Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tencent Music Entertainment Group 2019 Third Quarter Earnings 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. I will turn the conference over to your speaker host today, Ms. Heather Diw u. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us on today's call. Tencent Music announced its quarterly financial results today after the market close. An earnings release is now available on our IR website at ir.tencentmusic.com, as well as via Newswire services. Today, you will hear from Mr. Cussion Kar Shun Pang, our CEO, who will start the call with an overview of our recent achievements and our growth strategies. He will be followed by Mr. Tony Yip, our CSO, who will offer more details on our operations and business development. Lastly, Ms. Shirley Hu, our CFO, will address our financial results before we open the call for questions. Before we proceed, please note that this call may contain forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and observations that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors not under the company's control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements of the company to be materially different from the results, performance, or expectations implied by these forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statement, risk factors, and details of the company's filings with the SEC. The company does not assume any obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, changes in market conditions, or otherwise, except as required by law. Please also note that the company will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more thoroughly explained and they're reconciled to the most comparable measures reported under the International Financial Reporting Standards in the company's earnings release and filings with the SEC.
You're reminded that such non-IFRS measures should not be viewed in isolation or as an alternative to the equivalent IFRS measure or other non-IFRS measures are not uniformly defined by all companies, including those in the same industry. With that, I'm now pleased to turn over the call to Mr. Cussion Pang, CEO of Tencent Music. Cussion, please.
Thank you, Heather. Hello, everyone, thank you for joining our call today. At TME, CTS is the backbone of our business strategy. As I recently shared at the Music Matters annual conference held in Singapore, CTS represents content, technology, and services, which illustrate our commitment to enriching our content offering, deploying proprietary technologies to improve user experience, and providing comprehensive services to partners, artists, and users. With CTS as our core driving force, in the third quarter of 2019, TME achieved a solid financial performance, with total revenue increasing 31% year-over-year, which was attributable to accelerated growth from online music subscription and solid growth from social entertainment services. One of the most recognizable achievements in the third quarter was the continued accelerated growth of our online music services in terms of both paying users and subscription revenues.
Our online music-paying users reached RMB 35.4 million, growing 42% year-over-year as we added RMB 4.4 million during the third quarter, picking up further from the strong addition of RMB 2.6 million in the second quarter and RMB 1.4 million in the first quarter of 2019. More importantly, the high quality of this growth was demonstrated by the ARPU expansion of 3.5% quarter-over-quarter. Paying ratio reached 5.4%, up from 4.8% in the last quarter and 4.3% in the first quarter of this year. Achieving an increase of over one percentage point within less than a year demonstrates our strong execution and path to pave for long-term sustainable growth.
This impressive performance was primarily attributable to continuous improvement in our user retention rate and the significant increase in the number of paying users driven by pay for streaming as the willingness of users to pay for our premium music service improved substantially. As a leader in China's online music industry, we have been closely researching user demands trends, particularly among the younger demographics, who show an increasing willingness to consume premium content. We expanded our network penetration of this younger user group by covering hundreds of universities and higher education institutions. We also launched target programs for students, such as the subscription plan promotional event during summer holiday, and a streaming program called Summer Fan Appreciation, [Non-English content] , inviting the idols' favor. Summer Fan Appreciation is a special edition of our self-produced new song releasing events, which live stream the artist releasing events.
It boosted the number of video playbacks for new song releasing events to 280 million in the third quarter, higher than that of the first two quarters combined. On the content front, we also stepped up our investment targeting the younger generation by strengthening genres including urban, EDM, ACG, and Chinese ancient style. Chinese ancient style has enjoyed a rising trend of popularity among young people as it combines China's traditional culture with popular trends and provides the young demographics a strong sense of cultural identity. As one example of our investment in trending content, we recently signed a strategic agreement with Yimen Cultural Media, the largest Chinese ancient style music label in China.
Finally, during the quarter, we continued to add long-form audio, such as audiobooks and podcasts, including a rich variety of categories, including audio novels, talk shows, and a diverse set of topics on children, education, history, and humanity, et cetera. We are pleased to see the proportion of long-form audio users on our platform record a healthy growth year-over-year. In fact, in September, average daily time spent on our platform by audiobook users was over 50% higher than an average user. Another achievement that I would like to highlight was that throughout the third quarter, thanks to our vast user base, deep understanding on music trends and user insights, we continued to improve our platform promotional effectiveness and emerge as a preferred destination of artists to build a fan-based economy.
With digital albums, we support artists in the promotion of their music, regardless of whether they are aspiring, up-and-coming, established, domestic, or international. We have a lot of success in creating an interactive setting for content consumption, particularly with the younger demographic who are primary contributors in the fan-based economy. For example, R1SE, an emerging male band with members selected with a variety show produced by Tencent Video, "CHUANG 2019," [Non-English content] , a male version of the tremendously popular variety show, "Produce 101," sold almost 1.5 million copies of its first digital album on the first day of its release. Another example showcasing the power of our fan operation capabilities is Jay Chou's newly released single, "Won't Cry," [Non-English content] . Aside from strong sales, more than 12 million karaoke song recordings were produced by our WeSing users within 10 days after its release.
The release also generated a massive amount of social buzz with more than 470 million page views on external social media by the end of October 2019. International artists also enjoy and benefit from our promotional capabilities, which allow them to connect with music lovers in China. A case in point, the title song of Taylor Swift's new digital album, "Lover," sold nearly 6 million copies within 24 hours on our platform after its release. Another highlight of a fan-based economy on our platform was the successful live streaming for a highly popular boy band called TFBoys of their six-year anniversary concert. This concert, called The Fever, was the top live-streamed concert on TME platform in terms of fans' participation. Its live feed attracted more than 45 million users and generated over 300 million real-time user interactions.
These are excellent examples demonstrating our unique strength in building a fan-based economy, inspiring content consumption, and providing an additional way for fans to interact with idols and socialize with other fans. In summary, we were pleased with our solid third-quarter results. Our continued innovation and investment to attract a younger demographic, relentless efforts in content expansion and diversification, and our ever-strengthening efficiencies in operating a fan-based economy continue to pay off. Next, Tony will elaborate on how we deploy technology as well as other areas of focus, which will enable us to continue enhancing overall user experience. We are true believers in integrating music into every aspect of people's lives. Tony, please go ahead.
Thank you, Kar Shun. Hello, everyone. In addition to the strong results from our online music services, our social entertainment services also maintained steady momentum in the third quarter, with a nearly 33% year-over-year top-line growth, as its paying users and ARPU grew over 23% and 7% year-over-year respectively. Our healthy third-quarter financial results were driven by a combination of concerted efforts focused on product enhancement and improving user experience through proprietary technology. First, on product enhancement and innovation. As you may recall, during the second quarter, we mentioned we pioneered a product innovation by adding short videos onto the Kugou Music streaming page, which has enabled users to watch short videos while listening to music. Since then, our short video library has expanded to include a wide range of professionally generated and user-generated videos.
Such an innovation has proven to be popular with average daily streams of short videos, up almost 40% compared to the previous quarter. For our social entertainment services, we added new interactive features to build a rich and diverse landscape by bolstering our social and young attributes. We upgraded the universal duet feature, [Non-English content] , in September, which allows listeners to sing a duet much more easily, and therefore, further lowers the barrier for participation. This has led to an almost 50% increase in the number of duet participants in October compared to September, with nearly half of them being new users of the duet feature. In addition, through music-centric social and gamification features, we added new functions within our singing rooms to facilitate social connections among users.
Further, in an effort to cater to the younger demographics preferences, we introduced WeSing Live House [Foreign language], allowing users to integrate their offline stage singing experience with online social interaction. With all these features, we strive to provide a common destination for users of similar interests, age, or location together and interact virtually or in person, in order to create tighter user communities and improve user time spent on our platform. Another highlight during this quarter was WeSing's partnership with CCTV and Tencent to launch a singing campaign in conjunction with the celebration of China's 70th National Day. The campaign attracted over 10 million participants, with more than one million WeSing users uploading their own karaoke recording of a National Day celebration song through WeSing's Quick Sing feature. This feature lowers the barrier for campaign participants and improves user engagement.
