China portals promise talented amateurs stardom and a cut of the revenue

Aspiring singers hoping to become China's next Super Girl should upload their songs to the internet in addition to submitting audition tapes to television broadcasters.

Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old student of Sichuan Music Conservatory, shot to fame last month after 3.52 million television users voted for her to become this year's Super Girl.

Mainland internet portals such as Tom Online and Mop.com said they also had the ability to make stars out of amateur singers and musicians - and promised to share revenue with the content creators in the process.

Tom Online chief executive Wang Leilei said mainland internet users were no longer passive consumers of Web content. 'The internet user is not a simple browser. They like to be a content creator or publisher. We leverage the user behaviour to aggregate fresh content.' He said 100 artists were uploading music content to the company's servers each day. When the content is accessed via Tom's wireless valued-added services, the artist receives a cut. 'We have an electronic contract to share revenue with the music singers or the small music labels,' he said.

User-generated music content is the latest in a trend that started last year, when the mainland's first serialised text-message novel Out Of The Fortress fetched a reported 180,000 yuan from wireless content provider Hurray Holdings. What followed was a wave of websites set up to aggregate content from the thousands of amateur authors hoping to make their fortune writing text-message novels of their own.

In a country where karaoke is popular with young people, there is no shortage of content or demand for music. Mr Wang said most of the songs uploaded to Tom's servers were recorded at music parlours or using home-recording equipment. He estimated 40 per cent of the company's wireless content revenue was music related.