Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tencent Music Entertainment Group second 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 announced its quarterly financial results today after the market closed. An 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.
The company will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which we believe are meaningful metrics for evaluating our performance. Please refer to our earnings release and SEC filings for reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable IFRS measures. With that, I'm pleased to turn over the call to Cussion, Executive Chairman of TME. Cussion?
Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. In June 2022, we celebrated the first anniversary of launching our dual engine content and platform strategy. Over the past year, TME has continuously innovated business models and improved our all-in-one music entertainment content and product capabilities to better serve our users and partners. Meanwhile, facing the complex and evolving industry landscape, we continue to explore music's intrinsic commercial and cultural value. As always, we strive to nurture our music ecosystem and foster the sustained healthy development of China's music industry. On the content side, we steadily enriched our original content production capabilities.
To that end, we launched a new smart music assistant functionality in May, enabling creators to quickly make decisions through our proprietary PDM predictive model at key stages of the music production process, such as demo screening and market appeal potential evaluation. Each of our tools facilitates more efficient production of high-quality work, evidenced by dozens of original songs produced and streamed more than 100 million times in the second quarter. Notably, Blessing of the Three Lifetimes, San Sheng San Xing, a song by Hailai Aamu, dedicated to his beloved partner, was a blockbuster that we produced, promote, and helped to enlist it on the variety show, The Treasured Voice, I Can See Your Voice. It dominated major music charts and generated huge social media buzz, comprising over 2.5 billion views and 350 million streams in the second quarter.
Meanwhile, we continue to refine our original content catalog, focusing on key verticals such as gaming and hip-hop music. In the second quarter, we collaborated with popular game titles, including Honor of Kings, Wangzhe Rongyao, League of Legends Pro League, Yingxiong Lianmeng Zhiye Liansai, and Peacekeeper Elite, Heping Jingying, among others, and worked with well-known artists including Angela Zhang Shaohan, Jing Shao Jintang, and Xin Liu to produce 15 chart-topping game songs. Notably, the theme song of the Honor of Kings game character, Shangguan Wan'er, sung by Yisa Yu Kewei, has achieved the highest number of first-week streams among all QQ Music game songs released in the first half of 2022. What's more, in the trendy hip hop genre, we cooperated with the NBA on its 75th anniversary album.
The title single, Time to Shine, Re Ai, performed by Chinese artist Lay Zhang Yixing, and American pro basketball star Nick Young, became the first Chinese theme song to appear in the NBA finals. Next, through Tencent Musician Platform, we spared no efforts to cultivate a ripened community of indie musicians while creating a positive social impact. Tencent Musician Platform continues to empower musicians with a wealth of online and offline promotion capabilities and monetization avenues. In the second quarter, we introduced a new service for our musicians to easily mass distribute musical works globally to over 150 popular platforms such as Spotify and YouTube with a single click, which has already brought 190,000 songs by over 10,000 musicians to overseas audience as of the end of the second quarter.
Kugou also now allows musicians to publish their songs easily on mobile phones and to self-host pay-per-view live events with merchandise sales embedded. For instance, we recently hosted a paid online birthday party for musician Yu Yan, with a rich pipeline of additional parties yet to be unveiled. What's more, as a long-term support program for musicians, our four-stage 2022 program launched the Open Mic series in April, which has already produced offline performances by over 70 groups of musicians across 7 cities. Tencent Musician Platform also plays a pivotal role in exploring China's rich, deeply embedded social and cultural values through music works. Notable examples in the second quarter include, first, New Trend in Chinese Ancient Style, Gu Feng Xin Chao, an album birthed by up-and-coming and top musicians who gathered to promote Chinese culture through music.
Second, My Girls, our music creation plan for female musicians designed to promote female independence and self-awareness. Third, a Sino-French album, MOSAÏQUE, Le Se Ban Lan, a joint effort between our musicians, French musicians, and the French Embassy, which was showcased on the front page of Apple Music's recommendation list, further enhancing our musicians' international appeal. With our finger on the pulse of our users' preferences, we continue to zoom in on both trendy and time-honored music experiences. To further enhance the quality and variety of music on our platform, as well as our reputation as the go-to destination for key music verticals such as classical, DJ, and hip-hop, we established strategic cooperative relationships with professional classical arts institutions, launched the Kuwo's DJ for Everything plan, Kuwo DJ.