The success of this campaign is a testament to our broad user base, demonstrating our ability to make online karaoke more engaging and entertaining. Lastly, on WeSing, its international expansion we mentioned last quarter continues to show encouraging results, with MAU continuing to grow at a rapid pace of over 30% quarter-over-quarter. In the third quarter, WeSing consistently ranked number 1 among music-related apps on Google Play Store in the Philippines and achieved top-two ranking in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. We will continue to proactively explore new opportunities to bring our products and services to a larger user base outside China. Next, I would like to discuss how improved data analytics and the deployment of proprietary technology allow us to offer a superior experience to users. Aided by leading smart tagging and analytics technology, we have greatly improved our efficiency in content curation and personalized recommendation.
In addition to listening habit-based recommendation, by analyzing audio features with deep learning, and by using data mining to screen songs in our library, we can better curate content for different target user groups. Such efforts have resulted in improved user experience. In the third quarter, average daily streams from personalized recommendations doubled from the same period last year. The % of song saved driven by personalized recommendation also showed meaningful improvement, which is another reflection of the increasing effectiveness of our recommendations. Similarly, on WeSing, millions of content are generated by our users every day. Our algorithms screen through new and existing content to curate content most suitable for different user groups. The improved content curation and personalized recommendations have led to a 20% increase in both the streaming volume of UGC curated by our algorithms, as well as the number of user-to-follower conversion for these UGC creators.
We also made advancements in deploying data to help live streaming performers improve their ability to reach a broader audience. For example, we developed a machine scoring algorithm, which helps high-quality performers differentiate their ranking, and as a result, has helped more users discover these performers and increase user time spent. In addition, with our pairing algorithm, we're able to find and match more relevant and compatible live streaming performers, facilitating these performers to perform together or engage in a sing-off to make the live streaming session more engaging, which in turn garners more appreciation and virtual gifts from users. We are always on the lookout for innovative ways to improve user experience and meet all kinds of user needs to further strengthen our ecosystem.
For example, our song recognition application, called Floating Radar, enables users to, within seconds, to recognize songs embedded in external short videos that they're watching in third-party short video apps, and serves as a gateway to attract incremental users back to the TME platform to listen to the full song when they're consuming short videos elsewhere. Since the official launch of Floating Radar back in June 2018, we are pleased to say that it is gaining momentum as a very useful music tool. In summary, we delivered strong execution for both our online music and social entertainment services by focusing on product enhancement and improved user experience through proprietary technology. Persistent focus on this type of overall deployment and improvement will be key to our sustainability to grow both our platform's popularity and financial performance.
With that, I would like to turn it over to our CFO, Shirley, for a closer review of our financials.
Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. We delivered a strong financial performance in the third quarter with our top line growth of 31%, along with solid operating margins and cash flow. Both our online music and social entertainment business achieved a strong growth in the third quarter, driving our revenues to increase by 31% year-over-year to RMB 6.5 billion. Despite the decrease in license revenues from other music service companies, our online music services revenue was boosted by the strong growth from user subscriptions and the sales of digital music albums. Revenues from online music services increased by 26% year-over-year to RMB 1.8 billion. During Q3, the number of our online music subscribers increased by 4.4 million from Q2, a record increase since 2016 when we merged with CMC.
Revenues from music subscriptions were RMB 942 million, an increase of 48% from RMB 635 million in the third quarter of 2018. The growth was mainly driven by the addition of premium content and our pay-for-streaming model, and the continued improvement in subscriber retention rate. In addition to the strong growth in subscriber numbers, our subscriber ARPU rose to RMB 8.9 in Q3 from RMB 8.6 in Q2, as more subscribers were attracted to our premium membership. During Q3, our revenue from sales of digital albums more than doubled from Q3 last year, brought by new and hit releases from top artists and top TV show. Throughout 2019, we have built up our platform as the go-to destination for top artists to release their digital albums and fans to interact and support their idols.
