Jul 01 2009
The inaugural InMusic festival has announced their lineup. You can check it out and discuss on Douban HERE.
It looks like a pretty standard Chinese indie festival lineup, plus the customary one or two international names. What do you think?
Jul 01 2009
Is there any hope at all? These are China’s top 5 music videos as of the 29th June 2009.
Check them out HERE and see them below!
Jun 30 2009
Shen Lihui, boss of iconic indie label Modern Sky is embroiled in some controversy over his backing of “Happy Girl” contestant Zeng Yike.
You can read the article and the web reaction on the ever “interesting” CHINA SMACK.
Jun 29 2009
The BBC recently did a documentary series on how the economic crisis has hit in China. This short excerpt focuses on “house music” (the guy is an economist – we mustn’t expect him to know about Acupuncture’s Minimal offering) and in particular the Intro Festival that we reviewed HERE
You can view the video and our good friend Chozie (trying not to look “altered”)
Jun 29 2009
In what amounts to harassment of foreigners in Beijing leading up to the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC and in what appears to be a first comprehensive “pub crawl” search, Chinese Immigration officials were out in full force in the Drum & Bell Tower/Nanluoguxiang area last Thursday, entering bars and checking foreigner’s passports and visa status.
They entered MAO Livehouse and stopped the in-progress show to check the passports of China-based Norwegian band “Luohan.” The show was reported stopped for 10 minutes, and Mao staff were questioned as to why a foreign band was performing without proper ID and visas.
The show was allowed to resume, but MAO will no doubt be working through various means and ways to ensure China Immigration does not again take a sovereign interest in their humble home of live music.
Jun 24 2009
Lots of promoters promoting lots of bands and festivals in China this year. It is tempting to say that there is too much happening at the moment, but that is the subject of another, upcoming article.
With the recent announcements for major July tours for the likes of These Are Powers, Jeff Lang, the Radio Department and Skid Row in August, there are rumours circulating that Zhangbei’s InMusic Festival have snared legendary Bristolian trip hoppers Tricky to headline, while Modern Sky are continuing along a British theme with ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker coming to rip up Haidian Park (if it remains there).
More soon. The summer is shaping up nicely!
Jun 24 2009
Beijing based post-punk (thanks J!) band Rebuilding the Rights of Statues (Re-Tros) are playing at the end of June in Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangkok. After a hugely successful China Tour earlier this year in support of their “Watch Out, Climate has Changed. Fat Mum Rising” album, this month sees them venturing further afield. Catch them if you can. Great to see Chinese bands spreading the word!
Tour dates can be found HERE.
Jun 21 2009
At the beginninng of June, we pointed you in the direction of the JinShan Crazy Beach Music Festival. You can read the post HERE. If you read the post, you will remember that we were dubious about it, seeing as we were 6 weeks away and there were few if any references to it online of in the media..
We’ve just received word that, despite commitments to media partnerships (and, we presume, artists and production), the investors have pulled their investment overnight. The following email tells it better than we possibly could:
Sorry to inform that Crazy Summer Music Festival has encountered big problem and all the promotion and execution works for the festival need to be stopped right now. The investor party had stopped investing on halfway, all due payment for treatment to media partners, for tickets exchange, for artists etc all have no way to continue. Sorry for that. I highly appreciated your big support. We know there are already promotions out at this point, and all the due resources i promised to give are not dispear anyways, please help me exchange all the promotion coverage and exchange resources into countable values and give back to me. We will ask for a rightful payment for giving back to you.
If the investor party had made any behavior in order to get off this obligations, just ignore, all rights and values for you to help promoting the event will be returned.
If there are already pages of promotion out, please exchange into value, and get back to me, iwill get those values back to you. If there are enough to get every information withdrewal, please let those not out. and please still give me the value exchanged from all the preparation and pages left for it. Thanks. Sorry for the big trouble, Sorry.
Sorry for everything, and thanks for your understanding. Sorry.
Honestly, we expected something like this, and we also expect more in this vein as the market progresses. Inexperienced organisers and investors see sexy opportunity – fail to budget properly, fail to obtain the right artists/ promotion/ licenses – investors pull out, festival gets canned. Festivals are very historically tough to get off the ground – conventional wisdom is that they take 3-4 years to break even (if indeed they ever do). We may see more of this before the cycle reaches any sort of maturity…
Jun 20 2009
How about some more numbers? (FYI, the beginning of the conference was largely putting the 2009 Asian market into context from a numerical perspective). We put the second and third speeches together. First up was
MARCEL FENEZ (PWC Entertainment Global Practices Leader – quite some title). His numbers were as follows:
Jun 20 2009
The first big numbers session of the day went to Synovate, the research firm and a partner of Music Matters. They did a pre-conference questionnaire for delegates about Music in Asia. They interviewed 8,500 18-24 year olds from 12 regional markets around Asia. The research was done online. Stand out for the Radar were the following points:
