A look at a Chinese music app: Xiami Music
Song dedications, music parties, and a music Tamagotchi? Here are some features and design decisions on Xiami Music.
It’s difficult to find English content about China’s design and apps, so I decided to take a stab at creating some. Suggestions and feedback are much appreciated!
I don’t listen to as much music as I used to before. I used to need music as I worked, preferably something with lyrics. Spotify is and has been my music app of choice, and I like its curation. Most times, it seems to have a pretty decent gauge of what I like.
But some months ago, a friend showed me Xiami Music. I didn’t think too much of it until a week ago (it’s a music app, oh yay it has lyrics), when I started exploring the app a little bit more.
Started in 2007, the music service used to be known as EMUMO, which stands for “Earn Music & Money”¹.
In 2013, Xiami was acquired by Alibaba². With 14.4 million monthly active users³, it is the smallest of China’s top 5 music apps, and competes for the country’s music pie with QQ Music, KuGou Music, KuWo, and NetEase Cloud Music.
It’s going to be a long read, so here’s an outline of the content (and screencaps) that follows: First impressions; non-audio content; lyrics; social and community; direct monetary contributions; song dedication; customisation; gamification; Kindermode; traffic-free plans; offline listening.
First impressions, and Spotify
Gosh, there is so much to see and do! And that is not a terrible thing here.
Maybe I had downloaded and opened the app with the explicit intention of exploring it, and my impressions may differ a little from a user just looking to listen to music. However, despite the amount of content, the interface feels clean, structured, and usable.
It isn’t my intention here to compare Xiami with Spotify, but I have been a long-time user of the app so I was quick to discern some obvious differences between Xiami and Spotify.
One, Spotify is big on playlists. My home screen is full of different swimlanes of different playlists. The first swimlane provides entry points into what I’ve played recently and includes both playlists, albums, podcasts etc, but from the second swimlane, it is just rows and rows of playlists. There is typical Spotify-smartness in the curation — there are some inspired by my recently played, and those built upon my long-term listening history. Xiami has playlists too (tons), but they form only part of the app’s offerings.
Second, Xiami has a lot more music content that is not just audio. The content here is invariably driven by music, and there are music videos, lyrics (Spotify has this too, but only sporadically), commentaries, reviews, news etc.
Third, both apps have different ways of displaying current-playing and last-played music. On Spotify, the track is displayed as a sticky bar above the bottom navigation, and includes the track name and artiste. On Xiami, only the music art is displayed, and is part of the actual bottom navigation.
Lastly, Spotify is dark and Xiami is bright. It is an aesthetic difference, but I felt that their respective colour schemes optimise for different tasks. Spotify goes for a dark scheme, which is great for highlighting gorgeous album art, and also seems to convey a more entertainment, just-play-music-already vibe. Xiami mostly uses light backgrounds, which is better for readability (in the day, at least).
Apart from the above, there are a couple of features that I found noteworthy and interesting on the Xiami app. I’m not a regular user of the app so I won’t go too in-depth here, but here goes!
1. More than just audio
Music on Xiami is more than just its auditory component. A piece of music has its own entourage — live versions, videos (the official one and the live ones), behind-the-scene footage, outtakes, remakes or covers, reviews etc.
Xiami has taken a leaf out of the WeChat’s playbook. Everything you need about a song, an album, or an artiste/band, you can get it on Xiami. No need for you to google for lyrics, head to Youtube for a video, or launch Twitter/Weibo for news.
🎤 Lyrics, lyrics, lyrics
Spotify, which has been my go-to music app, is a little skimpy on lyrics. Last year, with Genius, they finally made lyrics available. However, only key lyrics are displayed. Note the italics. I get that some lines in a song are obvious and repetitive, but this arbitrary selection and the alternating display of music “nuggets” and lyrics irk me.
Xiami, in my opinion, does a simple and great job of displaying lyrics. You can choose either a line-by-line view, or to view the song’s lyrics in its entirety. You can scrub through the song by clicking on any line in the lyrics.
🖼 Lyric poster
Ever felt that a line of a song encapsulates your life? Now you can create a poster for it and share it on all your socials.