Revenues from social entertainment services and others increased by 33% year-over-year to RMB 4.7 billion, primarily driven by revenue growth in our online karaoke and live streaming services. We expanded the paying user base of our social entertainment services by 23.2% and increased ARPU by 7.4% in Q3 of 2019 compared with Q3 of 2018. Cost of revenues increased by 43% year-over-year to RMB 4.3 billion. The increase was attributable to higher revenue sharing fees and content expenses. The increase in revenue sharing fees reflected the growth in our social entertainment services. In addition, we introduced the more professional generated content into our social entertainment platform through talent agencies and shared a portion of our revenues with these agencies. The increase in content expenses was mainly attributable to the increased market price and the amount of license and to produce the music content.
Our gross margin was 34% in Q3 2019, improved from 32.9% in Q2. Although our overall gross margin decreased year-over-year as we increased our content investments, we were able to steadily improve operating efficiency. In addition, strong growth from our online music business also helped to increase our gross margin. Now, let's turn to our operating expenses. We have seen improvement in operating leverage on a year-over-year basis. Although our total operating expenses increased by 26.6% year-over-year to RMB 1.2 billion, operating expenses as a percentage of total revenue improved to 19% in Q3 2019 from 19.7% in Q3 2018. We increased spending on growing our user base and promoting our brands and content in the third quarter. Selling and marketing expenses for Q3 2019 were RMB 570 million, representing an increase of 19.1% year-over-year.
We continued to expand our workforce during the quarter, which we believe is an essential investment and is crucial for expanding our leading edge in products and technology. General and administrative expenses increased by 32.6% year-over-year to RMB 720 million in Q3 2019. Our effective tax rate was 12.2% in Q3 2019 compared to 8.1% in Q3 2018. The increase was mainly due to the change in the proportional tax rates of certain subsidiaries. As a result of foregoing, our net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was RMB 1 billion, and our non-IFRS net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was RMB 1.24 billion. Our non-IFRS net profit margin was 19% in Q3 2019.
As of September 30, 2019, our combined balance of cash and cash equivalents, term deposits amounted to RMB 21.1 billion, an increase of RMB 1.3 billion from RMB 19.9 billion as of June 30, 2019. The increase in the balances was primarily due to cash flow generated from operations of RMB 1.4 billion. Overall, we achieved strong growth across our online music and social entertainment business, brought by the strength of our products and the premium content offering. Our investment in premium content has not only brought in sound financial returns, but also solidified the leadership of our platform. In the coming quarters, we will stay focused on strengthening the synergy between our music platform and social entertainment platform and continue to invest in long-term growth initiatives. 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 one on your touch tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star two. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, please limit yourself to one question. If you have additional questions, you can re-enter the queue. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Eddie Leung with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Just two quick one. The first one is about the fourth quarter business trends. As we heading to the end of the year, just wonder if you could give us more color on the two major segments, in fourth quarter. Related to that, I remember in fourth quarter 2018, there were higher sales and marketing expenses, quite significantly higher than third quarter last year. Wondering whether this year we would also see some promotional events in the fourth quarter. Secondly, I remember you guys mentioned about content cost increase. Part of it is driven by market prices. Could you share a little bit more color on the increase in content cost related to market prices? Are we seeing more competitions for content? If so, from which types of companies? Thank you.
Hi, Eddie. Let me address your first part of the question. Then I'll let Shirley address the later parts of your question. As we mentioned before, while we don't provide specific guidance to stay very focused on the long-term growth, I think directionally from a revenue perspective, we expect our online music revenue to grow at a faster pace on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter. That's mostly driven by the trend of continuing acceleration in growth in the subscription revenue within music. In terms of social entertainment revenue, we expect the growth rate in the fourth quarter to be in line with the third quarter. Now, we recognize that that may be slightly below where we previously thought it would be, and that's primarily because of increasing competition that we're facing with the short video platforms.
What that translates to is that overall, from a total revenue perspective, Q4 total revenue growth on a year-over-year basis should be slightly better than what it was in Q3.
For two questions. For sales expenses, we think last year, we do some IPO, the expense will be very high. For last quarter, we think compared to the Q2, our sales expenses will a little increase, the growth rate will be lower than the growth rate of revenue. For all operation expenses, we think, compared to the Q4 2018, the percentage of total revenue will be lower than last year.
In terms of your last question about the market price for licensing. As you would reasonably expect, content price always goes up. Given the rapid pace of growth of our music subscription revenue, we're actually very pleased to say that at the current pace of growth of our music subscription revenue, it's definitely outstripping the rates of growth in terms of the content price.
