Q. How long has your company been around?

ADSH was founded in 2001, but our staff had several years of experience selling MIDI instruments before we established our own company.

Q. What products were you selling at the start?

The first brands we distributed were VSL, Best Service, and then EastWest. Now we also have FXpansion, Propellerheads, and Crypton. With the help of XCHANGE, we are now able to effectively resell more brands, such as ADX, Antares, InMusic etc... We also distribute hardware, such as MOTU, ADesigns Audio, and AEA Mics in China.

Q. How did you first learn about XCHANGE?

It was Dan Brown from EastWest who first introduced XCHANGE to us back in November 2015. That is where it all started.

Q. How easy was it for you to actually use XCHANGE?

For us it was very easy. I learned to use XCHANGE in about half an hour. What really struck me was being able to place an order even when I am not in office.

Q. Has XCHANGE helped your business in any ways?

Yes it has. The main positive change was the fact that we can place an order anytime and get the serial number right away. This has helped us a lot and has transformed our business. You know in China some customer are first-time buyers, so they want to get the software ready to use as soon as they pay for it. With XCHANGE, we can help our customers authorize the software quickly. The other major positive was that there are many software vendors on XCHANGE. We can send requests and the vendors can evaluate our status more easily and quickly. Also the XCHANGE staff will help us follow up with some Vendors. So now we have more software to resell, and that means more customers come in.

Q. We noticed you also develop products.

Yes, in 2010 we began producing our own Chinese virtual instruments under the brand Yellow River Sound. Now we have 2 products, Gu Zheng, and Peking Opera Percussion, both of which are using Best Service's Engine player. We think these products are the best virtual Chinese instruments ever made.

Q. How do you promote music software in such a vast market as China?

Since the popular Western platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were not accessible in China, we use Wechat, Weibo, and our own mail list to reach customers. We also have online chat for sales and support. Eventually many professional musicians became our customers as we remained focused and dedicated to software sales for all these years.

Q. What is the software piracy situation in China like now?

Software piracy is always a big problem in China, during first several years, our sales on software was very low. We kept on promoting software even though the cracked versions spread at the same time. We always believed that software sales has a lot more potential. Things are getting better now, and we sell more software from more brands, we welcome vendors to invite us to resell their products.

Q. What are some of the other challenges for selling software in China?

In China there are still many users who just cannot use English to communicate. So we have to do lots of localization. Payment is another obstacle for many of our customers as most of them do not use VISA or MasterCard as these are not very common in China. We see many software manufacturing companies going direct to customer in China but that is not the best path. We realize more and more that we have a significant advantage for selling software in China.

Q. Do you see the Chinese market expanding for software sales in the immediate future?

Yes. Software sales keep on expanding rapidly as more and more musicians are paying for the software they use. Unlike the old generation of musicians who started out by using cracked software, we noticed some of the new generation of musicians do not even take crack software into consideration. All of the software they used are licensed. This is a big improvement and it means our software market is more healthy than before, and this new reality will bring more sales.

Thank you Ma for shedding some light on this important market.