(Yicai Global) April 27 -- The music streaming service of Chinese internet giant NetEase is taking its biggest rival Tencent Music Entertainment to court for alleged copyright infringements.

Platforms run by Tencent Music, such as QQ Music, Kuwo and Kugou, have been pirating music and bulk plagiarizing popular songs, NetEase Cloud Music said today on its microblogging Weibo account.

Tencent Music needs to stop such practices immediately, remove the copyright-infringing works and check for other such violations, it added. The amount of compensation being sought was not given.

Tencent Music dwarfs NetEase Cloud Music in terms of revenue and number of users. Last year, the Shenzhen-based company raked in CNY31.2 billion (USD4.8 billion) in revenue, a gain of 7.2 percent from the year before, while NetEase Cloud Music earned CNY7 billion (USD1.1 billion), a jump of 42.9 percent. Tencent Music had 615 million active users as of the fourth quarter last year and Beijing-based NetEase Cloud Music had 182.6 million MAUs over the course of the whole year.

However, NetEase Cloud Music features more independent artists. It had 400,000 compared to Tencent Music’s 300,000 at the end of 2021.

Tencent Music’s parent company Tencent Holdings was fined CNY500,000 (USD76,250) by anti-trust regulators in July last year for its 2106 acquisition of music platforms Kuwo and Kugou. The Shenzhen-based internet giant was also required to give up its exclusive copyright to music labels.

Editor: Kim Taylor