Motorola has upgraded its Chinese online entertainment portal MotoMusic so it now includes play list creation, management, and sharing, buddy interaction, music guidance articles, mobile phone sections to recommend music devices and companion products, and an advanced tagging function that enables users to label any kind of content (music, articles, play list, MVs) with any text they like in order to improve sharing within the online community. It has also expanded the music selection to over 100,000 songs. The site has had 700 million page views in a little over two years, and had one million songs purchased, which Motorola claims makes it the leading legal download site in China. (release)

Of course, the vast majority of music in China is pirated—ZDNet Asia notes that “350 million knock-off CDs are in circulation”, which are then copied to mobile phones, PCs, MP3 players and so on. The article is about the digital music industry in Asia, which effectively makes it about mobile music: “About 85 percent of the US$4.2 billion in digital music sales (online and mobile) last year in the Asia-Pacific region were downloaded via music-enabled handsets. What’s more, the total digital music market in Asia is expected to more than double to US$9.35 billion, according to the study led by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Right now, ringtone melodies, rather than song tracks, are by far most the biggest type of digital music in demand.”