Go viral or die: Streaming platform adaptation and collaboration among performing rights organizations in the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

Abstract

This study examines how performing rights organizations (PROs) and music practitioners across China’s three regions-Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan region-adapt to streaming platforms and collaborate on copyright issues. There tends to be considerable commonality in a country’s streaming and rights management, the current study presents a unique scenario. Through in-depth interviews with 18 stakeholders from the three regions (same cultural systems but varied economic and legislative frameworks) together with policy document analysis, we find that in the core market of Chinese music, the power of mainland platform enterprises prompts PROs and practitioners to accept short-term copyright ambiguities in exchange for long-term market exposure. This dynamic process, characterized by strategic placement, tacit circulation, and multichannel revenue evaluation, contrasts with the static enforcement observed in Hong Kong and Taiwan's intraregional markets. Moreover, PROs become increasingly marginalized as platform logic encourages emerging musicians to associate revenue with traffic and to tailor their work to algorithmic preferences. This study provides theoretical and practical insights, emphasizing the need for PROs to maintain technological and economic resilience in managing music copyrights within streaming platforms.