New and what looks to be ongoing blog feature from the Beijinger – tracking Soundcloud users (Soundclouders?) in Beijing. Quick glance at the first post rounds up some Radar pals including Live Beijing Music. Nice going by Jerry Chan, True Run media editorial director and old Beijing music hand.
We imagine the upcoming entries will be more inspiring than the 5000 accounts of Shanghai’s ur-Euro DJs.
We kid!
Actually, peep some great Shanghai-based Soundclouds:
Perhaps fittingly, seeing as Xiami was founded by former Alibaba systems engineers, Chinese online giant Alibaba announced on January 11 that it had acquired streaming music juggernaut Xiami. Xiami, known colloquially as the “Spotify of China” is a grey-market service hosting millions of songs and albums, all available for free streaming over the Chinese Internet. The service is available worldwide but from our personal experience, it is much faster in China (off VPN). It is also one of the more problematic services floating around, having never fully verified how all the songs in its service are licensed and how artists and labels are compensated. Writing in China tech blog Technode, Ben Chiang puts forth the theory that the acquisition by Alibaba is Xiami’s tacit acknowledgement of the Chinese online music sphere’s move towards copywritten content and need for a company with Alibaba’s coffers to aid them in the royalty payments. We’re inclined to agree with this sentiment, though as with everything, the proof is in the pudding.
For news of other developments in the China online streaming music sphere, be sure to subscribe to Radar posts and follow us @chinamusicradar on Twitter.
There have been a couple of half decent articles on the Chinese music scene kicking around the wires recently. We thought we’d point you to a couple:
First up, Andrew Chin over at City Weekend does a retrospective of big international shows in China in advance of two in two days (Elton John on Friday in Shanghai and Jennifer Lopez in the same venue the following night).
From Wham, to John Denver, to the Rolling Stones to Sonic Youth to Linkin Park to the present day, the article features interviews from Adam Wilkes, Archie Hamilton, Steve Sybesma and John Cappo, it makes a nice trip down memory lane for nostalgia hunters, while demonstrating how far we’ve come.
You can read that one right over HERE.
Disclaimer, the one of the authors of this blog was interviewed for this article.
At a different end of the spectrum, Morgan Short of Smart Beijing and previously of Shanghai based band Boys Climbing Ropes baits Dan Shapiro of The Fever Machine into telling us what he really thinks about the music scene in China. Both of these brohammers have been here for over 5 years and have spent most of that time immersed in the music scene, so the interview is a good one for those of you interested in being in bands here. You can read that little gem HERE.
The final one for today looks in depth at the present and future of music access in China, pointing to the fact that more and more of the big players are introducing options for the consumers to actually pay for content. The model seems to be that streaming will continue to be free, while downloading would cost. The author makes some pretty broad claims without backing anything up. The Chinese consumer has never paid for content before – it’s going to take a pretty significant breakthrough in simplicity or usability to make it happen
Read this one HERE
This just in, mainland e-commerce juggernaut 360buy have thrown their hat into the ring for paid, cloud-based music services. music.360buy.com debuted today with everyone from Hedgehog and Queen Sea Big Shark (we see you, Modern Sky) to Tizzy Bac, Maximillian Hecker and Tanya Chua. Prices range from Right now, you can also pick up free downloads from the likes of Eason Chan, Stefanie Sun and Sodagreen. Individual songs start at ¥1.99 and most albums go from ¥9.90 to ¥19.90 though we did spot an audiobook of Jane Austen’s Emma that was selling for a whopping ¥258.90 (or ¥1.99 per track).
The catch is of course, you can only play the songs on 360buy’s proprietary app, called LeMusic. However, with the catalogues of domestic heavy hitters such as Gold Typhoon, Taihe Rye Music and Huayi Brothers already signed on to the service, we may just have a new player entering the game.
It has become clear over the last couple of years that the most popular place on the web to listen to music (in those countries that don’t actually block it) has become Youtube. We are aware that there are lots of statistics and opinions out there but it’s the weekend, so we’re going to let you find those yourselves.
And so it was that last night, we were picking out some of our favorite artist videos for our Black Rabbit Festival Youtube and Youku channels. We are lucky to have a pretty decent VPN which means that surfing Youtube in China is not that difficult. It was while surfing videos on both simultaneously when it became clear that under current conditions, Youku will never develop into a serious video jukebox the same way the Youtube has.
VS 
Reason being: the intensely irritating adverts and their frequency on Youku. On Youtube, the ads only seem to pre-roll one video every three or four. You get to watch several things that YOU want to watch and only then you are forced to watch something someone else has decreed. Generally, the adverts are reasonably gentle on the senses and the ratio of what is given vs. what is taken seems reasonable, a little like watching TV.
Youku on the other hand has loooong pre-rolls and the same looong post-rolls on EVERY video. They are intrusive, and mostly look and sound horrible, completely at odds with what we are watching. Worse, you can’t skip and it is hard to pause, so if you are watching a lot of videos at once, the amount of suffering is intense. It ruined our mood so badly last night, that we just switched to Youtube only browsing, which is slower and clunkier through VPN, but oh so worth it.
Youtube seems to be making a LOT of money as the new de facto place for the mainstream to watch music, the new MTV if you will. The Youku experience has a long way to go before it can become that…..
