Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tencent Music Entertainment Group first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Today, you will hear discussions from the management team of Tencent Music Entertainment Group, followed by a question and answer session. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded today. Now I will turn the conference over to your speaker host today, Mr. Tony Yip. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us on today's call. TME announces quarterly financial results today after the market close, and earnings release is now available on our IR website at ir . tencentmusic.com, as well as via Newswire services. Today, you'll hear from Mr. Cussion Pang, our Executive Chairman, who will start the call with an overview of our recent updates. Next, Mr. Ross Liang, our CEO, and I, Tony Yip, as CSO, will offer additional thoughts on our product strategies, operations, and business developments. Finally, Ms. Shirley Hu, our CFO, will address our financial results before we open the call for questions. Before we continue, I refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which applies to this call, as we will make forward-looking statements.
Please also note that the company will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more thoroughly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported under the IFRS in the company's earnings release and filings with the SEC. We're reminded that such non-IFRS measures should not be viewed in isolation or as an alternative to the equivalent IFRS measure. The other non-IFRS measures are not uniformly defined by all companies, including those in the same industry. With that, I'm pleased to turn over the call to Cussion Pang, Executive Chairman of TME. Cussion?
Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. In an era of increasing entertainment choices, amid an evolving market landscape, a sustained competitive advantage is awarded to those who offer users a differentiated experience. With this in mind, in the first quarter of 2022, we continued to build new professional and personal use cases and interactions around our dual engine content and platform strategy, as well as expand our efforts to augment the scale and fortify the quality and competitiveness of our music catalog. Meanwhile, we sought to enhance user experience through innovations built on our four pillars of music entertainment, namely listen, watch, sing, and play, driving momentum for our long-term success and promoting the healthy development of the music industry. First and foremost, we remain committed to energizing original content productions, leveraging our technology-driven production capabilities and strength in mobilizing promotional resources.
The benefits of our overall content ecosystem are increasingly manifest. With our Xingyao Plan and Galaxy Plan, we empowered original content production, leveraging a technology-driven solution to add value across demo and single discovery throughout the production, distribution, and promotion phases of these original works. Our high hit rate for original content blockbusters is supported by our middleware platform, which integrates, first, algorithm-driven screening of lyrics, songs, and demos. Second, AI voice matching capability builds upon a stored library of hundreds and thousands of voices. Third, a targeted promotion system based on real-time data analysis to help artists and songs reach the right audience and go viral. Empowered by these advanced technologies, our artists have created quality pieces as well as trendy ones, serving a wide range of use cases.
Notable standouts in the first quarter include Mirage by San Shu Shuo and Zhuang Sa Qian by Chuan Xin. Two sweeping successes that topped the multiple music charts and both achieved peak daily streams in excess of 13 million. Meanwhile, we continue to refine our original content catalog, focusing on key verticals such as gaming, Chinese ancient style, and pop music. In the first quarter, we collaborated with Tencent Games' popular titles, including PUBG Mobile, Honor of Kings, League of Legends: Wild Rift, and several more to produce original themed music content. These songs by leading artists such as Hua Chenyu, Chen Linong, Mao Buyi, and Huang Zitao have made their way to the top of various music charts and have also been embedded with the sales of apps and game props, further driving our revenues.
What's more, an inspirational Chinese ancient style hit song, Flying Snow, Ta Xue, became the background music of choice for many official media outlets during the Beijing Winter Olympics, generating tremendous social media buzz of over two billion views and catapulting it to the top of TME's 12 music charts. Moreover, our Tencent musician platform continues to provide systematic support for musicians, enabling us to partner with musicians at any stage and in all aspects of their careers to provide a launchpad for more musicians to showcase their talent, passion, and music for the broadest possible audience. We have been making resolute efforts to optimize and upgrade Tencent musician platforms all around services for musicians, so that being active on our platform becomes not only a preference, but also a habit for creators.
For starters, in the first quarter, we launched a brand new behind-the-scenes music production service with an initial group of over 50 industry well-known professionals and more than 100,000 creators who are well-versed in music composition, mixing, recording, and more joining the roster to provide our musicians with production support. Additionally, we have strengthened our platform infrastructure to support musicians with a customized self-service productivity toolkit to analyze data, host concerts, and manage their artwork catalog, profile page, and photo albums. Taken together, these tools empower musicians to create and promote their work more efficiently and reach a higher audience, ultimately helping to build a constructive and active musicians ecosystem. Second, the Tencent musician platform motivates musicians with an array of creative scenarios and rich promotion resources, both on and offline, helping them break through to larger audience.
