Rampant piracy and a lack of transparency have long complicated efforts by record labels to do business in China. Still, for those willing to be flexible and patient, the Middle Kingdom could still prove to be a useful laboratory for new business models.

Relative to it’s potential, China’s music market remains microscopic. Recorded music sales totalled just $82 million in 2008, up 8% from a year earlier, according to IFPI data. But digital sales, which accounted for 62% of total music sales, provide a glimmer of hope, having surged 45% last year to $50.4 million.

Ed Peto, founder of the music business consultancy Outdustry in Beijing, believes artists must adopt a 360 degree approach to China. The man on the ground for the Beggars Group of labels, Peto works to tap a network of promoters, critics, DJs and Web entrepreneurs to position acts aiming to connect with Chinese music fans. Asked to identify the best means to promote music in China, Peto cautions that no single platform would suffice, given the China market’s fast pace: “The menu could change at any minute,” he says.

1. Land a billing at Beijing’s premiere live music event, the Modern Sky Music Festival

Founded in 2007 by Modern Sky record label boss Shen Lihui, past festival headliners included U.S. rockers Yeah Yeah Yeahs and local heroes Carsick Cars. This year’s event will be held Oct 4-7 at Beijing’s Chaoyang Park and will feature a roster including British Sea Power, the Buzzcocks, the Futureheads and Shonen Knife. Peto says Modern Sky is better organized than previous Chinese rock festivals, boasting sponsorship support, a wider range of bands and a more professional staff. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a really significant step up,” he says. Peto also suggests licensing a record to a local label first then using the fest to promote it. And don’t go shouting about politics like Bjork did about Tibet in 2008. “That incident did a disservice to everyone working hard for incremental change in music in China,” he says. “It is getting better, but she set things back five years.”

(Update: It is worth noting that Modern Sky Festival ran into some….’trouble’ this year, after the article was published. The week before the event, the organisers were told that none of the international bands would be allowed to play)

2. Hire an intern to start a discussion thread about a single or album on Douban.com

Douban.com is the most transparent, frank, witty and active collection of critical writing about music, books and films in the Chinese blogosphere. Knowledgeable music editor Xu Bo is also the guitarist for one of the capital’s top bands, the post-folk punk quartet P.K.14.

Peto says 80% of the traffic to Outdustry’s online community/record label site MicroMu comes from Douban. “It is the light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “It’s what Myspace China wishes it could be.”

3. Make friends with Kelly ‘ZhaZha’ Cha

Cha is an influential TV/radio host educated partly in the United States whose shows on Hunan Satellite Television (”Midnight Mindtwist”), China Radio International’s Easy FM and the video channel of popular Web portal Sina.com (”The ZhaZhaClub Show”) expose fans to imported music by playing songs and discussing lyrics in English and Chinese. “She’s like a champion for Western music across a number of platforms in China,” Peto says.

4. License music to R2G

R2G is a Beijing-based online music distribution platform whose custom-built software detects illegal electronic listings of songs, then uses documentation of those posts (and the courts, if necessary) to negotiate legitimate royalty payments for future downloads from Web sites. Privately owned R2G takes a cut of the payments and thus far appears to have survived China’s Wild West environment by focusing on songs downloaded and used as ringtones and ringback tones by the nation’s 430 million cell phone subscribers. Peto calls R2G “the most transparent and Western-friendly of the music distribution sites in China”.

5. Upload a video to Youku

Youku is China’s largest online video portal. As with YouTube, a channel can be set up for free, pages customized and videos uploaded. “It is definitely worth adding Chinese and English subtitles,” Peto says. “Lyrics are very important to Chinese people, and having the translation there really adds value as the video also becomes an educational tool.” By posting a video, Chinese music fans can better appreciate a band’s over-all presentation, he says, noting that “where your music might not be particularly culturally applicable, your video might pique interest, be plucked from obscurity by the editorial team or community and hit a a feature page.”

Billboard article used with permission of Nielsen Business Media, Inc.

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Will and I actually first met over a beer at a music venue I was booking at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005, when he was working as a music journalist for Straight No Chaser. We have both taken somewhat drastic turns in our careers since then and, by happy coincidence, Will stumbled across this very blog and decided to get in touch to reminisce. We have been chatting ever since about his work, particularly with regard to it’s relevance to China.

Will Page

His latest report The Long Tail Of P2P, co-authored with Big Champagne’s Eric Garland, was presented to much fanfare at this year’s Great Escape Festival in rainy Brighton, UK, an event I was lucky enough to be invited to attend (Thanks Jon McIldowie and UKTI). Will has kindly agreed to me running a few questions by him on the subject:

Ed Peto: There has already been a good deal of coverage on your work on the demand curve for digital music consumption – from New Scientist to the Financial Times – particularly with regards to your contention of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory – but, for the benefit of people who haven’t read it yet, could you give us a quick elevator version of your latest Long Tail Of P2P report and its findings?

