What have you always wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about the Chinese music industry?

I'm headed in about a week to Austin, TX, where I've been invited to be on a panel at the South by Southwest Music Festival, on China's music industry. Of course it'd have been better if my band had been invited there to play, but even I can tell we're not "alt" enough for that honor. I've not spent time in Austin before, and hear it's a cool town; that's Beijing E-I-C Jerry Chan tells me of some good restaurants I plan to try, and your suggestions are welcome.

More important are your suggestions on things that I ought to talk about--things that I might overlook from my up-close perspective, but which people who bother to come to the panel should hear about. Doubtless, piracy and file sharing will come up--I have my take on that. And censorship: I have a POV on that as well. The moderator has said she'll throw me questions on the digital music scene--Internet downloads and mobile music, which I know something about, but that's pretty dull stuff, and a few good stats will put most of those Qs to bed.

What do you want to know about the music industry here?

By the way, Jeremy at Danwei alerts us to (yet another) article on the Beijing music scene, this one in The Fader. Right-click and "Save Target As" here to download the whole issue as a .pdf. The magazine's fetching editor-in-chief, Alex Wagner, came out here herself to report it. A bit of fact-checking might have helped; it has me as former bassist of TD, not lead guitarist, and it refers to Cui Jian as "Jian" at some point. But otherwise, not a bad read. There's a high style bar among rock scribes, and Ms. Wagner's mag clears it consistently. Nice prose, even if some of the old tropes about Beijing--draconian censors, metastasizing Starbucks, badly-named real estate developments--are a bit tired.

Comments

[Daninbusiness]

I have a few ideas:

1. guess I'd be ready say something about trends you see in the music scene
2. popular themes that people write about
3. some of the specific "China" challenges that bands face here when they're starting out
4.if it is (or is not) possible to make a decent living playing music in China
5. maybe something about how bands use the internet for marketing (if at all)
6. Other main music scenes (ie, everything aside for Beijing)
7. If there are regional style niches (is there a city that may be equivalent to early 90's Seattle, for example?)
8. Stuff about local hip-hop
9. Any interesting fusion releases (ie, modern music sounds mixed with traditional Chinese instruments) that don't suck?

If I was at this thing in Austin, I think those are the questions I'd ask you.

[kaiserkuo]

Thanks Dan, very interesting questions -- some of which I'll try to answer in a post.

[davesgonechina]

I'll throw some out as well:

1) Are there any podcasts or blogs that are genre themed or programmed? Does that have any big potential?
1.5) Have mobile carriers looked into copying the podcast self-publishing model of iTunes (& to a lesser extent Odeo)?
2) Emo - has it hit China, or will they remain unscathed?
3) Is there Payola with Chinese Characteristics? What role does radio play for performers and distributors in China anyway?
4) Will karaoke songbooks ever go legit?
5) ABCs and Huayi: does anybody on the Mainland target them as a growth market?
6) What's the WTO schedule for opening music publishing (however tentatively) to foriegn companies, and where are the Taiwan and HK pop machine labels positioned respectively in this regard?
7) Creative Commons licensing: Barenaked Ladies did it, does it make any sense whatsoever for Chinese artists?
8) Can you please have Daolang ripped limb from limb by a pack of wolves for me?

[kaiserkuo]

Thanks Dave. Will get to yours tomorrow, though I can see just from reading through quickly that you've thought about a lot of these issues a lot more than I have. Oh, and I see you love Daolang too!

[davesgonechina]

No worries, answer whatever strikes your fancy. But it's not something I've thought that much about; in fact, I'm clueless about pretty much all of this. Most of it is just taking things I know from the US market and wondering if there's a Chinese equivalent. I just can't help but think that the Chinese music industry never had a chance to build the links to radio, never had a honeymoon period without piracy with LPs (instead, they were smashed in the CR) and never gained any political or legal clout to protect their business model.

Meanwhile, back to trying to get this damn Empylver emule download working...

[A.J.alex]

kaiserkuo先生

您好，偶然，看到这篇日记……虽然，和您，不熟，会有点唐突……但是，如果很荣幸的，您喜欢，我的音乐，能否，请您购买empylver的，专辑呢……
这样说，很，抱歉……但是，我希望，我的音乐所得，能够，多一些，好给一些，需要帮助的人，一些帮助……

如果您，不喜欢，我的，音乐……也请您继续，支持，环保，和帮助那些，需要帮助，的人……十分感谢……

如果，我的留言，给您，带来了困扰……请您删掉就好，再次致歉……

A.J.Alex上