Aided by our platforms toolkit, Liu Shuang rose, which climbed to the top echelons of the trending charts with cumulative social media buzz reaching over 200 million views. Our diverse promotions for the singer and the song include top variety shows like The Treasured Voice, online joint activities with TMELand and WeSing video content, video accounts. Offline stages such as our Tencent Musicians Entertainment Awards, TMEA, and the fourth stage, Yuan Li Wu Tai Ji Hua, as well as a handful of offline brand-sponsored events, providing additional opportunities for Liu Shuang to shine and unlock his potential. We have established the sustainability and diverse monetization models for musicians, which help them earn a better living while focusing on honoring their craft.
To this end, we distributed over CNY 200 million from our platform to musicians during the past 12 months, supporting a new generation of indie musicians as they propel the industry forward. Enriching our content library and building our presence across a multitude of music verticals to reinforce our core competencies is another focus, which in turn strengthens our platform's reputation as a go-to destination for enthusiasts and benefits our penetration among high-value heavy users. Chinese indie-style music remains our stronghold. In the first quarter, we presented In China, Zhongguo Chaoyin, a variety show that brought together top Chinese musicians and performers from 41 different genres to compose and showcase original music work that creatively combined the traditional Chinese cultural elements with trendy styles. The show has received widespread acclaim and over 300 media accolades for its efforts in actively promoting Chinese cultural heritage.
In addition, during the first quarter, we began to expand our focus to the electronic, classical and anime genres. For example, we strengthened the operations for electronic music by bringing in musicians, labels, and institutional partnerships, and provide a full range of content, including music, audio, playlist, video, and more. By the end of the first quarter, more than half of the world's top 100 DJs have settled on QQ Music, which not only enabled their in-depth communication with Chinese fans, but also promoted the spread of trendy electronic music. Finally, build upon our commitment to promoting healthy and sustainable industry development, TME seeks to create inclusive professional music charts that accurately reflect and evaluate China's music industry.
Our TME Chart, along with its data-based TME UNI Chart and its expert review-based TME Wave Chart, serves as a solid music rating infrastructure. In the first quarter, we released the TME music chart annual review, which provided a snapshot of the Chinese music landscape in 2021 with ratings and reviews of over 1,800 songs. Becoming a bellwether for the latest and hottest in China's music world and attracting a wave of social media buzz, including over 900 million views upon release. Because we are motivated every day by the differentiated value we can bring to music lovers, music creators, and the music industry as a whole. We are committed to earning each of these participants loyalty and devotion through real empowerment.
With that, I conclude the progress update on our growing content capabilities. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Ross, who will share more about our platform strategies. Ross, please go ahead.
Thank you, Cussion. Hello, everyone. Moving on to our platform strategy. In the first quarter, we continued to invigorate our ecosystem and innovate around the four pillars of our music entertainment experience, listen, watch, sing, and play. Beginning with the smallest details, we continuously polish our products to meet the multifaceted needs of diverse user cohorts and strive to create a sense of belonging, making our products an uncompromising must-have in our users' daily lives. With respect to listen, our users' core demands, we are providing innovative and professional product features to elevate users' listening experience. Technology is so deeply embedded in our corporate character that it has become part of our DNA.
QQ Music was the first in China to launch advanced listening functions, including the digital music enhancement engine, which can significantly improve sound quality with one simple click, and replay gain and gapless playback, which help equalize music volume and deliver a smooth music listening experience between consecutive song plays, particularly compatible with classical music streaming. These new functions have been well received as millions of users incorporate this feature into their daily practice. We have also optimized our smart recommendations feature and have become more in tune with our users' tastes, as demonstrated by QQ Music's recommendation penetration rate, reaching a new record high by the end of the first quarter. Along with recommendation streaming, volume and time spent both registered stronger double-digit growth year-over-year.
In addition, our upgraded QQ Music popularity index with real-time updates on the number of listenings online, expanded music coverage and additional song information has considerably strengthened the user sense of participation with their input directly influence a song or artist prominence. The second pillar of our all-around multisensory entertainment experience offering is Watch. We are deepening our collaboration with WeChat video accounts to create vibrant music scenarios and strengthen music promotion capabilities. In March, Tencent musician platform held a large-scale live charity concert during the pandemic, Spring Never Ends, chuntian buyao yan. It was an eight-hour uninterrupted marathon performance by 141 groups of well-known artists such as Chen Li, Hao Meimei, and our roster of musicians.
Supported by WeChat video accounts promotion capabilities and our ability to mobilize resources on our platform, the concert attracted millions of viewers, generating over 30% increase in the number of viewers in participating musicians live streaming rooms on the event day. We are proud to share by the end of the first quarter, daily video view of WeChat video accounts of musicians on our Tencent musician platform had exceeded 100 million, representing over 70% increase quarter-over-quarter. Beyond video, our efforts on the visual front also include the use of the graphics and other formats to enrich streaming content. KuGou Music's comment display function and streaming visualizations are just a few of the many examples launched in the first quarter.