Built up Kugou's new rap brand, Rap Trailblazers, Shuo Chang Xian Feng, among other initiatives in the second quarter. One remarkable success was the 2022 hit single, She Can Do Magic, Ta Hui Mo Fa Ba, by DJ Little Fish, Xiao Yu Er, which dominated charts on many music platforms after its creator joined the DJ for Everything plan, achieving nearly 700 million streams by the end of the second quarter on TME's platform. Moving on to TME Live, our comprehensive online and offline performances brand was presented 132 high-quality live music performances since it debuted 2 years ago.
In the second quarter, in addition to online live concerts for Roy Wang Yuan, among others, TME Live was also proud to breathe new life into two legendary series of recorded concerts by household name artists Leslie Cheung, Zhang Guo Rong, and Jay Chou, Zhou Jie Lun. Supporting the ultra-high definition visual and sound restorations enhanced by AI algorithms for selective events. These two huge hits went viral and dominated the top trending list, accumulating over 100 million unique viewers within the Tencent ecosystem, and social media buzz of 6 billion views. Jay Chou's concert also set a new record in viewership for online concerts in the industry, and his artist merchandise, including two action figures, sold through our Puta Mall and Tencent channels, achieved close to RMB 10 million in GMV in the second quarter.
TME Live not only serves as an online stage for artists and musicians, but also demonstrate our game-changing creativity offline. Through our TME Live in-house live house tour, we are providing participating artists and users with immersive interactive experiences. Early starter artists, including Young Jack, Man Shu Ke, Red Paper, Bai Pi Shu, and Hu Yanbin, held live events in the second quarter, and tickets for some events were sold out in just 2 hours. In summary, what matters most to music lovers, music creators, and the broader music industry are the primary areas where we will continue to invest and drive innovation, showcasing our ambition to support the sustained growth of the music ecosystem in China. That concludes 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 second quarter, we continued to innovate our four pillars of entertainment, namely listening, watch, sing, and play, to provide our users with a stage to express their musical tastes and build their sense of identity on TME's platform, which in return deepens their recognition of and the connection with our products. In terms of listening, in the second quarter, we added a variety of refined product features to provide a more professional music streaming experience. For example, we pioneered Homepage Lyrics, which displays synchronous lyrics on the mobile home screen when streaming songs. We also rolled out a premium song feature, supporting real-time song quality enhancement, which is now available via our Super VIP membership, and has been activated by 85% of these subscribers.
What's more, to further improve users' music discovery efficiency, in the second quarter, QQ Music launched the Radar Mode, on the homepage, which recommends songs to users based on their favorites with the help of personalized algorithm-based listening, contributing to new heights for QQ Music recommendation penetration. In addition, Kugou rolled out a new search feature allowing users to easily find the different version remix or styles of the same song. We also added features such as looped playback of a selected song section, and self-defined music chart preferences, to create a more personalized music streaming experience. As for WeSing, we shall add another dimension to users' immersive music entertainment experience.
Based on our understanding of users' preferences, the music related video content we provide to WeChat Video Accounts is very popular among users on WeChat, ranking among the best in the music category of WeChat Video Accounts. We also continued to work with WeChat Video Accounts during the second quarter to boost our promotion capabilities, especially for indie musicians. The number of our musicians with a connected WeChat Video Accounts continued to grow by double digits quarter-over-quarter. Meanwhile, our products also released new updates to strengthen visual experience including one, customized dynamic images on personal playlists and two, Focus Station, which provides a video enhanced listening experience across three scenarios, studying, sleeping aid, and meditation. The third pillar of the unique music entertainment experience we provide is WeSing.
