Earlier this year, Chinese internet giant Alibaba announced that it had acquired streaming music service Xiami.

Now the first fruits of that deal are emerging: Xiami is being integrated with Alibaba’s hugely-popular online shopping site Taobao. TheNextWeb reports that users will be able to access “My Music” while shopping on Taobao, streaming songs from Xiami.

It suggests that the inclusion of the ad-supported streaming service is an effort to turn Taobao into more of a “lifestyle and media platform” rather than just an e-commerce site. It’s a significant move, with Taobao currently ranked the 10th most popular website in the world by Alexa, and the third in China behind only Baidu and QQ.com.

The news comes at an interesting time for digital music in China. Last September, Google shut down its legal music-search service after three years in operation, while Chinese internet firm Baidu renamed its Ting service to Baidu Music and gave it more promotion on its homepage.

More recently, there has been sustained speculation that the likes of Baidu Music, Kugou and Duomi will launch paid versions of their services in early July.

Source: Musically