In terms of WeSing, we were the first in the industry to offer sound tuning without requiring earbuds, waifang xiuyin, an easy-to-use function that can substantially improve the sound effects of songs recorded without external devices. Another new feature that has inspired widespread accolades among users is our cloud-based sound mixing, yunduan hunyin, which helps produce nearly studio-quality sound mixing in just two minutes after the musical work is uploaded to the cloud. We have also endeavored to expand music entertainment scenarios, adding more fun play elements to the music entertainment experience. We hosted our first virtual learning course on TMELand and are planning to organize additional featured events such as virtual avatar concerts and customized events on this exciting new virtual music playground in the second quarter.
In addition, we have pioneered dedicated virtual rooms for artists, including recently launched rooms for Zhou Zhennan and Wang Yuan, which provide immersive interactive social scenarios where fans can listen to their idols' digital album anytime, anywhere, while posting song reviews, chatting with other fans, and displaying self-expressions in virtual avatars. We are proud to share that through pioneering innovations in the four pillars of music entertainment, listen, watch, sing, and play, QQ Music has achieved solid initial results, as demonstrated by its continuous year-over-year MAU growth. Building a complementary component to our music entertainment ecosystem, we continued to grow our long-form audio business with increasingly differentiated content. We are delighted to see mid and long-tail podcast hosts flourishing in the TME's ecosystem and gain traction thanks to our large user base.
For example, after participating in TME's Podcast Creation Center in 2022, podcast host lao shi qi audio work of the Nonsense Time Riders, beatai dangmu biji, racked up 23 million streams within one month upon its release, and shot to the top of TME's charts, leading to substantially higher financial gains for lao shi qi and inspiring a growing crowd of mid and long-tail creators to join our podcast ecosystem. Secondly, we enhanced our joint content operation with popular IPs, particularly in TV drama series. Through audiobooks, artist participation in the Putong Community and more channels, we successfully promoted both the audiobooks and the associated IPs, with highlights in the first quarter including Ren Shi Jian, Luohua Shijie, and Yu Sheng, Qing Duo Zhi Jiao. During the release of these hit dramas, TME's long-form audio offers of the same title saw their streaming values surge.
Going forward, we will leverage our memberships to maximize the monetization potential of long-form audio as we also continue to optimize content ROI and the DAU monetization efficiency to improve its profitability. We drive our business progress, we remain dedicated to undertaking our social responsibilities to create a better world and promote character spirits and create a new model of public welfare through music. To celebrate the 15th World Autism Day, we launched an autism care charity project, Shape of Music, ru guo yin yue you xing zhuang, which presented a series of artworks such as our first public welfare digital kaleidoscope single, The Brightest Star, zui mei na ke xin, the music album Si-Symphony of the Galaxy, xin he jiao xiang qu, and the Shape of Music art exhibition.
Allow music to not only be heard, but also seen and treasured through the crossover of different content and art forms online and offline. The entire net income from the project was donated to autism institutions to advocate for social connections with these autism groups. With that, I'd like to give the floor to Tony to reveal our business operations. Tony, please go ahead.
Thank you, Ross. Hello, everyone. In terms of operating results in the first quarter, our online music MAUs were 604 million, down slightly year-over-year. Despite churn of casual users who opted for other pan-entertainment platforms, we are encouraged by the progress we've made in our original content production capabilities, music catalog, and innovative product features, which continue to strengthen the engagement of our core user cohort. Our IoT service MAU continued to witness a double-digit year-over-year increase in the first quarter, which was primarily attributable to our comprehensive IoT entertainment content, integrating music, singing, live streaming, long-form audio, and more. In the first quarter, we worked with Little Genius smartwatch, xiaotiancai, and multiple electric vehicle manufacturers such as NIO, weilai, and XPENG, Xiao Peng, to provide karaoke functionalities on IoT devices.
Due to macro headwinds, our online music revenue decreased year-over-year in the first quarter. However, our fundamentals remain healthy, and we successfully sustained our growth momentum in subscriptions. We achieved a net add of four million in the first quarter and a paying user penetration rate of 13.2%. At the same time, user retention remained largely stable. For the remainder of 2022, we are committed to delivering a healthy balance between paying user growth and ARPPU, which reflects the quality of growth of our online music business. In the first quarter, as the pandemic weighed on our advertising business, we continued to implement innovative, diverse advertising solutions to unlock more ad revenue potential.
