Tag Archives: inmusic

and then there were three (more)…

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And so, Beijing’s ascension into the annals as the city with the most music festivals in the world ever continues. We are moving into a complicated holiday period, due to the fact that the mid autumn holiday is snuggled up close to the October Golden Week. For those of you (like us) who are relatively confused, this means that Wednesday 22nd September is a holiday, with the 23rd and 24th also officially days off. To make up for this, you must work one day of the weekend before and one of the weekend after. The country will close down 1-7 October for the national vacation. Confused? We thought so…

Anyway, there are another 3 festivals hitting Beijing over that period. Check ‘em out here:

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and then there were more…

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And as if Beijing needed another festival, they get another three. The mid-autumn holiday is 22-24 September is now playing host to two brand new festivals:

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Intrstng wknd

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And so, Shanghai has two big shows this coming week. Based loosely around Zhangbei InMusic Festival, Panic at the Disco and CocoRosie are both coming to Mao Live House. Both shows are pretty expensive (300RMB and 120RMB presale), but while Shanghai is used to 120RMB at the upper end of the ticketing spectrum, 300 kuai hasn’t been seen for quite some time (if you disregard the stupid prices charged for “top 1″ DJs).

It will also be interesting to see if these two bands and Killing Joke will have the pulling power necessary to drag people out of Beijing and all the way to the Zhangbei Grasslands. The InMusic festival was a brave, brave effort in 2009, but are the Chinese masses ready to travel long distances for the music they don’t always yet love?

We always thought it was going to take a biiiiiiggggg headliner to get serious numbers in 2010, and while PATD! is certainly more than just a mid level emo band (we called them that a few weeks back and were asked to check our facts – PATD! actually has 1.3m Myspace friends and does indeed have significant pulling power in the USofA), they may not be the mega headliner that the festival needs. We hope they are because Inmusic is pioneering a type of out-of-city festival that Chinese kids will learn to enjoy.

Incidentally, there will be 3 out of town festivals around Beijing in the 4 weeks from 27 August (Tanglewood) to the 24th September (Dreamvalley).

Time will tell…

What other people are writing about…

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We have a LOT of browser windows open at the moment, talking about China’s independent music scene. And so it is that we thought we should put them all together for your viewing pleasure.

1. China Daily sticks its “journalistic” oar in on music festivals

China Daily is not reputed to be the most objective of sources. In THIS article, they report on Suzhou Holisland, interview Shen Lihui of Modern Sky and Liu Hongjie of InMusic (who expects 30,000 people this year) and also the Party Secretary of Zhangbei province (where InMusic has reportedly signed a 10 year partnership to run the festival) who admits to investing RMB3m in the festival.

Oh, and they put forward this Awesome Guitarist photo:

2. An interview with Modern Sky’s Shen Lihui

New kid on the block (expat newspaper – been around for 15 months now) the Global Times profiles Shen Lihui, boss man at Modern Sky.

3. HP is sponsoring the Communist Youth League.

We just thought this was too good not to put in here.

4. A comparison of comments between a Chinese and Western festival promoter

What makes a good music festival? Yu Hui of Suzhou’s festival (good sound, good artists, good marketing, satisfy audience) vs. Rick Farman of Bonnaroo (secure approvals, production, site operations, concessions).

5. Andy Best on why Douban’s news feed has gone

Making the Douban social network a MUCH lesser place to hang out, and a Guardian article explaining why the government might have had a hand in it.

6. Andy Best again on starting and running a DIY record label

Interestingly, Andy Best of Kungfuology fame started a new blog a while back. Indie Everything looks to our untrained eyes like a kind of training manual/ testing ground for how to do music-ey things all DIY style. Man, this promises to be a great resource for Chinese kids looking to start their own band, label, print t-shirts etc. Are you the patron saint of music Mr.B?

We seem to be a festival promotional website

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Well, it isn’t really, but we have 3 more festivals to announce (and a further 2 on the cards that we aren’t in a position to announce just yet).

  • the Big Love Festival in Hangzhou

Organized by the InMusic posse, this will run in mid August (13-15). We have previewed this one about a week ago, but now we have a pretty picture and some artists: the Concretes (Sweden) / Little Dragon(Sweden) / Zuo Xiao Zu Zhou etc.

  • the Tanglewood Great Wall Festival

On August 27-29, Modern Sky are organizing a festival around 2 hours outside of Beijing. It seems like it is being underwritten by a combination of the Yanqing Government, a tourism company, and the IDG Media Foundation. Details of lineup are as yet unknown. Visit HERE for a description. The venue website is HERE.
NOTE: we will be on holiday as of Wednesday. There will be no updates until the 18th July.

Let’s all go to Mongolia (or close, at least)

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Just a quick bit for people looking for Music Matters content. We have lots to share, but we’re lacking time. It will be up soon.

China is a country of numbers: 1.3 billion people, 650 million mobile phones, 300 million internet users, 7 billion litres of Baijio drunk ever year, 7986 kazillion cigarettes smoked (OK, so we made that one up). In the coming years, we imagine music festivals will be added to that list.

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