Tencent Music Entertainment, China's biggest music streamer and the owner of QQ Music, says it pulled more than 250,000 songs in 2025 for breaking its content rules or posing reputational risk, and examined over 600,000 cases it rated as high-risk copyright material. The numbers come from its 2025 ESG report, released in April, where TME describes tightening compliance across copyright licensing, new AI risks and its expansion abroad. The 250,000 were flagged by a mix of AI detection tools and human inspection.
Another 27,000-plus tracks went for three tactics TME files under grey-market manipulation: song theft, which means tampering with ownership data; song laundering, copying or altering existing works; and trend hijacking, speculative or misleading uploads aimed at gaming distribution. The company says these schemes are becoming better hidden and more elaborate, that they eat into creators' income and motivation and mislead listeners, and that they upset the order of the industry.
Its answer is continuous scanning of the catalogue with several kinds of recognition at once: melody comparison, voiceprint matching, audio fingerprinting and checks for similar text.
It also rewrote its rules, issuing version 2.0 of its code for handling inappropriate content, with scored, tiered penalties, and started giving labels an ongoing health rating. A label that falls short can be warned, ordered to fix problems by a deadline, or suspended and dropped.
On AI, TME says it uses audio models to detect and tag AI-generated content, applies its governance rules to it and runs regular security checks. It says music only goes into model training or creative tools once the rights holders have licensed it, that its user agreements carry AI-specific clauses, and that it works with labels on technology to catch unauthorised AI tracks.
The company helped set up an AI copyright working committee at the Copyright Society of China, where it is deputy director and which studies copyright questions raised by AI-generated works. It also led the drafting of a cybersecurity practice guideline on hidden metadata labels for AI-generated audio files, part of the rules on how such content is marked.
Elsewhere in the report, TME describes a copyright pact with the Music Copyright Society of China on lyrics and compositions, meant to make licensing more standard and transparent and to give songwriters clearer routes to payment. It says its practices were presented as model cases at the World Intellectual Property Organization's General Assembly meetings, and that it helped the China Audio Industry Association write two standards on high-quality playback and spatial audio with wireless earphones.
By the end of 2025 TME had applied for 5,530 patents, 3,513 of them granted, plus 6,544 trademarks and 741 registered software copyrights, its recent filings centred on generative AI, recommendation, audio recognition and sound quality. It is also a defendant: its annual report to the SEC lists 160 pending infringement suits seeking about RMB 187.1 million ($26.8m), which it does not expect to have a material effect.
MBW sets the report beside other services' moves. Deezer, which says it was first to tag fully AI tracks when its system launched in June 2025, reported about 75,000 arriving a day by April and 13.4 million tagged over 2025. Apple Music added AI Transparency Tags in March, a self-reported metadata scheme that will become compulsory for new deliveries. Spotify launched DDEX-based AI Credits in April so artists can disclose AI use in vocals, instruments or post-production, has removed more than 75 million spam tracks, and added a Verified by Spotify badge for human artists.
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