In today’s WeChat Essential Tip, brought to you by China Channel, we will cover WeChat music. Not only is it really easy to search for, listen to and share music in WeChat all in English but WeChat also has a built-in music identification service similar to Shazam. We’ll break today’s post into 3 parts:

How to search for and listen to music in WeChat

How to share music and how to listen to music when offline in WeChat

How to activate WeChat’s hidden Shazam service

How to search for and listen to music in WeChat

One of the most popular ways to share music on WeChat is through QQ音乐 (QQ Music). You can download their app by searching on the app store or similar Chinese android market. You can also simply add their WeChat official account (WeChat ID: qqmusic). Let’s look at the official account first.

Once you are in the account, simply tap the keyboard icon to in the bottom left and then type in the song or artist you want to hear.

Late 80’s euro dance classics, that’s what we need right now. Clicking on one of the options brings up the song page.

Tap the play icon to play the song. Tap the big green button to download the song. To download you will have install the QQ music app.

How to share music and how to listen to music when offline in WeChat

Sharing or saving the song to your moments is easy. Tap the top right hand corner to see the options.

Unfortunately once you exit from the song page, the song will stop playing. The same can be said for shared links to the song on your moments. The second they exit the page the song will stop playing.

However, if you download and share music using the QQ Music App, the music will continue to play while you perform other tasks like checking moments or sending messages. A message may appear at the top of your timeline.

Sharing music through the app leads to a better user experience. When playing a song in the QQ Music App, select this icon (below) to share on WeChat.

In this screenshot you can clearly see the difference between sharing music through the Official Account (located above) and through the App (located below).

Sharing a song from the app to either you moments or your favorites (see this post for more info on WeChat’s free cloud storage) has an added benefit: you can listen to the song offline as it is now stored on the device.

How to activate WeChat’s hidden Shazam service

WeChat has an inbuilt music identification service that works the same as Shazam. In order to access it however you will need to switch your phone’s language to Chinese. To do this go to ‘Me’ then ‘Settings’

Then ‘General’ then ‘Language’, and finally change (简体中文) as shown in the picture.

Now go to ‘Discover’ (发现), and ‘Shake’ (摇一摇). Usually in English there is only two options here ‘People’ or ‘TV’, but when you switch to Chines a third option of ‘Song’ appears in the middle.



Select ‘Song’ (歌曲) and shake your phone while a song is playing. It works the same way as Shazam.

Next time you hear a song you like, open WeChat, shake your phone to discover the track and then save it to your ‘WeChat Favorites’ to listen to it offline later. No payments or Apps to download. The song is stored in the cloud for you to access from any mobile device.

To turn your phone back to it’s English settings, select 我 (wo), then 设置 (she zhi), then 通用 (tong yong), then 多语音 (duo yu yin).

Join us tomorrow for our next article from the China Channel ‘WeChat Essential Tips’ series. Follow us on WeChat by scanning the QR code to follow our official account.

China Channel has no association with QQ Music.