📱 Lyrics on the lock screen
Something that I’ve also not seen before is the display of lyrics on the phone’s lock screen. Typically, you get the song title and artiste name. On Xiami, instead of the artiste name, you get a marquee of the song’s lyrics instead.
Granted, it is a little delayed and the real estate available is less than ideal for English songs — English words take up more space than Chinese characters, so you sometimes don’t get the full line until the marquee starts to scroll. And, it’s not something you’d use for karaoke sessions, but for someone who hears ridiculous (incorrect) things in lyrics all the time, this is a welcome and helpful feature.
2. Find your music comrades
For me, music consumption has been mostly a passive and solitary activity in recent years. It used to be a lot more social when my friends and I would trade music files and burn bootleg shows on CDs. Updates about artistes, new shows or music were more sporadic and mostly shared by friends who shared similar music preferences.
It is a lot easier to access music (from legitimate sources too!) now, and news are just a Google search away. In my experience, this democratisation of access had an unexpected effect. There is just so much music available now — my favourite music is a couple of clicks away, and well, I know that Spotify will ping me when there’s new music. I don’t spend much time thinking or chatting with friends about where to find music, what’s worth buying or downloading anymore.
Beyond adding your friends and viewing their recent activity, Spotify has very little in the way of social. It was surprising to see that Xiami is very, very social. But it is the country of WeChat after all, so maybe it shouldn’t come as a big surprise!
💬 More than just likes and shares
It’s one thing to just like a song or an album, but what I’ve seen on Xiami are hundreds and thousands of comments. They run the gamut — there are the 👏🏼👍🏼😍, the intentionally obtuse emo comment, the intelligent and insightful reviews, the inside jokes, the love confessions, and the strange engagement-driven bets (“if I get 1000 likes within a year, I will profess my love again”).
🥳 Party
Yup, a party. There are music parties on Xiami⁴; there are parties centred around a certain artiste or band, and some around genres or moods. Join one, and you get huddled into a (digital) room, where music is determined by DJs in the room. You can leave comments for fellow party-goers, explore related hashtags, and even play DJ.
Or you can start a party of your own, and choose between a PK or Share mode. The former lets fellow party goers review and vote for the song selection before it’s played, and the latter allows everyone get a chance at being the DJ!
It is just like an interactive radio station, but framing it as a “music party” is cute! No standing around like an awkward wallflower at this party.
⏳ Moments
Your friends’ recent activities are called “moments”. You get to see which songs your friend collected or played. What one chooses to show is configurable in privacy settings, of course.
You can also follow other Xiami users and browse through their music feeds, recommendations, and commentaries. Like any other social media, there are influencers, but the narcissism is definitely less of a defining feature here.
🧧 Contribute directly to an artist or contributor
I found this feature by accident, while looking through the contextual options for a track that I was listening to. It turns out that you can show appreciation for the music or artiste by contributing a monetary token.
📮 Dedicate a song
Ah, song dedications. Didn’t they go away when you stopped listening to the radio shows at 9pm? And here they are, anyway. I found this feature to be a nice dose of nostalgia, even though it probably wasn’t meant to be this way.
On Xiami, song dedications work pretty much the same way they did on radio. You pick a friend, choose a song, and enter a message. Some customization options are available — you can choose from a variety of fonts and photo backgrounds (you can upload your own) on which your message is displayed.
The only difference is your friend doesn’t get to sit around the radio wondering when or if the radio DJ is going to play your dedication. Instead, your friend gets a notification (but of course). Ooh.
Something that I found really cute: the little album art spins as the song plays, like how a music record would.
🥇 Content Marketing? The Blackstar Awards
Last week when I opened the app, there was a little callout that said “Blackstar awards”, named after David Bowie’s final studio album.
Xiami users were awarded various honours. While some awards were pretty predictable (best playlist creator, best reviewer etc), there were the quirkier awards that went to users with the single longest play session (18 hours), the highest number of logged in days in a year (221), the most play sessions in different countries, the most late-night play sessions etc. As a content marketing piece, I thought it was highly relevant and not too pushy.
Companies have all kinds of year-end messages and campaigns and they are mostly self-reflective and self-congratulatory, so it is awesome to have a service acknowledge and reward its users in a highly visible manner.