One more point that I would like to add is, since that we are also heavily investing in the technology that can help us to do the content distribution in a more efficient way. Since that we have largest number of songs library in the market right now, we will get the best use of the content that we have on hand, and we will also help us to do a better work in future.
Thank you, guys. Very helpful.
Our next question comes from John Egbert with Stifel. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the strong results. The acceleration in paid users and conversion was impressive. Can you talk about some of the key product initiatives driving increased retention, as well as some of your efforts benefiting the top-of-funnel growth? It sounds like your partnerships with universities benefited traction with younger demos in particular. Would love to hear more about that strategy and how that's evolved.
Okay. Thank you for your questions. Yes, our online music service continued to deliver really good results in this quarter. First of all, I think that the most important point is we demonstrating that our users is willing to pay for the high quality of content, and the retention rate of our music services keep improving. From the operational point of view, I think we continue to enhance our content offerings and also provide a better user experience for our users. In addition to, especially next year, we will continue to expand the content behind the streaming paywall to gradually grow from the high single-digit level in 2019. We will also add more online and offline privileges to our monthly subscription plan. Sales and marketing program like bundling with other monthly subscription service of the Tencent ecosystem will also be continued to execute.
We strongly believe that the paying ratio of our online music service will continue to grow in a healthy manner. Regarding some of the younger generations users that you mentioned, that this is also a very key and important area that we are going to focusing on. During the presentation that we just talked about, frankly speaking, we think that the fan-based economy is going to be one of the very important driver for our business forward. We will continue to put in more efforts in this area.
Examples that we have already talked about, like Jay Chou, Taylor Swift, and also the R1SE example demonstrating all of the different artists, no matter they are the top-tier artists, domestic artists, or international artists, or even the rising star for the future, also having really encouraging results from our digital album sales. All are the key drivers of us, and we are demonstrating that the young generation really like this kind of idea, and we will continue to put in more efforts in this.
Also let me clarify sometimes a point that's misunderstood by the market is about the Jay Chou digital albums. In the sales period, the Jay Chou actually helped our digital album revenue as opposed to the music subscription revenue, because only users who bought the digital album are able to listen to the song, not even the monthly subscribers for the time being. After the sales period of the digital album, the song falls into behind the paywall, from that moment onwards, the subscriber will then be able to enjoy the song after being a subscriber. In the third quarter, the Jay Chou album launch helped our digital album revenue, but has not been a big contributor to our subscription revenue. We expect that to contribute over time.
Great. Thank you.
Our next question is from Alex Yao with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Good morning, management. This is Daniel calling on behalf of Alex Yao. My first question is on your music subs ARPU. It actually shows a very strong sequential growth, 3.5% at this quarter. Wondering what's the main rationale behind, and how should we think about the trend in the future quarters and our main measure to increase the music subs ARPU in the future? My second question is regarding the paywall. We have had some content in the paywall in recent quarters, such as Jay Chou, Eason Chan, et cetera, but we noticed most label contents are still not in the paywall yet. Could management give us some color on our plan to put music in the paywall in the next one to two years? Thanks.
Okay. Thanks for the questions, Daniel. Right now we are focusing on promoting the premium monthly VIP packages, and the result is encouraging, which helped to drive the ARPU up. On the other hand, since the paying users conversion is still our top priority, we expected that fresh to slightly increase in the online music ARPU in the coming quarters. Regarding the paywall that you mentioned about, we will go into continually adding more content behind the paywall. Right now we're just in the higher single digits, and we will continue to add on top of this. We are going to do it in a gradual manner. We are receiving really encouraging results, especially by the strong results of our monthly subscription, and we have the confidence that people are willing to pay for the high-quality content.
About the ARPU increase, we think naturally it means we cater our users have given good feedback. They all think our premium content has its price. This quarter we reduced our promotion and only promotion on premium VIP, so the ARPU is increased. The second, our automatic renewal package has its price to increase ARPU. That's all why our ARPU can increase, and our subscription also increased.
Thank you very much.
Next question, please.
Thank you.
