You love Chinese music—and you know that listening to it often will work miracles for your listening comprehension skills. But trying to find hidden gems while living outside of China can sometimes feel impossible, and you’re getting tired of listening to nothing but the Chopstick Brothers and Teresa Tang.
Let me introduce you to the six best apps to easily find Chinese music and keep up with Chinese pop culture trends.
This Chinese music app is so popular that it has over 450 million active users per month, making it the world’s largest streaming platform.
Created in 2004, Kugou Music lets you stream and download thousands of Chinese songs. It also hosts Ku Music Asian Music Awards—an annual music awards ceremony—alongside Kuwo Music, its sister streaming service.
Kugou’s streaming site lets you download songs and read the lyrics as you listen, making it especially useful for Chinese learners.
QQ Music lets you browse and stream thousands of Chinese songs, plus songs from other regions worldwide.
There are sections for mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, European and American, South Korea, Japan and more.
You can also browse songs based on what’s trending and what’s just been released, letting you stay up to date with Asian pop culture. There are live radio stations you can stream as well, plus premade playlists for different genres and artists.
Kuwo, QQ and Kugou Music are owned by Tencent Music Entertainment Group, so this one is similar to the first two.
Kuwo Music has tons of recommended playlists and artists. There’s also a leaderboard that lets you keep track of which artists and songs are currently trending.
Apart from streaming songs, you can also watch full music videos on Kuwo Music. And of course, there are plenty of categories—including dance, sad, European and American and more.
NetEase has tons of options for finding new Chinese music, and it also has an iOS version. Their popular music categories include pop, rock, folk, electronic and more.
But unlike other streaming services, NetEase puts more effort into promoting indie artists. This means it’s even easier to find hidden gems that aren’t being overplayed.
They also have features that let you interact with artists who have NetEase profiles. And there’s even a cool live stream called Run FM. Once it knows your heart rate, it chooses the songs that best match your beats per minute (BPM) to help you keep pace.
YouTube Music hosts several Chinese music videos that come with Chinese and English subtitles, plus HD audio and video—making it one of the best resources for Chinese learners.
You can save different videos to your favorites with ease, too.
YouTube Music is free to use with ads but they also offer a premium subscription.
To find Chinese music, try searching for these keywords in either English or Chinese:
中国 (zhōng guó) — China
中国音乐 (zhōng guó yīn yuè) — Chinese music
中国流行音乐 (zhōng guó liú xíng yīn yuè) — Chinese pop music
How Can Chinese Music Apps Help Me Learn Mandarin?
Music can improve your listening, comprehension and memorization skills. Many bilingual people will tell you that listening to music in a particular language helped them learn. It might seem like a subconscious thing, but actively trying to translate lyrics and singing along helps bridge gaps between unfamiliar words and their translations.
You can listen during downtime to improve your fluency. Actively studying 24/7 is impossible, but throwing some passive practice into your leisure time is a great way to add variety to your language learning routine without doing much work.
Music videos with subtitles can help improve your Chinese reading skills. Some of these apps come with music videos with subtitles. For more subtitled videos, you can use a language program like FluentU.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
If you want to continue learning Chinese with interactive and authentic Chinese content, then you'll love FluentU.
FluentU naturally eases you into learning Chinese language. Native Chinese content comes within reach, and you'll learn Chinese as it's spoken in real life.
FluentU has a wide range of contemporary videos—like dramas, TV shows, commercials and music videos.
FluentU brings these native Chinese videos within reach via interactive captions. You can tap on any word to instantly look it up. All words have carefully written definitions and examples that will help you understand how a word is used. Tap to add words you'd like to review to a vocab list.
FluentU's Learn Mode turns every video into a language learning lesson. You can always swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you're learning.
The best part is that FluentU always keeps track of your vocabulary. It customizes quizzes to focus on areas that need attention and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. You have a 100% personalized experience.
