The world’s premier basketball league, NBA has joined hands with Chinese music streaming company Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) to expand its online podcasts and streaming content.
This mega-deal will allow TME’s QQ platform, a collaborative part of Spotify, to take over the NBA podcasts and provide for new podcast creation and opportunities for rookies to be featured or be a part of it. This agreement will see fans and users given accessibility to a special NBA-QQ music subscription, through which the fans would have an opportunity to win exciting prizes or tickets to NBA events and games.
As part of the deal, TME will promote the league in China and make arrangements for roping musicians to expand and commercialise the league. NBA’s commercial outlet in China, NBA China will help TME with strategic deals and content creation. Presently, TME reportedly has approx 800 million users, including 61 million paid subscribers.
NBA, following the footsteps of Major League Baseball (MLB), has rightfully forced more emphasis on podcast creation and streaming services in unexplored market areas. Last month MLB signed a deal with Audacy for the creation and distribution of its podcast content. Deals like this make way for higher corporate revenues, notching up a 6% increase annually. The generated revenue is expected to be around $1.50 billion, according to figures from sports partnership consultancy firm IEG.