Online music services in Vietnam is booming like never before. If you’re not sure, ask yourself: did you buy a music CD for yourself within the last two years? Either your answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’, let’s take a quick look at some major online music players in Vietnam.

nhacso.net is arguably Vietnam’s no.1 music site, at least based on Alexa ranking. Backed by the FPT giant (which also owns VNExpress.net), nhacso.net’s advertising business seems to be doing pretty well. Also, nhacso is known for NOT allowing downloads. Recently

YeuAmNhac (YAN) is the largest, oldest music forum in Vietnam. Strength: big membership & large collection. Minus points: slow speed, still web1.0. Recently receiving Series A funding from IDG, YAN was expected to flesh out some revolutionary features. Its first move (after upgrading server and forming JSC) seems to be testing out the Offline Factor. (By the way, since YAN was originally just a forum for a while, unlike other IDG-funded startups, I will take a deeper look at this interesting deal later.)

giaidieu.net was born shortly after the inception of YAN. While it is pretty popular in general, its performance has remained stagnant over the years (see the graphs below). Unless some miracle happens, I do not expect giaidieu.net to survive long in this fiercely competitive field.

tuantrinh.info: despite its limited features, mediocre song quality and, in my opinion, a boring interface, this site commands an impressive audience. Particularly, its traffic reach and rank has going up consistently high over the last few months. Does anyone have an explanation?

Baamboo is definitely the “new kid on the block”. Yet, as we see from the traffic graphs, it’s doing extremely well. If we take into account its existence of less than 3 months and its quiet advertising on dantri, Baamboo, backed by the Vincom Giant’s Vietnam Communication Corporation (VC), is really something. By the way, I really like their development blog. (Oh, another by the way, VC is looking to invest in cool entrepreneurs and great ideas.)

UPDATE: I have experienced some problems with downloading/playing music from Baamboo, and I just found out this is a widespread issue.

Did I miss any cool music sites?

WHAT IS THE FUTURE?

Leadership positions are not secure. If the trends in the graphs below continue, the gaps between leading players are narrowing further. And it won’t be long before we see change in leadership. One major reason is that, music sites tend to be less sticky than other web2.0 types. The first and foremost reason why people go to a music site is to find their songs. Brand name, fancy features and social networking are only complementary.

musicsiterank

musicsitereach

Innovation: In light of heightened competition and the deep pocket, music sites should invest seriously in innovation. Just some wild thoughts: a/ a system can recommend songs I may like by analyzing my music habits (what kind of songs, singers I listen, the frequency, etc); b/ more fancy sharing widgets (like Slide) to enhance viral marketing and sustain leadership position; c/ build a loyal, real; community (this is a bit hard, because people are already overwhelmed with Yahoo360, yobanbe and cyworld. But if any music site can pull this off like imeem, it would make the site significantly stickier.)

Diversification: Partnering with television and radio channels is one option. The online music services can also devise some sort of cooperation with music superstars. Branding and user membership (both quantity and quality) are key to any sort of partnership.

Finally, copyright issue: technically speaking, if you host music on your site and allow people to download, you’re breaking the law. YAN, giaidieu.net, tuantrinh.info and most other sites fall into this category. nhacso.net is the exception because it claims to host only copyrighted stuff and does not allow downloading. Baamboo is a controversial case; it claims to act as a ‘tour guide’ or a ’search machine’ of music content from internet sites, hence no responsibility. More interestingly, recently nhacso.net has announced its plan to commercialize digital music content, the first one in Vietnam. Now think about it: if you have to pay $5 to get the distribution right of a song from the singer/the composer, would you be happy to see your competitors getting free lunch?

Okay, that’s a rhetorical question. Here’s a more practical question: would you spend money on Vietnamese music websites?

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