If you’re in Dalian this weekend, peep at the Dusk Music Festival, happening on Saturday June 22. Taking place at a youth hostel supposedly on the beach, it’s being promoted by a collective of bars and entertainment professionals. The lineup includes Shanghai imports Duck Fight Goose, Pairs and R3; Beijing’s Skip Skip Ben Ben and Dalian’s own Doc Talk Shock.
Split Works laoban and China Music Radar editor emeritus Archie Hamilton chats promoter economics and hand-carrying gear all through Asia with Slink Rat, aka Xiao Zhong for Other Sounds, Singapore’s leading music news and information website. You can read the whole interview right here.
Last week we told you Metallica was coming to Shanghai, Metallica sold out in Shanghai in 6 minutes, and even got in a not-so-subtle 1D dig. We guess the universe is a bubblegum pop fan, however, because this week brings the news that Justin Bieber is coming to China. Yup.
QQ Entertainment reports, from a screen shot of the teenybopper heartthrob’s website, that the Biebs will be playing shows in Beijing, Dalian and Shanghai over the October holiday this year. Do you think there are enough Mainland Beliebers for the shows to sell out faster than Metallica? We can’t wait to see.
Whilst fact-checking this little bit of news using the Google machine, we also came across this (satirical) gem. Considering the kind of shenanigans Bieber’s been in the news for recently, life just might imitate art come September.
You’ve heard the stories: “Glastonbury sells out in 30 minutes”, “One Direction Tour sells out in minutes”.
Well, finally we have our own happy narrative and despite the corporate metal allegations, our band is way better than One Direction.
According to the grapevine, Metallica tickets went onsale at 10am this morning. At 10.06am, there weren’t any left. The likelihood is that there will be a few more tickets available sometime towards the end of the month, once the venue configuration has been worked out (and you can always become a Metallica International Fan club member, perhaps) but the reality is, we have our own arena show sellout measured in minutes, which is a massive leap forward.
Fans are generally quite slow to buy tickets here in China, due to the rarity of shows actually selling out, and the proliferation of tickets usually available on the night courtesy of the huangniu.
Shows selling out creates buzz, creates excitement, creates a very real reason to buy early. Once people start missing out on shows they actually wanted to see, it will encourage them to buy early. this will keep tickets out of the hands of the scalpers, and enable promoters to accurately gauge demand, and should make the art of selling shows a less haphazard one
All hail Metallica, all hail China’s metal fans
Couple of bits and pieces leading into the non-weekend of Dragon Boat Festival:
Shanghai Sonic is looking more and more likely: produced by the promoters behind August’s Summer Sonic Festival in Tokyo and Korea, the names floated around for Shanghai Sonic include Aerosmith, John Legend, MIA, Limp Bizkit (yup), Alt-J and Carly Rae Jepsen. The organizers have been telling local media, off the record, to save the weekend of August 17-18.
According to everyone including Metallica’s official website, tickets for the Shanghai show, scheduled for August 13, go on sale at 10AM local time on June 7. Reported ticket prices are 480, 980, 1280 and 1680 RMB.
For something new and different, our pals at Taihe Media are testing a new concept on the Chinese festival-going public. Taking advantage of a car- and outdoors-loving middle class, the open space in the outskirts of Beijing and gambling on the fascination/nostalgia associated with RVs (recreational vehicles), the Mi RV & Camping Festival is a week-long eclectic lineup of local bands, craft market, BBQ, film fest and even a “MLB-sanctioned” batting cage. Cool.
Well, it’s official (almost). Douban kids have found Metallica’s MOC permit. August 13 in Shanghai, kiddies. We reproduce it in part below:
94 members in the touring party will keep AEG busy, whereas Live Nation will host the Pet Shop Boys for a two-week tour of Beijing and “other Chinese cities” from August 14 to 28. LIve Nation has been keeping busy, recently inking a deal with international entertainment company Lushington to promote concerts in Hong Kong and Singapore. The JV, Live Nation Lushington, kicks off activities with a Linkin Park show in August.