Our next question is from Rob Sanderson with Loop Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. Just wanted to ask your view on advertising as a source of monetization going forward, both in the online music segment, but especially interested in your advertising opportunities within your social entertainment properties. Then along those lines, it's clear that digital platforms are becoming more and more important and more powerful in promotion of artists and marketing of artists. How do you view opportunities like the sponsored recommendations that Spotify recently announced? I understand China's digital music ecosystem is quite different than the U.S. and Europe, can marketplace concepts like this be successful at this stage of development, or are these more later-stage ideas and driving adoption of paid music in a subscription model is more the singular focus for the time being? Any color there would be helpful. Thank you.
Okay. In terms of the advertising opportunity, actually, I think we mentioned this a couple of quarters back. We actually see there to be a massive opportunity in terms of advertising potential, not only just within our social entertainment services, but probably more so in the online music services. That's because within online music, we have a much larger user base with a very long time spent. As you probably would know, if you compare our product experience with our Western peers, free users are still not subject to as many ad blockage. In fact, a very low ad load at the moment. That has a lot more room for it to run. In terms of the second question about whether we see marketplace as something that will work in China.
Look, I think we haven't spent a lot of time talking about it, but we actually think there's room for the marketplace model to work in China as well. In fact, the Tencent Musician Program follows a similar concept, which is our effort to promote more independent artists to go mainstream by giving them much easier access to our large user base, providing programs for them to improve their music. Helping connect them with the right mentors and music labels to work with, as well as helping them promote and monetize the music onto our platform. That's also part of our industry value chain strategy to extend beyond just the recommendation, but more towards the indie musician market.
Yeah. As we always talk about in TME, we want to make music ubiquitous to our users. We will cover many different use cases. For the advertising, I think, especially in the in-car audio systems or the smart speakers, and other scenario that we are currently we have a number of very successful business partnership with those manufacturers and service providers. I think that it will also provide other audio-based advertising opportunity for us in the future.
Thank you, Cussion and thank you, Tony.
Thank you.
Next question, please.
Our next question comes from Wendy Chen with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks management for taking my question and congratulations on the solid subscriber growth. My question is related to our next quarter color that's given by Tony. If we see the ARPU is let's say, relatively stable, I assume majority is contributed by the subscriber growth. Just wondering what action or management have been taken to sustain the subscriber growth into the next quarter or potentially even accelerate. If I may, on the subscriber growth in this quarter, can management share some color on how much of this is contributed by paid-for-streaming business model for Jay Chou, Taylor Swift, premium content, et cetera, versus the campaign we have done?
Very lastly, on the social entertainment, we see that in the third quarter, it seems the MAU growth has been relatively muted compared to last quarter, only three million. Also ARPU has seen slight quarter-on-quarter decrease, despite this is a peak summer season. Just wondering if there are anything in this quarter particular that result in a relatively weaker social. Thanks.
Sure, Wendy. You mentioned Jay Chou again. Once again, Jay Chou is a fantastic partner of ours, and we really appreciate the opportunity with working with him on releasing his digital album. Like I said Jay Chou actually helped with our digital album revenue in Q3. The music actually isn't behind the paywall for subscribers within Q3 yet. Over time, that effect would play out. In terms of what the company has done to drive music subscription, our effort to continue to improve our retention as well as paid-for-streaming pays off. For example, we continue to attract subscribers with our premium content offering that is the most high quality and comprehensive in the market. Our personalized recommendation provides the right content that users like, and as a result giving them more chance and increased likelihood for them to be willing to pay for it.
Our initiatives to promote a higher adoption of our auto-renewal subscription program, as well as our paywall, paid-for-streaming strategy that Kar Shun mentioned, which started beginning of this year with 0% of our content being behind the paywall. Now we expect it to reach high single-digit percentage by year-end. All these efforts contribute to the paying subscriber growth. In terms of the social entertainment, it is facing increasing competition from short video platforms, which is capturing an increasing percentage of user time spent. As a result, this has started impact the MAU and revenue growth pace.