WeSing launched a major version upgrade in July to expand the experience of singing from a mere production of audio work into multidimensional performance experience. In the second quarter, we rolled out a 3D avatar functionality, QQ Show, to serve as users' identity card in the visual world and allow them to generate dance moves when recording and singing in their dressed up avatar on stage. Additionally, in the second quarter, we provided innovative singing tools to stimulate users' interest in music creation as participation formats evolve. WeSing pioneered the industry's AI-based voice synthesis technology, allowing user rookies to create a visual scene based on their own voice, which improved upon its likeness to its owner as it received additional input.
Kugou also unveiled its first singer in the voice of Gen Z celebrity Yang Chaoyue, enabling users to customize and synthesize songs with just one click. Riding on the trend of visualization, we also enhanced our play elements by extending our use cases and the monetization opportunities across music based visual interactions. In the second quarter, TME Land, our immersive virtual theme park, teamed up with Adidas Originals and hosted China's first virtual rap concert, landing on the OZ feature, including sensational avatar performance by popular rappers Jay Park, Xiao Zai Fan and MC Jin, Ouyang Jing, as well as virtual shoppable fashion show. The sponsor event registered over 7 million views, setting a new record in viewship for TME Land. We also continued to upgrade our VR album rooms, which combine listening to songs with a virtual exhibition hall for artists.
A total of 13 stars have settled in our VR album rooms since launch, including singer and actress Cyndi Wang Xinling and musician Liu Shuang, who joined in the second quarter. As a pioneer in the application of innovative listening, watch, sing, and play functions, QQ Music has continued to improve its MAUs year-over-year, a testament to our young content operations and advanced feature interactions. Our long-form audio serves to round out our music portfolio while simultaneously differentiating our content. Notably, we have been strengthening our brand appeal in sleeping aid content, one of the fastest growing categories on QQ Music. We have teamed up with professional organizations, music labels, musicians, hotels, and other ecosystem partners to provide diverse professional sleeping aid content read by AI or real-world celebrities, and delivered sequential growth in users scale, streaming, volume, and the time spent in this vertical.
In addition, in the second quarter, we continued to enhance our collaborations with Tencent Video to successfully promote popular audiobooks and associated IPs such as the third season of 芒种前坤 and 天下. As his beloved dramas hit the airwaves, James Lang's long-form audio offerings of the same title enjoyed a marked upswing in their streaming volumes. With that, I'd like to give the floor to Tony to review our business operations. Tony, please go ahead.
Thank you, Ross. Hello, everyone. In the second quarter, our online music MAU was 593 million, down year-over-year, primarily due to reduced marketing spend. However, subscription revenue continued to deliver robust year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter growth, along with paying user growth and a sequential rebound of ARPPU. Meanwhile, we continue to strengthen engagement among our core user cohorts by deploying richer content, innovative product features, and continual new iterations. Our IoT service MAUs continued to achieve double-digit growth year-over-year as we enriched the use cases of our products and established collaboration with a broader group of partners. For example, we now partner with the top 50 passenger vehicle and top 15 electric vehicle manufacturers by sales, bringing car owners the ultimate in-vehicle music enjoyment through new features such as Dolby Surround sound and thousands of customized sound effects.
In addition, through our partnership with Little Genius Smartwatch, 小天才手表, which is mostly used by students, WeSing's MAU in the smartwatch segment grew triple digits year-over-year. Despite the macro headwinds that weighed on our online music services revenue in the second quarter, subscriptions maintained its growth trajectory, with 18% subscription revenue growth year-over-year. We are also confident we can sustain the ongoing rebound of our ARPPU while continuing to boost paying user growth during the remainder of this year. As a result of macro changes and the resurging COVID-19 outbreak in the second quarter, our advertising revenue softened year-over-year. However, it rebounded quarter-over-quarter, driven by the June 18 e-commerce sales promotions as well as ad sponsorship opportunities arising from TME Live and TME Land. In addition, we consistently innovated to build a diversified advertising portfolio.
Our incentive ad-based free listening mode is making good progress. During the second quarter, we launched a host of new advertising formats and inventories on music charts, search pages, banners, and playlists, among others. As we have strengthened our advertising monetization with additional avenues, we also successfully attracted well-known brands such as Sprite, Beijing Hyundai, and Pepsi to sponsor a variety of customized online and offline live events recently, attracting participation by dozens of popular artists and aspiring musicians in these highly engaging events. We continue to deepen our content partnership to enrich the user experience and explore additional monetization avenues in digital music.