The last few days have seen some pretty intense scrutiny laid at the feet of Shanghai’s burgeoning music scene. Shows raided, bands taken in for questioning (not sent to jail it is important to note) and festivals canceled. It’s been a tough week.
Some thoughts on this rainy Monday
We just hope that this is another temporary blip rather than a permanent shift. It’s important to remember that we are foreigners in a foreign land, and that we should be extra careful with what we do and how we behave – it is very very obvious when expats behave badly. We tend to live in a bit of a bubble here, and we are still at a very early stage in China’s cultural awakenings. We need to walk before we can run and be sensitive to the local community, or else things could change very quickly for the worse for all of us….
Perhaps surprising to some, the central Chinese city of Xi’an is once again becoming quite the destination for music festivals. Having been the site of a Strawberry Festival (Modern Sky) in 2010, the record label returns to the ancient capital the first weekend of June with another edition of Strawberry. Following that, the Summer Parade “Forests International Music Festival” will set up shop during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday break (June 11-12). The latter festival’s lineup includes regional indie favourites Deserts Chang (TW) and My Little Airport (HK) as well as mainland headliners Omnipotent Youth Society, Snapline and MC Shitou. For pop fans, Della Ding (丁当) somewhat inexplicably headlines the second day.
We last wrote about Xi’an when the Zebra Festival that was supposed to be there was cancelled in the lead up to the 2012 transition. However, the return of festivals to the city this year, as well as global brands such as adidas looking to put on events in the city, means that Chengdu and Wuhan may soon have company in the exclusive “hip second-tier city” club.
Editor’s note: This review of David Guetta on the Great Wall comes from a Radar pal who chooses to remain anonymous. He was part of the expat exodus to Juyongguan Great Wall this past weekend to see the tech-house ‘legend.’
When I was younger and more into music than I am today, I swore to myself that that I wouldn’t be one of those people who thought that “their” music is better than what the “kids” listened to. This is the lesson that one draws from hating baby boomers. My own preferences ran to 70′s stadium rock, which is not the paragon of sophistication, but my adolescence coincided with Blink-182 and the Backstreet Boys. So I had to perform every acrobatic maneuver of logic afforded by a liberal arts education to convince myself that music by those guys were the latter-day cultural equivalents of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, even though, well, they were not.
Which is why I am bewildered by how David Guetta was able to draw what seemed like many thousands of young expats to the Great Wall. First of all, did BLCU build like ten campuses without telling any of us? Did WAB (Western Academy of Beijing) and ISB (International School of Beijing) become much less selective? These are things that I don’t notice.
Second, I actually like electronica music. I went to Underworld concerts when I was in college, and I thought they were awesome. I also like French House, and was able to convince myself whenever Dimitri from Paris sampled 60′s lounge music it was somehow, like, influenced by Roland Barthes or something. Even nowadays when I hear Avicii sampling Etta James, I’m like nodding and smiling in the way that stupid people do in public lectures when they understand something.
However, every song I heard at the David Guetta concert seemed to have been engineered for dumb people to feel good. I don’t think David Guetta ever played a song all the way through. Maybe for copyright reasons he can only play the part he produced or something, but then the entire concert became a mash up of various choruses from pop songs, which when played over and over again, appear to be truncated mantras for simpletons. People got really excited every time the phrase “when love takes over” was played, but we never find out what happens when love takes over. Actually we do, we find out that when love takes over the concert ends, for David Guetta only played for like 45 minutes (inshallah). This caused great confusion for people who were used to encores, but nobody really cared. We realized that we were all at the Great Wall, it was dark and very far away from Spark (Ed.: nightclub of choice for fuerdai in Beijing).
We’ll be at Digital & Music Matters next week – come find us! The full schedule is out now. Of particular interest is the YouTube FanFest powered by HP. Conceived of by Branded, also the agency that produces Digital & Music Matters, the event brings Youtube sensations to the conference audience. We’ll be interested to see what kind of insights they bring to the table. The participants include actor/comedian Ryan Higa and US band Boyce Avenue, who have toured from Manhattan to Manila solely on the strength of their social media following.
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