Written by Philip Chen, CEO of GMA (Marketing to China). Philip has spent over a decade helping foreign brands find their voice, and their audience, across China’s audio and podcast platforms.
I still remember Chinese friends asking me why anyone would “just listen” to something instead of watching a video. Nobody asks me that anymore. Audio in China has grown into a real daily habit. People listen while commuting, cooking, working out, or falling asleep. If your China plan only covers short video and livestream, you are missing a channel that speaks straight into someone’s ear, often at a much lower cost than video ads.
This year gave us a headline that shows how much this space matters now. Tencent Music, the company behind QQ Music, is buying Ximalaya, China’s biggest audio platform. Two giants that used to compete are now joining forces. When that kind of deal happens, you know the market is not a side hobby anymore. It is a real business, and it is one your brand should understand.
A Quick Look At Audio, Worldwide And In China
Outside China, most people think of Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube when they think about audio. None of that works normally inside China. The country built its own full set of apps: Ximalaya for talk and audiobooks, QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music for songs, WeChat for a bit of everything, and newer players fighting for a piece of the pie. If you want to reach Chinese ears, you need to learn this local map first. Copying a Spotify playbook will not get you very far here.
Here is the part I find most interesting as an agency owner: audio in China grew up mobile-first and app-first, not browser-first. Nobody in China bookmarks a podcast feed the way people do in the West. They open an app, and the app’s own algorithm decides what plays next. That single fact changes how you plan a campaign. Getting placed inside the right app, in front of the right recommendation engine, matters just as much as the quality of the content itself.
Ximalaya: Still The King, Now Owned By Tencent Music
Ximalaya is still the biggest name in Chinese audio, and by a wide margin. The platform now counts over 600 million activated users and more than 10 million hosts uploading shows, from single-person podcasts to full radio stations run by news agencies. Its mobile app ranks first among Chinese audio apps by monthly active users, and it holds close to a quarter of all online audio revenue in the country. The content library alone is close to 500 million audio pieces, spread across 101 categories, adding up to over 3.6 billion minutes of listening.
The big news for 2026 is the Tencent Music deal. Tencent Music, which already owns QQ Music, Kugou, and Kuwo, agreed to buy Ximalaya. Chinese business press has pointed out that Ximalaya has struggled for years to turn steady content into steady profit, so this deal is really about Tencent buying scale and content depth, while giving Ximalaya a bigger, richer partner to lean on. For brands, this means Ximalaya’s ad and sponsorship products will likely get tied closer to Tencent’s wider advertising system over the next year or two. Worth watching if you plan a long campaign.
Ximalaya’s own history shows why Tencent wanted it in the first place. Back in 2018, the platform ran “123 Knowledge Festival,” a one-day event where experts sold courses and paid audio content, and it pulled in 50 million yuan in a single 24-hour window. That playbook, turning listening into paid knowledge, still shapes how Ximalaya sells to brands today: less about a single ad spot, more about building a small paid content series your brand owns and can point customers back to for months.
Music Apps: QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, And A ByteDance Surprise
On the music side, Tencent Music is the clear leader. Across QQ Music, Kugou, and Kuwo, the group reports around 551 million monthly active listeners, with about 121 million paying users. QQ Music alone counts close to 190 million monthly active users, while its main rival NetEase Cloud Music sits at about 150 million, with roughly 65 million paying subscribers. Add it up and Tencent Music controls somewhere close to 70 percent of the whole market.
The real surprise of the past year has been ByteDance’s Soda Music (汽水音乐), a free app that skipped the usual subscription model and grew fast anyway, reportedly passing 140 million monthly active users by leaning on Douyin’s user base and short video clips for discovery. Smaller players like Baidu’s Qianqian Music round out the field. If your brand only budgets for Ximalaya, you are leaving the biggest slice of daily listening time, music, off the table.
Why does Soda Music matter to you as a brand? Because it proves the old rule, “the biggest app wins,” does not hold in China’s audio market anymore. A free app with a smart short-video feeder line can grab tens of millions of users in a short time. For a foreign brand testing China for the first time, that is good news. It means smaller, cheaper media buys on a fast-growing app can still reach a real audience, you do not always need to pay premium rates on the market leader to be seen.
The Podcast Boom: 播客热 Is Real
A few years ago, “播客” (podcast) was a small, almost hobbyist word in China. That has changed fast. The Chinese podcast market crossed 5 billion yuan in revenue in 2025, with a listener base estimated between 150 and 170 million people, up around 25 percent from 120 million in 2023. Some forecasts expect that number to pass 180 million by 2027.