First, accompanying the launch of Jay Chou's 周杰伦 latest digital album, Greatest Works of Art, 最伟大的作品, we tailored diverse activities for his fans, such as a customized vinyl record player interface and sound effects, artist merchandise, and interactions in Jay Chou's virtual room. Copies sold exceeded 6 million by the end of July, marking another digital album blockbuster on our platform. Next, in the second quarter, we entered into strategic partnerships with Time Fengjun Entertainment, the music label of TFBOYS and Teens in Times, 时代少年团. Avex China, and the talented female artist Xin Liu Yuxin, among others, where our platform has a head start period on their latest music, customized artist merchandise, or unique artist-fan interaction events.
Third, we joined hands with YH Entertainment Group, Yuehua Entertainment, a well-known artist management company, to launch artist subscription Chaoji Dingyue packages for its 13 well-known artists, such as Meng Meiqi and Justin Huang Minghao, providing customized audio and video content for their subscribing fans. We also doubled down on our efforts to build a young and trendy cultural community to expand our Gen Z user base. In the second quarter, our campus musician cultivation plan, Voila Campus, Ni Hao, Daxuesheng, organized the Wish for a Happy Graduation, Zhù Tā Bìyè Kuàilè, event and teamed up with artist Mao Buyi and campus musician Yang Ge to release the song Small World, Xiao Shijie. These initiatives brought inspiring messages to the first group of graduates born in the 2000s, resonating strongly with the new graduates' demographic.
What's more, we began to bring offline music festivals back to our audience in the second quarter, such as Kugou's Cool Fun, Kufan Xianchang, live performance parade, which debuted in Hangzhou in May, and the first WAVE Music Festival partnered with SAIC Audi in June, encouraging online live streaming and offline interactions between fans and musicians. These events are just the beginning of our return to live performances. We have an exciting lineup of offline experiences planned for the coming quarters. Now, let's turn to our social entertainment services. Its MAU sequentially improved while paying users declined year- over- year due to competition and industry adjustments. We will continue to improve our competitiveness through ongoing product innovations and new initiatives, such as audio live streaming and virtual interactive product offerings.
For WeSing, we launched its latest version with tools to energize the singing experience while lowering the barrier to participate. For instance, the upgraded one-click voice enhancement feature, Yijian Meiyin, customizes voice improvement based on the song's rhythm as well as user's voice volume and timbre, producing a more natural effect. Along with other upgrades mentioned earlier, these efforts paid off, as evidenced by the strong double-digit year-over-year expansion in karaoke room penetration and user time spent in the second quarter, in addition to the year-over-year growth in recordings, penetration, and user time spent. In the second quarter, WeSing also capitalized on the success of the hit song Lonely Warrior, Gū yǒng zhě, which debuted on TME and achieved 4 billion streams across our platform since its launch, with a nationwide cover contest to convey positive cultural power to school students, attracting a broad group of participants online.
In response to the competition faced by traditional live streaming services, we continue to expand our content verticals and bring more differentiated content to improve user experience. QQ Music Live Streaming continued to expand the scale of its audio live streaming content offerings, where it expanded content across sleeping aid, studying, and commuting use cases, received wide user acclaim. In the second quarter, it also collaborated with Tencent Musician Platform to organize 39 sessions of the real-time live singing events, Meet, Let's Sing, Jianmen Ba Shouchang, connecting musicians and their fans and gaining over 10 million viewers. These efforts contributed to double-digit growth in the average daily number of hosts and viewers, as well as a year-over-year increase in QQ Music Live Streaming's revenue in the second quarter.
We were also successful in exploring overseas markets with audio live streaming activities such as chat rooms, leading to strong revenue growth in overseas markets in the second quarter. We also delved into the virtual idol and animation live streaming verticals favored by the young generation. WeSing added a new Live2D function, which captures hosts' expressions and movement in real time and allow the hosts to use an avatar for live streaming and multi-person interactions. Additionally, Kugou's live streaming hosts, together with its self-owned virtual idol, Shanbao, and Tencent Animation and Comics, Tengxun Dongman, jointly organized a number of events to recommend popular comic IPs to ACG fans through live streaming, during which the event's participating hosts recorded triple-digit growth in user time spent and the number of viewers of their live streaming rooms. Last but not least, I'd like to close with a word about our social responsibility initiatives.