3. Make it yours
🎨 Customization
Besides the typical — username, profile pic, background — there are several other customisation options. You can change the display theme, and the theme options run from the straightforward colour themes to the more elaborate ones. Each theme option include a launch background, a set of customised navigation icons and of course, updates to the UI colour scheme to tie it altogether.
🦐 Raise a little Xiami
Xiami in Mandarin translates to shrimp. And on the app, you get to raise your own shrimp (not kiddin’). Your pet starts out as a teardrop blob in a colourful undersea environment. Its eyes are closed, and it is sucking on a pacifier. My shrimp is very cute.
You feed/grow your pet by tapping on the various bubbles around it, each earned through the different activities you performed on the app. You get rewarded for listening to songs, liking posts, and participating in activities across the app. Grow your pet enough, and you also earn a heart that is added to an overall total. Accumulate enough hearts as a community, and a charity gets a donation. These are obvious plays at increasing engagement — use our app more to grow your shrimp and get yourself some free, feel-good karma! But, okay, why not?
🍼 Kindermode
Kindermode, which you can access from your profile, allows you to create playlists for your children. You can even enter your child’s name, gender, and age, which helps Xiami to better tailor music recommendations (I have no idea what else they are doing with this data).
I don’t have any children, but I imagine that this would be a very useful feature for parents who do not want their AI recommendations ruined by repeated plays of Baby Shark. Your kids may be too young to have a Xiami account, but they aren’t too young to destroy your years of careful music curation.
Listen everywhere
🚦 Traffic-free plans
The second time I tried to listen to music on Xiami, I was outside on a 4G connection. The app informed me that I would use incur data usage⁵, and suggested for me to consider signing up for one of their “traffic-free” plans (zero-rated, or data-free). Not being in China, I wasn’t able to sign up for these.
The plans are offered by two different telcos. Each telco offered a recurring plan where you pay from 9–56 Chinese yuan (USD1.50–8) every month, and you get zero-rated usage on a variety of entertainment apps, a couple of GB data, and some talktime. Every additional GB of data will set you back another yuan (that is another USD 0.15, gosh!).
There is also a Xiami-only plan, where for 8 Chinese yuan, you get 6GB of data to use on the app.
🎵 Offline listening
Xiami users can choose to download music for offline listening. Select the length of time you want, and the app automatically downloads an assortment of music (“offline music packages”) to cover you for your selected time duration.
Second impressions
Is this all just feature overload? Maybe, but while there are tons of features, I didn’t feel that they were being shoved down my throat — there was no endless stream of pop-ups asking me to try this or that.
Regarding some of the above mentioned features, I had discovered them only because I was deliberately poking around looking for fun/different/novel stuff. Not one of them took away from my music consumption experience, and several even added value to it.
When I’m looking to listen to some music, I launch my Spotify app. It does that job well. However, if I now need to perform a secondary but related job such as looking up its lyrics or writing credits or music video, I have to look elsewhere for another website or another app. In terms of performing these cascading jobs, I think Xiami does an awesome job (ah, pun not intended).
(Second disclaimer: I didn’t mean for this to be a Spotify vs Xiami piece. It just so happened that I use Spotify a fair bit and comparisons are inevitable.)
Spotify has always been quite an individualistic app, and the experience is pretty static. Consumption is one-way, and the social element is limited to viewing your friends’ last activity. In contrast, from what I’ve seen, Xiami has managed to create a vibrant, active, and symbiotic community around music.
It is nice, seeing all these strangers enjoying what you do, too.
Thanks for reading!
I’ve always been interested to explore and learn more about Chinese apps, but it’s hard to find articles in English so I wrote my own. I enjoyed writing about Xiami and I hope some of it has been interesting!
If you would like to see any other China apps, do drop a note!
¹ About Us: https://www.xiami.com/about?spm=a2oj1.12028025.footer.1.54771372aVBvUs
² For a read on Xiami’s pre-Alibaba earlier business model, https://technode.com/2013/01/13/xiami-story-an-ideal-online-music-model/
³ Top 5 Chinese Music Apps: http://www.wechatapply.com.au/2018/11/18/top-5-chinese-music-apps/
⁴ Facebook launched a Watch Party last year
⁵ You can also choose between different fidelity media, and the amount of data associated with each option is helpfully displayed so you know exactly how much data you would be using.
