Tag Archives: festivals

Festival Preview: Channel Young Zebra Festival

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In Shanghai Jinshan this weekend is the latest addition (and edition) of the Zebra Festival, the “Channel Young Zebra Music Festival” or 星尚热波音乐节. Shanghai music fans will probably remember that last year’s festival was postponed and then rescheduled due to Typhoon Muifa but by all accounts and purposes went off without a hitch the weekend after with headliners such as Edison Chen, MC Hotdog, Joanna Wang 王若琳 and Xu Wei.

Originating in Chengdu, Zebra is back again this weekend on the Jinshan beaches for what we hope to be an equally successful and typhoon-free weekend of live music. This year, the regional lineup boasts Show Lo 罗志祥, Qu Wanting 曲婉婷, Aska Yang 杨宗纬 and Stanley Huang 黄立行; international acts include Kite (Sweden), Exile Parade (UK) and Yoko Yazawa (Japan) and local bands Nova Heart, The Mushrooms and more.

Full lineup and schedule here. If you read Chinese, peep at the cooperation between the festival and Taobao’s new celebrity stores initiative here. Activities there include a battle of the bands, beauty contest and suggested items to bring to the festival. Cool stuff, guys.

Midi Shanghai

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Yeah, we heard the rumour today too, from the same source. The same rumour that circulates every year. That Midi will come to Shanghai. Every year. And it never has.

Anyway, we were going to ignore it until there was a little more clarity. But hey, festivals are getting more organized, and so the rumours start earlier. Jake Newby has it all.

Chinese Day of Mourning

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Yesterday, the Chinese government declared that tomorrow, Sunday, would be a national day of mourning. All entertainment events (and if the last few days of mourning are anything to go by, all entertainment) have been cancelled. We have an event tomorrow. Fortunately it is not one of our own and is being paid for by someone else. Unfortunately, the event has to be cancelled, resulting in committed money being lost.

I understand, and commend the fact that the Chinese government is encouraging its citizens to spare thoughts and time for the victims of all the recent natural disasters, particularly the flooding in West China. We genuinely hope that the national day of mourning will draw attention to the plights of those affected and will raise money and charitable donations of food and shelter for the most needy.

But the cancellation of our event got us to thinking – what if we had had a big, self funded festival on this weekend? What if we had pledged multi-million RMB to putting on a two day event and flown in artists, committed sponsors and suppliers etc. to the cause. Well, we would have had to say goodbye to that money, in the process putting our company out of business. I wonder if the Chinese government is compensating any businesses like ours for losses incurred due to cancellation tomorrow. We imagine not.

In a country of huge population and geographical extremes, natural disasters will continue to wreak havoc on a regular basis. There will be many more days of mourning then, putting businesses at risk continuously. Are we being harsh, selfish? Or does the lack of flexibility in these announcements (why did they only give us 48 hours notice??) cause the business community serious harm? Perhaps rather than causing businesses to lose money, it would be better to have a national day of giving, asking businesses to contribute money to the various charitable causes.

Nobody said private business in this country was easy…..

More Chinese music festivals…

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And we give you… more Chinese music festivals.

Qingyuan Niu Yu Zui Fesitval  清远牛鱼嘴山水音乐节
July 14-18
Qingyuan, a small city in Guangzhou | 80 RMB (day) / 300 RMB (5 days)
Line-up:
International: Caspian (USA post-rock)
TW/HK: Go Chic, Boyz and Girl…
Domestic: Carsick Cars, Hedgehog, Retros, New Pants, Queen Sea Big Shark, Wang Wen, Subs, Ourself Beside Me, Pet Conspiracy…
Qingdao 2nd Golden Beach Festival
Sep 3-5
More details TBA

Dubious business practises in China. Surely not?

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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…

Survival of the Fittest: Japan’s Summer Festivals

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After three years of attending the institution that is Fuji Rock, we decided to take the plunge and do both of the Japanese big boys back to back: Fuji Rock in July and Summer Sonic in August. The two festivals have much in common, with both geared toward the hyper-fashionable indie music fan. While the majority of both lineups are foreign artists, the organisers do programme their share of indigenous acts as well. Both steer away from hip hop, and in its pastoral setting, Fuji leans more toward roots music. Beyond similar tastes, though, a side-by-side comparison of the two festivals draws out some marked contrasts, and a Darwinian future outlook for the survival of the modern music fest.

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