I've been shorting TME for a long time, and the logic is very simple—the data divergence is right in front of us. On March 18, TME released its earnings report, and the Hong Kong stock plunged 21.82% in a single day, while the US stock dropped 24.65%.


The essence of this sharp decline is that SuiSui exposed Tencent Music's vulnerabilities.
It's like how Red Fruit short videos disrupted iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku with free content and low-tier traffic, reconstructing the entire industry’s business logic.

1. Data: The rise and fall
SuiSui Music’s monthly active users (MAU) reached 140 million by the end of 2025, a 90.7% year-over-year increase.
Meanwhile, TME’s three major apps all experienced negative growth—
Kugou -8.1%, Music -2.8%, Kuwo -8.0%.

2. Incremental Users: Uncovering the 500 million beneath the iceberg
SuiSui’s user overlap with Music and NetEase Cloud is only 2%-3%.
Over 40% of SuiSui users had never used music streaming or NetEase Cloud before.
This isn’t about抢存量 (stealing existing users), but activating a fundamentally invisible incremental market for TME.

3. Copyright expiration: The billion-dollar moat becomes a shackle
"Get Jay Chou, get the world"—this was true before 2021.
In 2021, regulators halted exclusive copyright agreements.
TME still spends 12 billion annually to maintain its existing copyright library. What they buy isn’t growth—it’s "maintaining current users and preventing churn."
Even more critically, consumer behavior has changed.
Generation Z no longer pays for "timeless classics," but for "the current mood."
86% of SuiSui Music’s TOP 1000 hot songs are driven by trending hits.
A viral hit from three months ago fits the current scene better than a classic from twenty years ago.
Algorithmic distribution efficiency has replaced exclusive content monopolies.
Having Jay Chou or not is less important than whether you can accurately recommend a free trending song that matches the current mood.
SuiSui uses one-tenth of the cost, leveraging hit song industrialization and 330,000 original musicians to produce low-cost incremental hits.
In a market that TME can’t see or control, they’ve recreated a super app with hundreds of millions of monthly active users.
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