Archie Hamilton of Split Works was invited to speak on the China Focus panel at Canadian Music Week in Toronto. This is what he had to say.
March 12, 2009 was the first day of Canadian Music Week. The Canadian government has very generously paid 30+ individuals to travel to Toronto to represent the Chinese Music scene, everything from distribution to piracy to festivals to touring. You can find the list of delegates here.
The first spotlight on China panel was an awkward affair. 9 panelists, each given 4 minutes to cover an area of the Chinese music industry. There were 72 people in attendance (lots standing – it was a small room), but unfortunately, the format of the panel meant that minds boggled with the number of stats and figures that were shoehorned into the single hour. After an introduction by Jasper Donat who puts on Music Matters, the annual industry conference in Hong Kong, Jackie Subeck kicked off the panel with an “introduction to doing business in China”, essentially Guanxi, and patience. Then Anthony Tsu of Cosmedia with an overview of facts and figures, 1.3bn, 600m mobile phones, 300m internet connection, blah.
On came Shen Lihui of Modern Sky. I suppose you could say that he was the only genuine Chinese on the panel – bear with me – there were only 3 Laowai, but 5 of the other 6 were HK or Taiwanese based. Everyone went really nutty over Lihui (especially Scottish panel moderator Stuart Watson, who continuously called him Lee-hooey, which never failed to crack us up). It may have been just this lowly blog, but the picture that Lihui painted of the market in China smacked to us of “the party line”. Sure enough, there were government representatives in the audience, but Lihui’s talk cast a more than optimistic sheen over festivals in China. Considering that Modern Sky have had to move their festival out of Beijing to Tongzhou Park and that the Midi festival has moved out of Beijing entirely, I found it a little disingenuous to paint such a rosy picture. It also made my follow on seem pretty stupid with our concentration on the myriad problems facing promoters and would-be festival owners in this country.
I looked at the opportunities in the live music market, which let’s face it is a tough space. I will post my talk soon.
Tommy Cha from Love Da focused on suitable international repertoire types, market size, key media, retail environment, import climate, sales potential, venues, festivals, CRBTs and download models from the Hong Kong perspective.
Finally, after some chat about distribution and sales in Taiwan (which we are afraid may well have been responsible for some of the glazed looks and departing souls in the crowd), Mathew Daniel of R2G and WaWaWa fame talked about the challenges in converting the Chinese to legal consumers of music. Again, the numbers are hugely impressive, the realities rather less so.
In summary, I found it slightly bizarre that 10 people has been paid (flights and expenses) to represent on a one hour panel. I certainly didn’t get half way through my (admittedly long) monologue (I was given 4 whole minutes to give an overview of the Chinese Live Music scene).
As with all of these conferences, some of the talks/ panels were good, some not so much. Hob nobbing opportunities were legion, and there were some great bands on offer every night. I would heartily endorse Malajube, Handsome Furs and Holy Fuck for your listening pleasure.
Day 2 of the Focus on China will follow soon!