To fully leverage our large user base, we are testing a free listening mode where users can listen to songs for 30 minutes for free with every 15 seconds of video rewarded ads that they watch. In addition, our music promotion service and playlist bonus tasks, which allow for accurate targeting of the right audience, an increase in streaming volume and popularity of selected songs for a fee, have both achieved early success with strong growth in their daily revenue in-streams. We also forged ahead with new business models to enrich user experience and monetization avenues. In the first quarter, we launched our super VIP membership, which complements the two existing tiers of our subscription plan and incorporates up to more than 50 privileges, including access to more music and audio content, as well as digital albums for a monthly fee of CNY 30.
Additionally, in the first quarter, we continued to explore the tie-ins between celebrity artists with our Music Pets digital collectibles in Peta Mall. To captivate more Gen Z users and cultivate a young and trendy cultural community, we further embrace our deep roots in the college campus scene and spare no effort in bringing more and more promising voices to be heard with our campus musician cultivation plan, Voila! Campus. In the first quarter, we are particularly proud of the positive impact we have had on female campus musicians included in the winner of the first prize scholarship of Voila! Campus and Chinese folk fusion musician, Qian Runyu, who created the Chinese ancient style original work, Mulan, based on the classic heroine. With this song, Qian Runyu bloomed on the CCTV program, Sing My Heart, exemplifying female bravery and spiritual power.
We were also instrumental in her collaboration with household names and brands such as the award-winning lyricist Vincent Fang Wenshan, Lancôme, PUBG Mobile, and QQ Speed Mobile, to produce original theme songs, helping her achieve accelerated professional growth and broader recognition. Now, let's turn to our social entertainment services. Both MAU and paying users were affected during the quarter by seasonality as well as macro headwinds. Facing the fast, challenging landscape, we will continue to improve our competitiveness through ongoing product innovations and new initiatives in social entertainment such as audio live streaming, international expansion, and virtual interactive product offerings. For WeSing, to achieve our goal of making singing more fun and recording more professional, we provided innovative, easy-to-use features and tools to elevate users' singing and playing experience, as well as energize the relationship among our users.
Our investment in these innovative singing and playing tools in the past few quarters started to pay off as the adoption rates of and the user time spent in our singing room both improved year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Facing competition for our traditional live streaming services, we will strive to generate more differentiated content and user experience. Firstly, we continue to make progress in vertical content category expansion. Focusing on the she economy, KuGou Live launched the Goddess Festival event in March, which successfully attracted female users with premium ARPPU to enjoy our audio live streaming rooms. Our audio live streaming business achieved a double-digit year-over-year increase in revenues in the first quarter and will become a key component of our overseas development strategy due to higher monetization efficiency in international markets.
We also broadened WeSing's target user base by adding live streaming educational content addressing seniors' online learning and sharing needs, such as lessons on square dancing, calligraphy, and traditional Chinese operas. Secondly, cross-platform collaboration is another way we can differentiate. For example, our first real-time live singing event, Meet Let's Sing, co-hosted by QQ Music Live Streaming and WeSing, brought premium karaoke content to live streaming. QQ Music live streaming advanced steadily with the number of hosts increasing rapidly and daily active hosts reaching a record high of 10,000 during the first quarter. In conclusion, we kicked off 2022 by facing challenges head on, but we remain confident as we execute our dual engine content and platform strategy.
We will persist in making our ecosystem, our content, products differentiated and highly specialized, which in turn will help us capture the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of music lovers and unlock the massive opportunity in front of us. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Shirley, our CFO, for a closer review of our financials.
Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Next, I'll discuss our results from financial perspective. Our total revenues for Q1 2022 were CNY 6.6 billion, down 15% year-over-year, and by 20.7% sequentially. In the first quarter of 2022, our IFRS net profit was CNY 649 million, and the non-IFRS net profit was CNY 939 million, which represented a sequential increase of 8% as a result of our focus on operating efficiency. In the first quarter of 2022, music subscription business continued healthy growth with revenues of CNY 1.99 billion and a year-over-year growth of 18%. As we benefit from expanded sales channels and paying users loyalty due to high-quality content and services we provide.
Online music paying users grew to 80.2 million, up 32% year-over-year, representing four million net adds sequentially. Monthly ARPPU was CNY 8.3 this quarter, compared to CNY 9.3 in the same period last year, as we offered more effective promotions to attract users. Taking out impact from fewer calendar days in Q1, ARPPU maintained stable sequentially as we focused on the quality growth of our overall subscription revenues. Revenues from advertising dropped year-over-year and sequentially as our advertising business continued to be negatively impacted by the industrial adjustment and seasonality. Our advertising revenues were also impacted by the outbreak of COVID-19 and lockdown in some major cities. We are proactively spending the ad inventories, optimizing ad display, and rolling out innovative advertising formats to manage these challenges.