UPDATE: thanks to Andy for pointing out Beijing Daze’s much better analysis of Baidu’s offering, namely that Google has had a somewhat better service in the China market for nearly 3 years. We covered the Google thing back in August 2008.
Baidu, China’s largest search engine, has reached a music licensing agreement with One-Stop China (OSC), a joint venture between Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG which will make over 500,000 songs in their catalogues available for free and legal download and streaming on Baidu’s music page and through the search engine company’s new social music venture, Baidu ting!
Within the agreement, Baidu will pay the artists’ and labels’ licensing fees, allowing China’s 450 million Internet users to stream and download these songs freely and legally, though with commercial interruption. A “pro” paid model with limited or no commercials is in the works, scheduled for release later in the fall.
It will be interesting to monitor what this means for the notoriety of foreign groups in China. Though many artists in the One-Stop joint venture already have ardent Chinese fans (Avril Lavigne and Lady Gaga come to mind), we wonder what this means for younger bands signed onto the major labels. San Francisco’s Cults, one of the most talked-about groups of 2011, went from deliberate Internet anonymity to signing with Columbia (a subsidiary of Sony BMG). It will be interesting to see how these labels will (or won’t) use this new platform to promote their diverse rosters.
Pangbianr
Can you give us an introduction to Pangbianr and your current team?
Pangbianr started about a year ago with a group of friends who liked going to shows, drinking beer and talking about the things we were most interested: art, music, film and food. We launched the site in June 2009 with a few show reviews and recipes. At the beginning the team was pretty fluid, more or less a collective. Now that some of the original members have moved on from Beijing, our projects are a bit more centralized. At the moment the core team is about 6 people, though some of the current members are leaving Beijing this summer. We’re going to keep the core team small but at the same time figure out ways to increase community involvement.
Pangbianr is different from most music blogs in China, as it’s bilingual. Is it difficult to maintain?
I think it’s very important to publish bilingual content. One of our main goals is to have a site that is useful and interesting both for Chinese readers and an English-reading audience. It is difficult to do at times because I write or edit almost all of the content but I’m mostly self-taught in Chinese so I’m not qualified to translate myself. Luckily the pangbianr team and our friends are a mix of native Chinese and English-speakers, so we usually have several phases of translation and revision. It’s a bit complicated at times but the final result is worth the effort.
It seems that you prefer doing video interview with artists if possible? Why?
Videos give the viewer a more direct sense of an artist’s style and spirit. A video interview with a musician edited together with live performance footage gives a much better sense of what the artist is all about, as opposed to a print interview.
There is also a great review by Fernando Gros HERE, and you can see our tweets from the event in a previous post HERE.
China Music Radar recently attended the Music Matters 2011 as a media partner. This review comes to you courtesy of our Thai beach resort – we are good to you 
It was the fifth time for the Radar to attend but the first for this writer, who found it engaging and invigorating to have so many people (several hundred attendees) from the same industry in the same place at the same time. Everyone focused on an issue very dear to us: the music industry in Asia and how it is developing, how it should develop and how we can all work together to make things happen.
Yang Haisong Still Has It: Noisey Launches in Beijing.
words: Ami Li
A recent Thursday night in Beijing marked the official launch in China of Noisey, a “Global New Music Discovery Platform.” A collaboration between VICE, Dell and Intel, the same team that brought the Creators Project to Beijing last fall, Noisey features mostly video footage of live shows and interviews with prominent, independently-minded bands and artists from around the world. Only launched formally in March of this year, Noisey has expanded rapidly into many markets and languages including Hindi and Portuguese as well as the expected French, German, Spanish and Chinese. Currently, the Noisey site features concert footage and interviews with four Chinese bands: Birdstriking, 24 Hours, Streets Kill Strange Animals, and Hedgehog.
For the Noisey’s coming out party in China, the organizers invited P.K. 14, Hedgehog and The Offset: Spectacles to perform at Beijing’s Yugong Yishan. Your faithful Radar correspondents were there on Thursday night to check it all out.
Like many PR events, this one started quite promptly on time (thus distinguishing it from many gigs). The Offset: Spectacles were on first, and we arrived belatedly, approximately two-thirds of the way through their set. All things considered, the droning, lo-fi sound that the band is known for suited the unique acoustic profile of Yugong Yishan. The subdued crowd appeared mesmerized by the sonic architecture coming from the stage. Always compelling in concert, The Offset: Spectacles continued their streak of hypnotizing performances, managing to achieve musical innovation with their steadfastly analog values.
PK 14 rock Yugong Yishan in Beijing for the Noisey.com launch
SXSW last month, you were on the SXSW tour with Carsick Cars as tour manager. Have you been to such big festivals before?
Just to clarify, I wasn’t exactly Carsick Cars’s tour manager. Their trip was sponsored by Converse and they were also supported by their label, Maybe Mars. Since I’m from Texas and I “grew up” in the independent music scene in San Antonio and Austin, I know a lot of people who organize more underground, independent shows during South by Southwest. I also knew Carsick Cars from living in Beijing and running pangbianr. So it was a good opportunity to help out the band by booking some more local shows for them during their trip to Austin. In general I don’t really like big music festivals, but South by Southwest is different. It’s like a music festival spread out across dozens of venues every day for almost a full week. I went to SXSW a few times while in high school but mostly just to see my friends’ bands and more off-the-radar shows at houses and small bars that the majority of fest-goers wouldn’t ever hear of.
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