Chinese mega portal Netease recently released their 2008 China Internet Communication Report (h/t Adam Schokora). The report generates statistics from the behaviour of some 200 million Chinese netizens who use Netease’s range of online products (ie. Netease Blog, Netease BBS, Youdao Search Engine, Netease Channels and Netease Posts). According to the authors: More… »
In April 1985, big-haired pop-duo Wham! took to the Worker’s Gymnasium stage in Beijing infront of thousands of screaming Chinese fans, becoming the first western pop act to play communist China.
This unlikely event had taken band manager Simon Napier-Bell 18 months of negotiations to organise; a process documented in his 2005 book I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch. More… »
Almost exactly a year ago I posted on the hype surrounding the Chinese music scene. I boiled my feelings down to a kind of cautious optimism ie. way too early to start billing Beijing as one of the best music cities in the world (as some over-zealous mainstream western media would have you think) but a genuinely exciting place to be nonetheless. More… »
A shorter, edited version of this piece appeared in The Guardian under the title ‘Online Pop Explosion’. Please treat this longer, draft version as a separate article.
When unknown Chinese singer Yang Chengang wrote and recorded the song Mice Love Rice in Wuhan, Southern China in 2000, he would have had no way to predict it’s eventual impact. More… »
Midi School have just announced (Chinese link) that they will be delaying the festival by another ten days or so. Dates are yet to be confirmed. The official reason is that the government expects millions of Chinese tourists to descend on Beijing during the upcoming October holidays to look around the Olympic facilities, including the Olympic Centre planned for use by Midi. More… »
As someone who recently spent three months and nearly a thousand pounds in flights, lawyers fees, bribes and fines to just be allowed to remain in the country I am all too aware of the bureaucratic nightmare that is attached to getting anything done in China. More… »
During last month’s Olympics I had the good fortune to be introduced to Matt Yanchyshyn, a visiting IT manager for Associated Press (AP).
Roughly four years ago while living in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, Matt started blogging about the music he came across during his travels in the region. It was part of the first wave of audioblogs and “certainly the first to deal with African music” says Matt. More… »
In their recent ‘final tally’, the Nielsen stats boffins have declared the Beijing Olympics to be the most watched games in history:
“The 4.7 billion viewers who accessed television coverage of the Beijing Olympics officially translates into approximately 70 percent of the world’s population, or more than two in every three people globally.”
When you consider that each country’s coverage of the Olympics More… »
I really enjoyed a Bob Leftsetz ‘Mailbag’ mailout the other day which contained a heartfelt email from one of his readers describing what life is like outside of the conventional music markets. I imagine this is a pretty representative state of affairs for the majority of music fans in the developing countries. More… »
This article originally appeared in Issue 191 (1st May 2008) of the MusicAlly Report.
China never fully adopted the “traditional” tools of music discovery and consumption: TV, radio and the print press are all heavily monitored by the government and relatively anodyne as a result; CDs never really gained any meaningful traction; live music events are circuses of permits and arbitrary cancellations. More… »
In November last year I got a call from a flustered Chinese magazine editor. ‘Would you be able to do an 800 word album review for our December edition?’ she asked, adding ‘by tomorrow?’.
Normally I would have turned this down as the money tends to be poor and the deadline was a bit abrupt, but the magazine in question was Rolling Stone China More… »
Ahead of his MidemNet panel appearance, Mathew Daniel, VP of R2G (digital distribution company) in Beijing has a few observations and words of advice for labels seeking digital licensing opportunities in China:
As Olympic hosts and country-of-honor at MIDEM, China’s music industry is an increasingly common feature on the western agenda. There is, however, almost a whiff of the ‘Wild East’ in the way companies are approaching licensing in the Middle Kingdom. More… »
The Chinese government is acutely aware that TV is the most effective medium for delivering key cultural and political messages. China Central Television (CCTV), the state-run national station, operates a range of channels, which, in the main part, are barefaced propaganda and state trumpet blowing. More… »
This article originally appeared as ‘Music In China : The Inside Story’ on The Register
How To Do Business In China, China CEO, The New Chinese Consumer… my shelves here in Beijing are stacked full of such books, all trying to throw some light on a country and market of seemingly endless allure to the west. A population of 1.3 billion people has marketeers around the world girding up their loins to do business here, each with a How To Do Business In China book tucked under their arm. More… »
A friend of mine, David Mitchell, has been a regular at his local pool hall in Beijing for going on a year and a half now. It didn’t take him long after his first visit to notice the lack of care put into the music choice in this vast twenty table room. The management had made the effort to get nice pool tables and cues and, in doing so, had earned themselves a loyal crowd of patrons, but they seemed to just stick the same CD of offensively bland wallpaper music on day in and day out. More… »