While we expect ad growth will continue to be impacted in the short term due to headwind from regulation on splash page, and the regional COVID-19 outbreak, we remain confident about long-term growth potential and expect advertising revenue to start recovering in the second half of 2022. Sub-licensing revenues also dropped on a year-over-year basis and sequentially due to restructuring of agreement with certain music labels. Social entertainment services and other revenues were CNY 4 billion, down by 21% year-over-year as we face an evolving macro environment and intense competition from other paying entertainment platforms. To adapt to the changing environment and to stabilize revenue scale, we have differentiated our content offerings by enrich our visual interactive product offerings and enriching cross-platform collaboration. We are also expanding our international footprint as discussed earlier.
Gross margin in Q1 was 28%, down by 3.5% year-over-year due to the following factors. First, given the continuous growth in music subscription revenues, our revenue mix shifted with revenues from online music, which generally have a lower gross margin, accounting for a higher percentage of revenue. Second, revenues from audio live streaming, whose gross margin was relatively lower, also grew faster and accounted for a higher percentage of revenues. In addition, the decrease of advertising and sub-licensed revenues also impacted the margin. Meanwhile, we're trying to control our content costs with increased ROI requirements, as well as lower revenue sharing ratios for social entertainment business, had a favorable impact on gross margin on a sequential basis. Now, moving on to operating expenses.
Total operating expenses for Q1 2022 were CNY 1.6 billion or 20% as a percentage of total revenue, which was relatively stable comparing with last year. Take out the impact from acquisition of Lazy Audio, operating expenses as a percentage of revenues would have been slightly lower year-over-year. Selling and marketing expenses were CNY 330 million, down by 15.51% year-over-year. During the quarter, we took measures to improve efficiency, closely monitor on the ROI of each promotion channel, better utilize external promotion channels, and leverage our internal traffic to attract users and promote our brands. General and administrative expenses were CNY 1 billion, up by 15% year-over-year, excluding the impact of approximately CNY 44 million from the acquisition of Lazy Audio, G&A would have increased by 10% year-over-year.
The increase was driven by a higher number of employees in R&D as we invested in product enhancement, technology innovation, and a more diversified product offerings. Meanwhile, we have been closely monitoring employee-related expenses and taking actions to improve headcount efficiency, which started bearing fruit this quarter and resulted in a decrease in G&A expenses on a sequential basis. Our effective tax rate for Q1 2022 was 12.2%, compared to 11.5% in the same period of 2021. The increase in effective tax rate was mainly due to some of our entities are entitled to different tax benefits in 2021 and 2022. Our net profit was CNY 649 million, and net profit attributable to equity holders of the company for Q1 2022 was CNY 609 million.
Non-GAAP net profit was CNY 939 million, and the non-GAAP net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was CNY 899 million. Non-GAAP net profit margin was 14.1%. As of March 31, 2022, our combined balances of cash equivalents, term deposits and short-term investments were CNY 25.9 billion, representing an increase of CNY 1.2 billion from December 31, 2021. Looking forward, we will continue to focus on our core business and invest meaningfully in new products and services, including long-form audio and international business. With a focus on investment returns and future growth potential. Meanwhile, we will continue to effectively control headcount-related costs and selling and marketing expenses to improve overall operational efficiency. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are ready to open the call for questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, please limit yourself to one question, and if you have additional questions, you can reenter the queue. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Alicia Yap with Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, management. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a questions related to how the lockdowns and the COVID tests impacted us. If management can share or elaborate on, you know, the overall Tencent Music, you know, how it has been, for example, the prolonged lockdown in Shanghai's impact, any positive impact on the time spent on the online music sub or even the social entertainment active user? Specifically, have you seen any spike in the user demand or time spent for your long form audios or the podcast? Any negative impact from the spending willingness and also the spending behavior? Thank you.
Sure. In terms of traffic, on the music side, as a result of various investments in the innovative features that we have been making over the past several quarters, particularly in QQ Music, we actually did not see any meaningful negative impact from the lockdown. As we reported during the early remarks, we actually saw a year-over-year increase in the MAU with QQ Music. With regards to the social entertainment side, specifically with regards to WeSing and the online singing components of that product feature, we actually saw a slight increase in the online singing activities as a result of people spending more time with karaoke during their quarantines.
However, with respect to revenues, there was a meaningful impact on the advertising revenue as a result of a large number of our advertising customers, you know, being in lockdown situations in major cities. Also it had an impact on our live streaming revenues because both the hosts are also affected in terms of the activities and affected the users' willingness to spend on live streaming.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Alex Poon with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks, management, for taking my question. My question is related to our music ARPU trend. Since beginning of this year, we have started scaling back some of the promotions to balance between the growth of net adds and ARPU growth. We are also launching new membership programs, which has very high ARPU. So how should we think about the ARPU trend from second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter onwards? Thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you. Well, I think let me kind of spend a minute to talk about the overall subscription revenue growth, because that plays hand in hand with the ARPU trends. In terms of subscription, our overall goal for subscription revenue year-over-year growth for this year is to achieve close to 20% for the full year. There are two ways to achieve this objective. The previous approach was to focus on subscriber net adds of 3.5 million-4 million per quarter, which translates to approximately 20% subscriber growth, you know, counting from the end of last year. Then ARPPU, that is, on a slight downward trend. The new approach that we'll be implementing going forward is to have a better balance between subscriber growth and ARPPU.
