MusicYun is the Chinese Music Streaming Service With Its Head in the Cloud

Streaming music from the cloud is no longer such a wonderment – but a Chinese music service that also lets you upload and share your own tracks? That’d be quite something. And that’s the approach taken by MusicYun, a startup from Shanghai.

It’s not quite a Google Music level of effort, inevitably, and much of it seems reliant on the strength of the community. It’s also a legal quagmire, as anything that another user uploads then becomes a part of MusicYun’s catalog, and I can’t verify if/how the music is moderated or licensed. At the moment, the site has over 10,000 albums from more than 5,000 artists. There’s no mobile app, just the website.

Nonetheless, this socially-engaged music streaming service seemed worth a shot, so I signed up with my Weibo account – both Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent’s (HKG:0700) third-party login are permitted – and gave it a go.

Uploading Tunes

All tracks can be streamed (as pictured above), but cannot be download for free. To download, you’ll need to use real cash to buy some of MusicYun’s virtual currency – called Yun Dou (lit: ‘cloud beans’) – which can be easily done with China’s largest online payment platform, Alipay.

There’s an entire social network incorporated in MusicYun, too, with profiles, albums, comments, friending, and all the usual ephemera of a digital community.

In terms of your own preferred music, there seems to be two options: build an online catalog of the albums you love based on what’s already available on the site, or upload your own mp3s to the site, which then go to the whole MusicYun community as well. Trouble is, the uploading mechanism is the very definition of clunky and time-consuming, involving manually inputting all the info and then adding the tracks from your computer. It all feels more ‘web 1.0’ than ‘living in the cloud.’ Unlike with Google’s (NASQAQ:GOOG) new Music service – which is confined to usage in the US, as these things so often are – there’s no desktop client for easy uploading.

From that, I get the feeling that MusicYun fails at being a personal cloud music service, and is just for streaming and sharing tracks. But Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Ting already does that much better, and even has free downloads of licensed mp3s.

Here are a couple of pictures of the hugely off-putting and laborious uploading process; trying it out with an album by some fantastic indie band: