Line to make best of untapped streaming music market in Japan

Line, a popular messaging app operator, has launched its music streaming service- 'Line Music' in Japan making a headstart in virtually untapped market of mobile music business.

Line's strategy is both challenging and interesting as the attempt aims to penetrate the Japan market where digital music market is declining and 80 percent of the music sales are still through compact discs. Hit by the rights issue, streaming majors like Spotify and others couldn't enter the market, thanks to conservative labels.

Line holds the potential to succeed, experts opine, due to its 205 million active users- fifty percent of whom are located in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. This helps the company to give a shot at effective distribution. 

Line has been planning the streaming music service for quite some time after it partnered with two domestic labels in late 2014. The actual exercise started when the messaging operator started testing a music streaming- a $2 per month service- in Thailand in mid 2014. This year, Line has introduced a full fledged digital music service right in its own country, Japan. 

Similar to Apple's music streaming service, Line Music offers service for a monthly pay of 1,000 yen ($8.13), or 20 hours of access for half of that. Users can access a catalogue of 1.5 million songs. As part of promotions, Line would offer the service for free for the next two months.

In order to make it bigger, Line plans to expand its library by five million songs by end of 2015 and 30 million by 2016 and that involves featuring regional and overseas artists such as Sam Smith.

Recall that Line also acquired a music service from Microsoft named Mix Radio, that is now available in iOS and Android. However, Mix Radio is another project that would run independent of Line Music.  

Despite its huge size, the music industry in Japan saw a revenue of only five million yen ($40,660) from subscription-based mobile music streaming in 2014, as per the Recording Industry of Japan.

In recent years, the international market for streaming music has grown giving record companies an essential boost in the backdrop of steady slump in digital downloads.

Early this week, Apple Inc introduced its$9.99 per month Apple Music service, hoping to penetrate into the streaming market dominated by Pandora, Spotify and others.  

The total sales of digital music in Japan slumped for the fifth year in a row, to about $350 million, against a peak $1 billion in 2009.