To address this, in addition to the growth initiatives that I mentioned in the last quarter, we will be further stepping up our investment in the user growth plan within the social entertainment segment, which entails a fairly comprehensive program such as penetrating younger demographics, partnering with schools and universities and offline singing competitions. Partnering with movie studios, television studios, and game studios to campaign around original theme songs that are released with these topical hit content that are popular amongst the younger demographics. While we're not a short video platform, we will also be providing more and better-quality short video content to fulfill our users need for music-centric short videos, that they consume music-centric short videos within our platform.
To this end, we have the benefit of being able to leverage Tencent's vast amount of short video content that are already available within the Tencent ecosystem. Finally, given WeSing's biggest strength is its social network, we will be stepping up investment in expanding its social network. Over the coming quarters, users will continue to see a lot more new features that help them better connect with their friends and discover new people with similar interests. We'll make it easier for users to, for example, join a singing room or sing duet or engage in a group chat or enrich in the number of things they could do while they're in a singing room or conducting a group chat, all those things to make it a more social experience and to broaden the social network.
All in all, we're confident that user growth will return over time as we execute on these growth initiatives that I discussed. All this is just on the domestic front, by the way. In terms of our overseas growth initiatives, WeSing continue to do extremely well. As I mentioned, ranking number one in Philippines and number two in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Having said all this, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that our social entertainment revenue continued to grow at a 33% pace this quarter. Our online music business continued to do extremely well with a continuation of the accelerating growth trend.
In Q4, we believe our momentum of growth subscriber will continue and ARPU will be stable compared to the Q3.
Great. Thanks very much.
Management would like to remind questioners to please limit your question to one. Our next question comes from Zhijing Liu with UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, management. Thank you for taking my question. I have only one question, is that online video companies has mentioned possibility of price hike in 2020. Do you have similar plans for next two years? Thank you.
I think that it's not our key focus to higher price at this moment. We just keep trying to drive the paying ratio is going to be our top priority because it takes time to educate a user, and once they started to pay, we have confident that they will continue to pay. As proven that our retention rate right now has been keep improving, I think that we still have a long room for growth in the paying ratio. This is going to be our priority.
Next question for you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks, management, for taking my questions. I have a question about the regulatory environment. Can company comment about how we should think about the government regulations in the next few years that you may think of, if any? I have a quick follow-up about the competition from short-form video. Can management comment about why the competition from short-form video happen right now? Also, anything that you think they are more differentiating and that we are yet to catch up? Thank you.
I'll address the point about the competition first. I think we're starting to see more of the impact from competition because both the short video platforms and our social entertainment platform are of very large scale. For example, with WeSing, not only is it a high penetrated within first tier 1 and tier 2 cities, but it also has a strong foothold in tier 3, 4, and 5 cities. As we see the short video platforms extending the footprint into all tiers of cities, we are increasingly seeing competition for user time spent as a result. Karaoke is one form of entertainment; short video is another form of entertainment. In this sense, we are also facing competition for share of time. In terms of the regulatory environment, obviously I think everyone is very focused on the regulatory environment is increasingly being tightened.
Nevertheless, we are fully committed to working very closely with the regulators to ensure the healthy development of the music industry. In particular, our efforts in copyright protection has been very well-recognized by the industry. Also, we are very compliant in terms of the sub-licensing requirements that are imposed on us. I think from our perspective, I think music is a slightly better operating environment compared to potentially other sectors.
Even though we are facing some of the competition from the short-form video platform, I still think that for TME, the social entertainment service is still differentiate from our competitors with this unique virtuous cycle of value creation. First of all, we can leverage on our user base and the strong capabilities of our music platform and online karaoke platform. We will be able to discover some of the young talents, help them and groom them to become the aspiring performers in the future. Quickly, let me give you two examples. One of the stars, who is called Ai Chen, who is a star from our WeSing platform. He started his career in 2014 and attracted over 14 million fans on our platform. One of his popular song will run the number 1 on our Yo! Bang Music chart of TME.
His two hit songs have recorded over 100 million streams on our QQ Music and WeSing platform. The other example is Hu Liu Liu, who is also one of the well-known performer of Kugou live streaming platform, and has successfully released the two hit songs with over 1 billion streams on our platform. All are of the key differentiators of our social entertainment services, and we are grooming the future style of tomorrow. We can, through all this kind of efforts, we can attract more users who love music to go to our platform to enjoy music.
