【Original #3】NetEase Cloud Music, a Player and a Music Community

       Tired of looking for your favorite music in the vast ocean of information? Want to share your personal feelings with other music lovers? Going to create your own playlists? Then NetEase Cloud Music is the place you should go. At that place, the music will find you.

NetEase Cloud Music, which was released in2013, is a Chinese platform which offers on-demand music-streaming service. Different from general music player apps, NetEase Cloud Music not only has main functions such as music playing, searching and downloading services, but also provides social services to its users. UntilJuly 2016, NetEase Cloud Music had more than 200 million users, with more than10 million songs, 1,500 signed singers, and more than 100 million playlistscreated by users. It also was selected as one of the "Rising StarBrands" by China's widely-read economic journal CBN Weekly in October,2016, because of its excellent performance of music service. And it is the onlymusic application which won that glory.

 Unlike other Chinese music applications, NetEase Cloud Music tries it best to create a music community where users can communicate with each other, rather than only provides general music services. By using NetEase Could Music, users can not only searching, listening, and downloading their favorite music, but also leaving comments, uploading lyric, adding tags, and sharing them to third-party social networking sites. By clicking different buttons, users can reply or “like” other people's comments, and comments which got most “like”s will be stay on the top of the comments area. By using this function, it is convenient for users to share detailed information and their personal feelings of certain music. Netease Cloud Music official holds regularly online thematic activities about music as well, such as interviews of bands and music creators, or introductions of different theme music. All of these features can guarantee the user's activity in Netease Cloud Music.

Personalization is also a major highlight of Netease Cloud Music. Every NetEase Cloud Music user can create multiple “personal playlists”, and was able to add his or her favorite songs to these playlists at any time. Users can also choose to share their personal playlists to the public. Once these personal playlists were shared, other users can also leave comments, share these playlists to third-party social media, or collect these playlists in their “Playlists Collection”, and was able to listen to these playlists at any time. 

By using a technology tool called acoustic fingerprint, which can bedefined as a condensed digital summary that used to identify an audio sampleor quickly locate similar items in an audio database, NetEase cloud music can analyze user's historical play records, then recommend similar music and playlists that they would like to them. Every day you log in NetEase cloud music, you will see “Daily Music Recommendation For You” and “Playlists You May Like” on your front page, which allows you to discover music that fit your taste more easily. Broadcast service is also offered by NetEase Cloud Music, which allows users to upload their personal broadcasts and share them to the public. Users can subscribe broadcasts they in favor of, and receive notifications as soon as these broadcasts updates. By using these functions, users of NetEase cloud music would not be worried about any problems of discovering music. On NetEase cloud music, you are not only searching for the music. Actually, the music comes to you.

As what Zhu Yiwen, the NetEase Cloud Music CEO, said in hisinterview, on NetEase Cloud Music, “userexperience should always come first”. NetEase Cloud Music is both a player and a music community, and users are the one who take control there. For the person who not only wants to find their favorite music, but also prefers to communicate with others, NetEase Cloud Music is the place to be.