What people listen to has shifted too. Shows about AI and startups grew a huge 310 percent year over year. Global politics content grew 203 percent, and investing and personal finance shows grew close to 199 percent. Even the audience itself is changing shape: listeners over 50 years old increased their listening time by 35 percent last year, which tells you podcasts are no longer just a young, urban habit.
One more shift worth knowing: video podcasts are moving from a side feature to the main format. Around 95 percent of listeners now know what a video podcast is, consumption is up 42 percent, and 58 percent of new podcast listeners first found a show through a short video clip. Industry watchers are calling 2026 the “video first” year for Chinese podcasts, which fits with how much time Chinese users already spend on short video apps.
Money is following the audience too. Podcast ad spending in China is still small compared to short video, but it is forecast to reach 4.17 billion yuan by 2031. If your brand wants an early seat at a growing table, this is a good moment to start testing.
We already wrote a full guide on the tactics for this, from picking a show to structuring a sponsorship deal, in our piece on using China’s podcast industry for brand promotion. This article stays focused on the platforms themselves, so go there next if you want the step-by-step playbook.
Who Is Actually Listening?
A few years back, the typical Chinese podcast listener was a young professional in Shanghai or Beijing, listening on the subway. That picture is now much wider. Business and career shows still pull a strong white-collar, first-tier city crowd, but health, parenting, and history shows are pulling in older listeners and people from smaller cities who found a show through a short video clip rather than a podcast app search. Commute time is still the single biggest listening window, but late-night listening before sleep and background listening while doing chores are both growing fast, according to platform data shared by Ximalaya and podcast researchers.
For your brand, this matters because it changes who you are actually talking to. A show that looks niche on paper, say, a personal finance podcast, may already reach a much broader mix of ages and cities than the same topic would on a text platform. Before you commit budget to any single show, ask the host or platform for real listener breakdowns by age, city tier, and gender. Do not assume the audience based on the topic alone.
WeChat Joins The Audio Game
WeChat cannot be left out of any China content conversation, and audio is no exception. WeChat Channels (视频号), the platform’s short video and livestream feature, passed 600 million daily active users in 2026, reportedly overtaking Douyin as China’s biggest short video platform by that measure. WeChat has also pulled its audio content, podcasts included, into one clearer tab, and it now lets creators post audio shows longer than 30 minutes, something that was not allowed before. The platform’s algorithm is also giving more weight to mid-length videos, three to ten minutes, with high completion rates, which rewards creators who can hold attention rather than just grab it.
Why does this matter for your brand? Because WeChat is where most of your Chinese customers already live, for messaging, payments, and increasingly, for content discovery. A podcast clip or a short audio message shared inside WeChat Channels or an Official Account reaches people who never open Ximalaya at all. If you are already running a video content strategy in China, extending it into audio and Channels is a small step, not a whole new project.
There is also a practical reason to care: WeChat keeps the whole customer journey in one app. A listener can hear your brand mentioned in a Channels audio clip, tap straight through to your Official Account, browse your WeChat Mini Shop, and pay, all without leaving WeChat once. Ximalaya and QQ Music are great for building awareness and trust, but WeChat is usually where the actual sale or lead form happens. Treat the two as one connected journey, not two separate campaigns.
Audiobooks: The Quiet Big Business
Audiobooks rarely make headlines, but the numbers are strong and growing at close to 27 percent a year by some estimates. Ximalaya alone still holds the biggest chunk of this market, thanks to years of deals with publishers and a large base of professional readers. Smaller platforms like Dragonfly FM built their name here too, using trained voice actors to narrate books rather than raw text-to-speech. Qingting FM, shown above, took a different path, partnering with news agencies like Xinhua to build a strong live-broadcast and news-listening audience.
For brands, audiobooks and long-form narrated content open a door that podcasts alone do not: sponsoring a self-help, business, or parenting audiobook puts your name next to content people return to again and again, not just a single episode they hear once.
A few brands go one step further and turn their own product information into audio. Think of a skincare brand narrating an ingredient guide, or a baby formula brand offering a short audio series on early nutrition, hosted on Ximalaya and linked from their WeChat store. It costs far less than producing a video series, and it fits naturally into a category where trust and detailed explanation matter more than flashy visuals.
AI Is Changing How Chinese Audio Gets Made
AI voice tools moved from “nice extra” to “just part of the job” in China’s audio industry this year. Industry estimates put AI synthetic speech use at over 58 percent penetration among content creators, with content creation the single biggest use case. Ximalaya built its own AI audiobook tool for creators. iFlytek, Baidu, ByteDance, and smaller players like Lychee all offer voice cloning or text-to-speech tools now used for dubbing, translating shows into other Chinese dialects, or turning a written article into a short audio clip automatically.