We'll work on improving the ARPPU, you know, through less promotions and other measures such as Super VIP that we've mentioned. As a result, we expect the ARPPU to increase going forward with Q1 as a base. For subscriber numbers, because of the better ARPPU growth, we can have lower quarterly net adds, less than the 3.5 million-4 million range that we previously talked about, but overall still achieve a close to 20% growth in subscription revenue with a more healthy mix of ARPPU improvement and subscriber growth.
Our next question will come from Xueqing Zhang with CICC. Please go ahead.
Hey, hi, good morning, management. Thank you for taking my question. My question is related to Tencent ecosystem, especially cooperation with WeChat. Since we see a series of new functions have launched on WeChat. Could management share with us the key directions of cooperation and what functions are particularly helpful? Wondering how does it help with the operational data? Thank you.
对我们，实际上一直都在对微信有非常密切的合作。当然有一些数据确实也可能不太方便透，但是有些比较明确的一些功能点和刚才在视频号里面合作我们已经大概有些介绍。从基础这个服务上来看，就是从聊天本身社交这个地方，从去年开始我们做了很多的合作，包括在跟从QQ音乐上可以去直接去设置微信上的状态，包括微信铃声的合作，如果你到后面可能会考虑视频彩铃，但这个都因为后面考虑可能并不是完全确定的，因为也涉及到我们跟微信产品的沟通。但是从现在目前已发布的这几个能力上来看，还另外一个我们比较看重的，包括说可以在聊天，大家可以看到可以在用户的群聊跟单聊里面，你可以直接去发送QQ音乐的，就直接可以发送音乐文件，这样的话就可以让好友之间去更好地去分享音乐，这也是我们在这块这段时间里面非常重要的一个尝试。那另外一个最重要的点是在于说视频号这部分，我刚才我们已经讲了，我们自己在音乐人这块，我们会重点地去，应该这么说，就是视频号这边的音乐生态是我们和微信团队一起来合作来做的，我们也可以看到我们这里面的微微的增长是比较迅速的。当然我们也可以看到一个非常好的一个趋势是演唱会这块这部分，我们可以看到从年初的，从去年的我们的五月天，然后到四月一号的张国荣，到我们今天正在准备去官宣的周杰伦这次的一个复刻的一个演唱会，都是我们的平台跟微信视频号一起来做直播的。我们也可以注意到，就是说在演唱会这部分，因为疫情的一些影响，出现了一些比较明确的商业模式，我们可以看到在里面开始，就上一次的演唱会上，在微信视频号里面的演唱会里面已经出现了一个招商的一个收入。我们这次其实在周杰伦里面可能也有所体现，所以我们未来的时候在视频号部分的视频分发里面会继续地去做运营。我们非常看重说音乐本身平台跟短视频这边的一个很好的结合，随着后面可能会有一个比较好的功能，但这个也不一定明确，就因为我们并不能完全地确定腾讯这边的一个合作方，就一个比较明确的是说，因为在正常的短视频的这个模式下，你会看到一个短视频在发布的时候会出现背景音乐，那背景音乐它可以继续跟拍，或者是去听这个背景音乐，那这个能力实际上在目前视频号里面还不具备，这个也是我们在极力在推动视频号来做发展的。那么这是短视频这边的进展。那么后面刚才说了，其实我们后面可能会重点地去推进直播，就是视频号的在里面的演唱会和我们这边的一个联动，我们会更好地让TME live本身的一个呈现，除了在我们自己的平台上，在腾讯视频上，同时在微信这边的微信视频号上有一个很好的呈现，我们也可以看到这里面会具备了一个非常大的用户规模，因为只有在这种大的用户规模下才有比较好的这些商业的机会。所以我们也从中看到了在线演出，通过跟微信视频号的合作。
I'll just spend a quick minute to do a short term translation in the interest of time. We continue to deepen our cooperation with WeChat, with the overall objective of letting music to become an important part of the social use cases. As Ross mentioned, there are a number of areas of our cooperation. It includes things like in the WeChat profile, you can change the profile based on the music that you've been listening on. In the WeChat's audio call ringtone, you can now customize using music from QQ Music. During WeChat chats, you can directly share music from QQ Music.