On Children's Day, we worked with Tencent to launch the Little Red Flower Charity Concert, uniting over 30 groups of artists and musicians in a heartwarming live concert for children with special needs. We also partnered with La Mer to host a special public welfare concert for World Oceans Day, launching a welfare song, Blue New Life, by Mao Buyi to create environmental awareness around the marine ecosystem. We're proud of these efforts to leverage the emotional power of music to advance our social commitment. To conclude, as our dual-engine content and platform strategy move forward, we will continue to use technology to elevate the role of music in people's lives and support the sustained development of the music industry with our strong and growing toolkit. 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 a financial perspective. Our total revenues for Q2 2022 were RMB 6.9 billion, down 14% year-over-year and up 4% sequentially. In the second quarter of 2022, our IFRS net profit was RMB 892 million, and the non-IFRS net profit was RMB 1.07 billion, which represented a sequential increase of 13% as a result of our effective cost control and improved operating efficiency. In Q2 2022, we were more focused on the return on the promotions for subscription service and continued to strengthen content operations. We achieved solid growth in subscription service. Music subscription revenues grew to RMB 2.11 billion, up 18% year-over-year and by 6% sequentially. Online music paying users grew to RMB 82.7 million, up 25% year-over-year.
RMB 2.5 million net adds sequentially as we benefit from expanded sales channels and paying users' loyalty resulted from the ongoing efforts we made to cultivate users' willingness to pay for music and high-quality content and services we provide. ARPU was at RMB 8.5 million, representing a decrease from RMB 9 million in the same period last year, and an increase from RMB 8.3 million in the first quarter of this year. Our strategy to grow our music business in a healthy and sustainable way has started to bear fruit and contributing to the continuous growth in music subscriptions revenue. Revenue from advertising decreased year-over-year as advertising business continued to be negatively impacted by the industry adjustment and the outbreak of COVID-19. However, advertising revenues grew sequentially as advertising business began to recover moderately from the outbreak of COVID-19 since June.
The June 18th e-commerce sales promotions also contributed to the sequential increase in advertising revenues. We are proactively expanding ad inventories, optimizing ad display, and rolling out innovative advertising formats to manage these challenges. We remain confident about long-term growth potential and expect advertising revenues to continue to recover moderately in the second half of 2022. Social entertainment services and other revenues were RMB 4 billion, down 20% year-over-year as we face an evolving macro environment and intense competition from other platforms. To adapt to the changing environment and to stabilize revenue skew, we have differentiated our content offerings by enriching our visual interactive product offerings and enrich cross-platform collaboration. Meanwhile, we continued to invest in audio live streaming and expand our international business, resulting in growth in revenues from audio live streaming and overseas business year-over-year and sequentially.
Gross margin in Q2 2022 was 29.9%, down by 0.5% year-over-year because the decrease in our total revenues outpaced the decrease in our total cost of revenues, as some of them remained fixed in nature. Gross margin improved sequentially, resulting from our effective control on content costs, including revenue-sharing fees for live stream business and improved operational cost efficiency. We will continue to take measures to manage costs effectively and improve overall efficiency. Now, moving on to operating expenses. Total operating expenses for Q2 2022 were RMB 1.4 billion or 20.5% as a percentage of total revenues. Down by 0.4% from 20.9% as a percentage of total revenues in the same period last year. Including the impact from the expenses related to our application for secondary listing, operating expenses as a percentage of total revenues would have decreased by 1% year-over-year.
Selling and marketing expenses were RMB 303 million, down by 55% year-over-year. During the quarter, we continued to take measures to improve efficiency, closely monitor the ROI of each promotion channel, better utilize the external promotion channels, and leveraged our internal channels to attract users and promote our brands. The reduced marketing spend resulted in loss of some casual users and impacted our music and MAU negatively. However, our music subscription service continued to grow rapidly with huge growth in paying users and level of user activities. General and administrative expenses were RMB 1.1 billion, up by 11% year-over-year. Including the impact of approximately RMB 44 million from the expense in Q2 related to our application for secondary listing, G&A would have increased by 6% year-over-year.