What this means for your brand is simple: producing audio content in Mandarin is now faster and cheaper than it was two years ago. You do not always need a full studio and a professional host to test a script. That said, keep a real person’s judgment in the loop. Chinese platforms are also tightening rules on labeling AI-generated content, so anything that sounds like a real host needs to be clearly marked if it was made by AI.
We use AI-assisted voice tools ourselves to prototype scripts fast, testing three or four versions of a message in Mandarin before we ever book a real host or studio. It saves time and money on the drafting stage. But when it comes to the version your brand actually pays to publish, we still push for a real human voice. Chinese listeners are good at spotting a flat, synthetic-sounding host, and trust is exactly what audio content is supposed to build.
How Brands Actually Use Audio In China
Brands active in this space usually pick one or two of these routes rather than trying everything at once:
Show sponsorship. Pay a popular Ximalaya or podcast host to mention your product naturally inside their normal episode. This works best when the host’s audience already fits your target customer.
Branded channels. Build your own station on Ximalaya or QQ Music, useful for education-heavy products where you want to teach people something, not just sell to them.
In-car partnerships. Ximalaya has deep ties with car makers like BMW, Ford, and Cadillac for in-car entertainment. If you sell anything travel or lifestyle related, in-car audio reaches people at a moment when they are a captive audience.
Video podcast clips. Since so many new listeners now discover a show through a short video clip, ask your sponsored host to cut two or three short video moments that feature your brand and push them on WeChat Channels or Douyin. One good podcast conversation can turn into a full week of smaller content pieces this way, at almost no extra cost.
If you are also running livestream campaigns in China, audio sponsorship is a good complement. It reaches your customer earlier, before they open a shopping app, and it costs less per listener than most video formats.
A Quick Case Study
Last year, we worked with a European sleep and wellness supplement brand entering the Chinese market with a small budget and no existing following. Instead of jumping straight into paid social ads, we placed the brand as a sponsor on a weekly 15-minute health talk show on Ximalaya, hosted by a doctor with a loyal, older, health-conscious audience. Every episode ended with a short, natural mention of the product and a WeChat mini program link in the show notes for listeners who wanted to learn more.
Over eight weeks, the brand added close to 18,000 new WeChat followers directly traceable to the show, with a click-through from listeners to the mini program sitting near 4 percent, well above what the same brand was seeing from banner ads earlier that year. Product page visits roughly tripled during the weeks the show ran compared to the weeks before it started. No viral moment, no huge budget, just a steady, trusted voice talking to the right ears every week.
What made it work was patience and fit. We did not chase the biggest Ximalaya host we could afford. We picked a smaller show whose listeners were already worried about sleep and stress, the exact problem the product solves, and let the host talk about it the way she talked about everything else on her show. By week three, some listeners were already mentioning the brand by name in the show’s comment section, without being asked to.
Challenges Worth Knowing About
China’s rules on content, including audio, keep tightening, especially around AI-generated and “deep synthesis” content, which now needs clear labeling. Hosting, payment, and content moderation all need to follow local law, and platforms will ask you to prove compliance before running paid campaigns. None of this should scare you off. It just means you need a local partner who already knows the paperwork, so you can spend your energy on the content instead of the rules.
One more practical point: most platforms will still ask for a Chinese business entity, or a local agency acting on your behalf, to sign a formal contract and handle payment before your ad or sponsorship actually goes live. Budget a few extra days for this step the first time you run a campaign. It is normal, and it moves much faster the second time once the paperwork and account are already set up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a Chinese company to advertise on Ximalaya or QQ Music?
Not always for a simple sponsorship deal arranged through an agency or a host directly, but for larger, self-managed ad campaigns, most platforms will ask for a Chinese business entity or a local partner to sign contracts and handle payment. Working with an agency already set up in China is usually the fastest way around this without setting up your own entity first.
Should I start with sponsorship or paid ads?
For most foreign brands new to China, sponsorship of an existing show is the better first step. You borrow trust the host already built with their audience, and you learn what language and tone works before spending on wider paid placements. Once you know what resonates, paid ads on top of that message tend to perform better and cost less per result.
Is podcast advertising worth it for a small brand?
Yes, and often more so than for big brands. Podcast and audio sponsorship costs are still low compared to video or livestream, audiences are smaller but more loyal, and a good host mention can outperform a much bigger banner ad budget. It is a solid, low-risk way to test messaging in China before committing to larger campaigns.
Sources
新浪财经, “【行业深度】洞察2026：中国播客行业竞争格局及市场份额” (2026), finance.sina.com.cn
证券时报 (STCN), “喜马拉雅被腾讯音乐收购，商业化困境依旧难解” (2026), stcn.com
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