With regards to Video Account, which we've mentioned in the prepared remarks, we continue to see very rapid growth in the operating metrics such as daily video views. With respect to live concert, that's also a key area that we are looking to expand our cooperation in. We have done a number of very successful live concert events, such as ones with Leslie Cheung, Mayday, et cetera. Increasingly, these events would have a monetization element such as ad sponsorships, and others. Overall, we provide a very healthy music content vertical to help enrich the Video Account content ecosystem for WeChat.
In return, WeChat provide us with very complimentary promotional capability, and we also help them with artist partnership, you know, to strengthen that partnership.
Okay. Besides the content distribution and promotional capabilities that you mentioned that we work with together with WeChat, I think that there's one more important point is we are working with them really closely on the program development side. Such as online concerts, we are not just distributing it, but we are also work on the details productions to ensure a high quality of online music concerts will be delivered to our users. This is the top priority of the TME team and also the recent video account team as well. We have been in the Tencent corporate umbrella for a long time, and we work together peer-to-peer and side by side. I think that we are really working together to create synergies.
We are looking forward to have a lot more very high-quality content will be provided through this platform. Besides we will the top-tier artist concerts, we are also working on the long-tail and also some of the really high-potential musicians content as well. A lot more wonderful content we can be expecting in the future and we have a lot more to come.
Our next question will come from Eddie Leung with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Could you tell me a little bit about the outlook for your live streaming business for the rest of the year, especially different recent regulations in host taxation problem as well as protection of minors? Thank you.
Thank you. In terms of the outlook for the full year, in the last earnings call, we said that for the full year 2022, we were expecting total revenue year-over-year to decline to be around mid-single-digit. Obviously that was prior to a number of recent regulatory announcements, such as ones you mentioned, as well as from the very recent impact from the pandemic measures. Without those impacts, obviously, you know, the previous guidance would have continued to apply. However, following these recent pandemic measures as well as latest regulation, specifically the live streaming one that you talked about, which comes into effect in June, we're likely to see live streaming revenue be impacted for the rest of the year.
Because the new regulation and the new restrictions around tip ranking as well as around PK, i.e., competition between performance during live streaming sessions don't come into effect until next month. We're not yet in position to quantify that impact for you at this point because the details will depend on the actual detail execution and the implementation of those restrictions. We'll be working very closely with the regulator to figure out exactly you know how best to be fully compliant. On to offset some of these challenging pressures, obviously we will continue to invest in building new opportunities to mitigate.
These opportunities in social entertainment lie mainly around audio live streaming, where some of the restrictions recently announced are less prevalent in audio live streaming. Secondly, with international expansion within our social entertainment business, that we see opportunities in Southeast Asia, Japan, as well as the Middle East. Lastly, in the longer run as we continue to build out our metaverse experience through our first pioneering virtual music playground, TMELand, we'll continue to host more and more exciting and interactive virtual events to pioneer a new form of social entertainment.
Got that. Thank you, Tony.
Our next question will come from Wei Xiong with UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, management. Thank you for taking my questions. My question is on margins. Management mentioned about a few factors that affected our gross margin just now. Just wondering, how should we think about the gross margin trending in the next few quarters? Also together with our focus on efficiency improving this year, any areas we see still have potentials for further cost saving, and how will that impact the net margin for this year? Thank you.
Okay. Gross margin is 28% in Q1, down by 0.8% sequentially. The main reason is advertising revenue dropped quickly, and margin has a higher gross contribution to gross margin. During Q1, there are some positive factors on gross margin. First, revenue sharing ratio of social entertainment business have been controlled and decreased sequentially. Second, adapting to new macro environment will increase the cost requirement of content costs. We restructured the agreements with some music labels and see the positive effect. That have positive impact on our gross margin. Looking forward to 2022, we expect our gross margin will be increased in the next quarters if our social entertainment revenue can be stable. We will focus on increasing efficiencies of all business units and all cost items.
For the operating margin, cost and expense control to improve operation efficiencies is one of our top priorities this year. We have taken tight control on selling and marketing expenses in Q1, resulting in 51% decrease on a year-over-year basis. We will further monitor ROI of each promotion channel and manage the internal and external resources more effectively to improve efficiencies of selling and marketing expenses. For headcount management, we will continue to invest new products and new business, such as long-form audio, international business and the new latest programs. Meanwhile, we will pay more attention to improve the profitability of new business and products, such as optimizing organizational alignment and improving the headcount efficiency. Looking forward to 2022, we expect our adjusted net profit can be increased sequentially.
Adjusted net margin can meet or above last year of 2021, and our music business can break even on operational level. That's all.