Next question, please. Our next question comes from Ellie Jiang with Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Thank you management for taking my questions. I just have a quick question on the WeSing. The management talked about our great performance in the overseas market. How do we plan to monetize this overseas market in longer term? Thank you.
Sure. Well, with WeSing at the moment, our focus is on expanding our user base and footprint. It's still very early stage. It's been less than a year since we started on this journey of international expansion. Over time, as you would imagine, WeSing is very experienced in coming up with innovative ways of monetization. For example, free virtual gifting, by having friends send virtual gift to other friends while commenting on their karaoke song recording. We have singing rooms monetization that we talked about previously. There are also UGC live streaming features. All of those are applicable. At the moment, our focus is on garnering a bigger user footprint at the stage.
Next question, please. Our next question comes from Alex Liu with China Renaissance. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks management for taking my questions. Just two quick questions here. First, when we are talking about the content cost trend heading into next year, how should we think about the company's strategy on price negotiation in the next round of agreement renewal? Secondly, just on the live streaming part of the business, we obviously see some competition. Just want to see how this trend will impact the sort of the revenue growth trend into next year, 2020. Any guidance will be very helpful. Thank you.
For the cost of trend, we think we have a good sign on the music side, because we have seen that the cost increase rate is lower than our subscriber growth rate. That is a good news. For the reassuring fees, we think maybe we will continue our trends in Q3. There is a little increase in the next quarter.
In terms of 2020 outlook, I'm afraid that we have to reserve that for our discussion in the next quarter's earnings call.
All right. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Tian Hou with TH Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, morning management. Congratulations on the good earnings. My question is regarding your investment for the growth initiatives. You mentioned overseas. You mentioned more converting paying users. Many initiatives. I wonder how that's going to impact your margin. That is my main question, how that's going to impact your margin. Thank you.
We have calculated all this investment in our cost. We think we can continue keep the growth margin stable in the next quarter. Yeah.
Last one, please. Our last question comes from Binnie Wong with HSBC. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning management. Thank you for taking the questions. My question is actually on, if you look actually on the conversion side of the user and also on the retention, because I think management have been mentioning that retention has been quite good. Were you able to give us some color in terms of quantifying it, say maybe because on, say, on the online video platform, they were sometimes commenting that, say, for users that have been subscriber, that have been signing up for the last 12 months, how many months have they been continuously be on? I don't know if there's any metrics on retention you can comment on.
Down the road is that, because we see also the nice growth in your social entertainment side, how do we leverage the user data, the user profile that we get there? As management have mentioned, that we are stronger in terms of promoting, like feeding the users with the songs that they want, right? It's about the better targeting. I think that technology side is something that investors have been closely looking at. Color on these fronts would be great. Thank you.
Sure. Well, while we don't disclose the specific data in terms of retention rate, I think by virtue of observing our growth trend in our music subscribers, and the fact that it is continuing to grow at a faster and faster pace, that should give everyone the confidence that the retention rate are in fact improving at a very healthy pace. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible for us to grow the subscribers at such a healthy pace. Then in terms of the data front, we have a massive amount of data on our platform. Not just because we have a very large user base, but also because we have a very long operating track record. QQ Music has been in operation for over 15 years.
Over time, we've accumulated a lot of information on particular listening preferences, music trends, and that's on the user side. In addition, we're also investing very heavily into analyzing data on the content side. There's the content curation that I talked about in the prepared presentation early on this call. We are able to help better curate the content that are suited to a particular target group, and thereby we're seeing improved favorite rates and improved listening volume of those groups of users. I also like to say that being part of Tencent obviously give us additional benefit of having access to their social graph. You see that as a key feature on the homepage of the WeSing, where users are able to connect with their friends instantly, even if you're just a new user onto the platform.
Obviously that gives us a lot of benefit in terms of understanding what the friend circle are listening to and what kind of content are more suited for that particular group of users.
We are now approaching the end of the conference call. I will now turn the call over to your speaker host today, Ms. Heather Diwu, for any closing remarks.
Thank you everyone for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact TME's investor relations team through the contact information provided on our website or TPG, the company's investor relations partner. This concludes today's call, and we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Thank you and goodbye.