We continued to invest in product enhancements, technology innovations, and more diversified product offerings, as well as closely manage employee related expenses by improving headcount efficiency. Our effective tax rate for Q2 2022 was 12.2% compared to 11.5% in the same period of 2021. The increase in effective tax rate was mainly due to the fact that some of our entities are entitled to different tax benefits in 2021 and 2022. For Q2 2022, our net profit was RMB 892 million, and net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was RMB 856 million. Non-IFRS net profit was RMB 1.07 billion, and the non-IFRS net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was RMB 1.03 billion. Non-IFRS net profit margin was 15.4%.
As of June 30, 2022, our combined balances of cash equivalents, term deposits, and short-term investments were RMB 25.8 billion, compared with RMB 25.9 billion as of March 31st, 2022. During the 3 months ended June 30, 2022, net cash generated from operations was RMB 1.2 billion, and the cash used in share repurchases was RMB 669 million. We also incurred a net cash outflow of RMB 497 million for acquisition of shares in various subsidiaries and associates. Such combined balance was also affected by the change in exchange rate of RMB to USD at different balance sheet base. Looking forward, we will continue to focus on our core business and invest mindfully in new products and services, including long-form audio and international business, to maximize our investment returns and future growth potential.
Meanwhile, we will continue to implement cost controls in areas including revenue sharing fees for social entertainment business, content royalties, operating costs, account related costs, and selling and marketing expenses to improve our 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. If you have additional questions, you may reenter the queue. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Alex Poon with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good morning, management. Congrats on a very strong quarter on the profit side. My question is related to gross margin. The gross margin is up about 2 percentage points on a sequential basis in Q2, and despite that social revenue was flat on a Q-over-Q basis. Can management comment on each of the segment gross margin trends from Q1 to Q2, and how should we think about the second half? Thank you very much.
Okay. About the gross margin, this quarter, we take more measures to control costs and improve operational efficiency.
We have started to bear fruit. Gross margin in Q2 increased 2% sequentially. The following factors have positive impact on gross margin. First, revenue sharing ratio of live streaming have been controlled and continued to decrease sequentially. Second, we increased the RC requirement of content cost. We restricted the agreements with some music labels and see the positive feedback that have positive impact on our gross margin. Third, the optimizer, the technology and operation strategy related to bandwidth and the storage capabilities, and improved the utilization of our service and equipment. Our operational costs decreased sequentially. Fourth, subscription revenue growth and advertising revenue recovery also have positive impact on gross margin. We will continue to focus on increasing efficiencies of all business units and the cost item. We expect our gross margin will be increased in the next quarter.
Our next question will come from Lei Huang with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks management and congrats on the solid results. My question is mainly about your music ARPU. Notice the Q-on-Q rebound of music ARPU and any more color you can share behind this, and how should we look at the ARPU trend going forward. Related to this, can you give us more color on the Super VIP, like, adoption rate, user feedback, and the contribution to the ARPU? Thanks.
Yeah. In terms of the ARPU, you know, we saw a sequential improvement from last quarter's RMB 8.30 billion to this quarter's RMB 8.50 billion. That's a result from more effective promotions, you know, as well as more discipline in the way that we manage the marketing spend. Our focus, as we mentioned last quarter, is on the quality of the subscription revenue growth as the overall target, in that we are aiming to both grow the paying user as well as the ARPU at a healthy pace.
We've been able to achieve that in the second quarter, and we expect this level of a growth trend for both our subscribers and ARPU to continue into the rest of the year.
Our next question will come from Alex Yao with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning management. Thank you for taking the question. I have a couple of questions on the music subscription side of the business. Can you guys share with us your progress in terms of pushing up the paywall? What percentage of the content now is behind the paywall? And what target are you aim to achieve by the end of the year? And also, regarding the non-paying user, their user experience is becoming inferior as they are able to listen to less and less of the content. What are you trying to do with these guys? Are you going to let them go, or do you want to engage them through other strategies and features? Thank you.