Our next question will come from Ronald Keung with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Management. I wanna ask on the pricing side on subscription, given that the ARPPU has fallen sequentially over the past few quarters. With the COVID impact, with the macro impact yet, we do think the competition has been quite rational. I want to hear about the pricing trend outlook. When will we see a potential stabilization in ARPPU for subscription? And also any iterations on long-term paying subs targets. Thank you. I think as I previously mentioned, you know, the new approach that we'll be taking with our subscription revenue is to have a better balance between subscriber growth and ARPPU growth.
Even though our recorded ARPPU for Q1 saw a slight sequential decline, that was mainly a result of the lower number of days in Q1. If we adjust for that, the ARPPU for Q1 versus Q4 is actually fairly stable. Using Q1 as a base, we are actively working on improving the ARPPU, you know, through obviously less price promotion as well as through other measures such as, you know, bundling Super VIPs and other measures, as well. We'll be expecting the ARPPU to increase as a trend with Q1 as a base.
Overall close to 20% of subscription revenue for the full year and with a rising ARPPU, you know, we can have a slightly lower quarterly net adds less than the 3.5 million-4 million range that we previously talked about, but still we should be able to achieve the close to 20% target of subscription revenue growth for the full year.
Yeah. I think we are encouraged by the strong growth of our online music subscription business, and especially under the macro headwinds. Also, we are achieving a pretty good subscription rate of over 13% right now. I think that we will continue to pull in more high-quality content into the subscription plan, which help us because we really learned that a lot of users really question the value of the music content so that they are willing to pay for it. In terms of the ARPPU, we can also drive it by, for example, launching out some of the new VIP plans with new privileges to our users, which has a higher price tag than the regular one that we have. We can also have many different ways to drive the monetization.
For example, we can also work with different business partners to work on the new channels for production for promotion as well. That I think that the overall online music subscription business for TME is we are still developing in a really healthy manner.
Wonderful. Thank you, Manchu.
Our next question will come from Thomas Chong with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks management for taking my questions. Given the amount of cash that we have at the end of Q1, and when we look into our strategies going forward, how should we think about the priority in terms of cash usage? Are we going to do some more M&A in international market, share buyback or considering dividends? May I also ask about the progress on the Hong Kong listing by way of introduction? Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. In terms of our cash utilization, obviously I think we would be very disciplined and prudent with our cash management. We have announced that you know, we'll continue, and we intend to fully complete our share repurchase program by the end of this year. As of the latest date just shortly before the earnings release, we have already spent over $670 million on share buybacks since March last year. You know, as a percentage of our current market cap, that's a very sizable amount. At this stage, we have no intention to declare a dividend.
With respect to M&A, we'll continue to be prudent and assess strategic opportunities, both overseas as well as domestically in areas that are complementary to our core music, as well as social entertainment businesses. In terms of the Hong Kong listing, last quarter, we talked about that we have already started in pursuing the Hong Kong secondary listing. We are currently in an active execution phase, and we will strive to move things forward in an expedited manner and obtain the necessary regulatory approvals in due course. To the extent there are major developments, we'll be making the appropriate announcement at that time.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Charlene Liu with HSBC. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. I wanted to ask about new ads monetization model. I think in the last quarter you mentioned a premium mode which allows users to unlock music subscription services by watching ads. Can you share with us the progress on this in terms of user penetration and feedback from app clients more generally? Do you have any long-term targets in revenue from this mode? Thank you very much.
Yeah, sure. Advertising overall saw you know some impact as a result of obviously recent regulation around the splash screen ads as well as the pandemic measures. You know, specifically, a large number of our large advertisers are actually based in major cities. As a result, obviously, I think the advertising revenue has been affected and we've seen a decline on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter. However, if we look at the sort of subcategories within our overall advertising revenues, we are seeing a positive momentum in selected new ad formats. An example of that is the video incentive ad that you mentioned and that we talked about previously.
We continue to increase the penetration rates of new ad products, you know, the video incentive ad specifically, which is gaining very positive momentum. The revenue of this new format is growing sequentially despite the difficult overall ad environment. It's now a sort of low single-digit % of our advertising revenue at the moment, but we would expect it to grow and to become a much more meaningful portion over time. In the long run, despite the short-term challenges, we do expect a lot of potential in the advertising business, and we expect a recovery into the second half. We do see certain sectors that are stronger than others.
For example, you know, the FMCG kind of traditional consumer staple products continue to perform well, as well as online games, as people spend more time on online games during quarantine. Conversely, areas such as cosmetics or electronics and e-commerce in general have saw a bit of a weakness in the advertising verticals.
Okay. That's all. Thank you.
We are now approaching the end of the conference call. I will now turn the call over to your speaker host today, Mr. Tony Yip, for closing remarks.
Yep. Thank you everyone for joining us today. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact our investor relations team. This concludes the call today. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Thank you and bye for now.
Thank you. Bye.
Bye.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.