The State of the Union

The state of China's music industry in spring 2008...looking kinda bleak...

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On February 22, CMR posted an article entitled Big Bands in China – a bubble waiting to burst?, questioning the viability of the bloated roster of international superstars scheduled to perform in China in the coming month:

The big question now is whether or not there is enough of a market for such a heavy influx of big name, English language artists. There are more cats of this stature coming in the month of March 2008 than came in the whole of 2007. This is a massive and very sudden leap forward, and it remains to be seen if the market will bear it.

We didn’t expect what followed.

As has been discussed ad infinitum on this blog and elsewhere, Bjork put a bit of a spanner in the proverbial works with her March concert in Shanghai. The subsequent Harry Connick, Jr. concert was marred by controversy. According to the musicians, backstage was raided shortly before stage time and many of Harry’s more “incendiary” songs were barred. Then came a spat between Celine Dion, the Beijing Ministry of Culture and Emma Entertainment over the show in the Gongti Worker’s Stadium, which ended up cancelled for reasons unknown.

The final nail in the coffin has been the cancellation last week of China’s oldest and biggest festival — the institution that is Midi — and speculation that the government will offer Midi a rescheduled slot during the October holiday at Haidian Park, the preserve of the newly inaugurated Modern Sky festival.

The bubble has indeed burst, far more abruptly and corrosively than we had imagined.

So what now? Word on the street is that licensing any show before the Olympics will be impossible, and perhaps for the rest of the year. There have also been whispers that the biggest kids on the playground, Emma, will be prohibited from putting on any shows for the indefinite future (forever?), a huge setback for China’s international music scene. Regulations are in the works that, if put on the books, will make things very, very difficult for anyone in China to organize projects/events involving foreign artists.

Bjork’s “outburst” couldn’t have come at a worse time. Less than 10 days later, those now-famous whispers echoed around the world. The subsequent mess featured on front pages from London to Lhasa, and where this will lead is anyone’s guess. Speculation has ranged from international reconciliation to an increasingly tense Sino-World entente. We hope that good sense will prevail and that the alarming rise of nationalism on both sides of the Pacific will recede as everyone realises that the ferocity of the current credit and food crises will require international co-operation in order to avoid something much deeper and long term

As for the fledgling music industry here in China, we must change our own internal rules. Concert promoters here have long been operating on the edge of what the Chinese authorities deemed tolerable. Now, we must work only with bands that are interested in helping this country to develop through exposure and diversity. At the same time, we must work harder to improve the standard of the indigenous music industry, be it facilities, bands or media. That, however, is a topic for another article. Keep your fingers crossed for us – it doesn’t look good just now.

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