Sure. Well, first of all, in terms of our subscription package, obviously I think we continue to be on track. You know, as we have more and more discussions with our label partners to add more content into the premium package, and that progress is going well. You know, we expect there to be more content partners to be added to the paywall in the second half. I think we will talk more about that as that bears fruit. In terms of the balance between free user experience and the paid user experience, we mentioned previously and we also touched upon it this time, is the incentive ad-based free listening mode.
You know, we're seeing very good progress on that type of free listening mode. We think that's a good way for us to strike the balance because there will, you know, as with any entertainment platform online, you're bound to have a portion of users with very low probability of conversion to become a subscriber. Yet, you know, we need to find a way to be able to monetize. The incentive ad-based free listening mode is a good way for us to do so. Right now within our advertising revenue, close to 10% of that on a run rate basis is generated by the incentive ad-based free listening mode. Free through incentive ads, more correctly speaking.
I think that's, and that's growing quite well. We continue to expect that to serve as the balancing factor to provide a good free user experience.
Our next question will come from Alicia Yap with Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, management. Thanks for taking my question. I have a question related to the advertising. Can management share with us the latest ad sentiments among the advertisers? Which industry vertical actually has recovered strongly, and which industry verticals are still remaining quite weak? When can we expect the ad revenue to experience reacceleration on a year-over-year basis, reaccelerate the growth again? Thank you.
Yeah. Obviously, I think in the first half, you know, as a result of industry adjustments on the splash ads, as well as the pandemic measures, advertising revenue was quite weak in the first half. However, you know, as the pandemic improves as well as the opening, as well as the macroeconomic situation improves, we are starting to see moderate recovery of the advertisers' demands. Coupled that with our ongoing effort to expand our advertising format as well as advertising inventories that we've mentioned, we are expecting to see a recovery of the advertising revenue in the second half.
In addition to kind of, the ad formats that we mentioned, such as incentive ad or inventories that we mentioned in the various parts of the platform, we are seeing increasing amount of interest by ad sponsors that are particularly interested in interactive events that we organize both offline and online, such as ones that we do on TME Land or through TME Live or other sponsored events with Pepsi, Sprite and Beijing Hyundai, et cetera. In terms of verticals, in this quarter, you know, we see decent demand recovery, particularly from e-commerce, given the e-commerce June season.
The consumer staples, specifically categories such as food and beverages, as well as the automobile industry. Mm-hmm.
Our next question will come from Xueqing Zhang with CICC. Please go ahead.
Hey. Thanks, management, for taking my question, and my question related to TME Live. We saw some other short video platforms have launched online live performance one after another during this summer. Just wondering, how do we position TME Live, and how do we think about the competition landscape? What's the strategy and monetization plan for this business? Thank you.
Okay. For TME Live, I think we have a very good plan in having arrangement on not just for the top-tier artists, but we are also growing the long tail, the other different verticals as well. We have a very good cooperation with the WeChat Video Accounts. We also strengthen our distribution capabilities for our live projects. As we mentioned during our call about some of the top-tier artists like Jay Chou and also Leslie Cheung, that we trying to do a new release of their very popular classical concerts, and it aroused a lot of interest from the users.
We also bring in our technology, advancing that will help to improve the quality of the overall video and also the audio quality, so to ensure a better user experience for our users. We have continued to bring in some of the artists, for example, interactive capabilities, to demonstrate in our TME Live program as well. We have a very good confidence, especially, we are doing online and offline collaborations for our concerts. All of this will be continue to strengthen our TME's TME Live projects, and we definitely seeing that there's going to be some more great programs to come in the future.
Our next question will come from Wei Xiong with UBS. Please go ahead.
Good morning, management. Thank you for taking my question, and congrats on the earnings beat this quarter. My question is around the online music subscription or paying user addition. We see that this quarter, the net paying user addition was a little bit lower than the previous run rate, given our focus on the quality growth and also seek the balance between paying user and ARPU. Just wanna check how should we think about the run rate of the paying user addition for the second half, also next year? Given our focus on the marketing spend to strengthen our cost controls, will that impact the paying user retention? Thank you.
Yeah. As we mentioned before, our overall goal for the subscription revenue, you know, for the online music is to see a healthy growth in overall subscription revenue and not be overly, you know, leaning on just, you know, either the subscriber or the ARPPU. We want a healthy growth in both metrics. Because we think the whole industry will benefit from focusing more on the quality of service as opposed to, you know, just on price. We do believe there's a lot of value in the music subscription service that we offer, and that, you know, our continuous effort to cultivate the user's willingness to pay for the subscription service continues to see good results.
By, you know, having more of a balanced approach, we lay a stronger foundation for the long-term growth, which we continue to see there to be a strong potential. Obviously at the same time, you know, we are very focused on expanding on the privileges and the service that we offer within the subscription plan.
You know, we mentioned that we continue to add more and more privileges such as, you know, this quarter we mentioned about the Super VIP, you know, whereby, you know, for RMB 30 a month, which is double the price of a normal premium subscription, you get a lot more, you know, you know, such as you get access to a large number of digital albums, you know, you get access to the super high quality sort of music effects ones that Ross mentioned. You know, you get access to the WeSing membership. You get access to the long audio membership, et cetera, et cetera. We are seeing. It's early stage, but we are seeing good traction as we roll that out.
People are adopting and they are appreciating the privileges that we're putting into those Super VIP. For example, the premium sound quality feature that's adopted by over 80% of people who subscribe to the Super VIP. That also help us improve the ARPU in addition to having, you know, more discipline in cost control as well as promotional spend.
Our next question will come from Tian Hou with TH Capital. Please go ahead.
Morning, management. Congratulations on such a good quarter. The question is related to your much more granular strategy with Tencent, and you guys have already started to do advertising, membership and content distribution. I wonder, you know, for your newly added members, what percentage of them come from Tencent channel? Going forward, as Tencent continue to add the new functions like Tencent Shipin, etc., etc., you know, how are you guys going to have a long-term cooperation and so to enable you guys to have more sustainable users instead of, you know, only driven by these hit albums or artists? Thank you. That's my question.
Yeah. We have very extensive collaboration with Tencent. I can start and perhaps Ross can add additional colors as well. We have extensive collaboration with Tencent, both on the content production side as well as on the music promotion side. You know, on the content production side, we mentioned that we almost every quarter, you know, we showcase original songs that are produced either for some of the Tencent IPs, you know, such as selected IPs in Tencent Games or some of the IPs from Tencent Video, for example. Many of these original content that are either produced by us or co-produced together, you know, they see very good results in terms of popularity on the music charts. That's kinda one big bucket of areas.
The second big bucket of areas are in the form of content promotion. You know, a prime example of that is, you know, our deepened collaboration through the WeSing Video Accounts. You know, It's an important means for us to enrich the music video-based content, you know, all of our platforms, you know, be it QQ Music or Kugou or Kuwo, you know, we promote a lot of music-related video content through WeSing Video Accounts. In fact, you know, the content that we provide is ranking amongst the best in the music category within the WeSing Video Accounts, sort of music vertical. That serve as a way for the music lovers to discover music and they.
After which the users come back to TME platform to continue to explore and enjoy music in a more deepened way. While we don't rely on Tencent channels at all from a user perspective, given you know our music platform is already very established, and we've been in operation for many years, have very established brands, so most of our our traffic is organic, we do have more and more collaboration, for example, through our partnership between QQ Music and WeChat WeSing. There are more product features collaboration such as you can now set ringtones on WeSing using music provided by QQ Music. Obviously you can go back to QQ Music to listen to the songs.
You know, you can update your personal profiles using songs provided and being listened to on QQ Music, etc. We are seeing more and more collaboration and we expect that to continue.
We are now approaching the end of the con.
Okay. Okay.
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.
Okay. Well, thank you very much for joining our second quarter earnings call. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact the investor relations team. This concludes today's call. We look forward to speaking with you all again next quarter. Thank you and goodbye.
Thank you so much. Goodbye.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.