Will Page: Sure. The original Long Tail concept, as laid out by Chris Anderson in a famous Wired Magazine article in October 2004, goes like this: If you offer people more choice, and help them make that choice, they will take that choice. It proposed that in a world of widespread Internet access, it no longer makes sense to cater to the public appetite for the most popular CDs, DVDs and books. Instead, even the interests of the smallest niche might now be served. In short, the tail of available niche products would lengthen (supply-side effect) and then fatten with sales (demand-side effect). And so the “Long Tail” emerged.

To recall, Anderson’s theory relies on a change in the nature of the supply curve given barriers to entry falling and a great many new products can now get to the market. However, it takes two curves to tango in economics, and consideration of the demand curve completes the picture. What we uncovered from that analysis was a shock to some and no surprise to others: a ‘hit-heavy, skinny-tail,’ log-normal distribution for legal online music consumption; a distribution not that dissimilar from what one might expect from a more traditional, bricks & mortar store.

This dormant tail, pinhead pattern appeared across a number of digital music providers, in the markets for singles, albums, as well as streams – the three markets for legally consuming music online. But of course the illegal music market has been with us for longer, and is considered to be much larger than the legal one – so the next intuitive step was to understand the shape of demand in P2P. What we uncovered was another hit heavy skinny tail distribution, and that’s what we presented at the Great Escape. The results raised a few eyebrows, that’s for sure.

EP: Here in China we see also see an incredibly head-heavy distribution curve, with pop hits dominating the musical landscape. I tend to explain this by suggesting that, in China, music is used as a way of fitting in and not as a differentiator as it often is in the west. In short, the reason, I believe, is largely cultural (with censored media being another contributing factor).

According to your research, however, western consumers also largely seek out hits even when presented with the essentially infinite choice offered by illegal services such as P2P. Do you think that, like the Chinese, western consumers also have a deep-rooted cultural proclivity for hits, or is the behaviour you have identified in your study a hangover from a period of limited inventory, limited access and bottlenecked media and marketing? ie. Is it nature or nurture?

WP: That’s a great question. Firstly, the fact I’ve uncovered this hit heavy distribution for music does not mean the Long Tail is dead – there may be other examples of ‘fattening’ tails in books, film and television. But then perhaps that’s the point – some forms of media goods are for sharing (i.e. music at a festival) and others are for private consumption (i.e. a book on a train journey). Maybe that’s why ‘Book Clubs’ still haven’t taken off in a social networking era?

Now to your question. I don’t think it’s a hangover – there have always been niche markets, and one could argue that they were more effective prior to the long tail era kicking in. For example, I wrote for the niche music publication Straight no Chaser for seven years, and spent a large amount of time digging for rare Brazilian and African vinyl.

Point being, the magazine has closed (advertising revenues in a digital age) and lots of those niche shops have closed down. So I reject the hangover assertion, there may well be examples of the tail being a lot fatter prior to the book coming out. On that note, let me also add that you have to really think about the quality of data, both then and now. Niche music products are often purchased in second hand record stores – I can testify to that as I practically live in them! Not only is there no data on second hand sales, there’s no copyright either. That’s an important dynamic in an online physical world like Amazon, where first and second hand goods are priced side-by-side. A fat or skinny second hand niche market is therefore (i) hard to prove and (ii) even harder for artists and songwriters to benefit from. It’s an anomaly that’s really worth pondering. .

Another angle towards answering your question is to consider the tools which are being used to understand media markets like music, film and books. I mean this whole Long Tail debate has been dominated by economics, and us economists are terrible at losing sight of reality. Another angle, which we raise in the paper, is that of ‘culture’. On that note, I’m inclined to cite Andrew Bud, the Executive Chairman of mBlox, who has been like a professor to me in pioneering much of this long tail work to date::

“…It means something that we are seeing a log normal distribution in the sales data for tracks. That only happens if the more successful a track becomes, the larger are the random forces affecting its sales. But then the question is how does the market know how big a track is? Why does the scale of a track’s success matter to the choices people make? An obvious answer is that it’s through people chatting to each other and seeing the music talked about in the media. That’s what culture is. So the fact we’re seeing the log normal distribution here may point to the power of culture on people’s choices. Whereas Chris Anderson’s hypothesis of a Pareto power law would be much more about random, individual choices – people alone with their computers. So perhaps, this debate of thick versus fat is really about the power of culture in determining demand…”.

- Andrew Bud

Andrew Bud

EP: Are you able to project future behaviour from this research?

WP: No. We have not attempted any projections or forecasts based on the analysis. The original singles, albums and streaming data sets we worked on were for the twelve months from 2007 Q4 to 2008 Q3. We kept the same time period for the illegal P2P file sharing study, to keep it consistent. What we’re doing now is to look at data sets concluding in 2009 Q1 – so whilst we’re not essentially looking forward, what we can now provide our management team with is monitoring and interpretation of the changes in demand over time.

On that note, co-author Eric Garland raised two concepts in the study which merit attention here: the primacy of listening and music hoarding. To recall, these trends lead to a peculiar irony: widespread listening to music that is never stored coincident with vast stores of music to which no downloader ever listens. I think you can use our rigorous long tail analysis and these two concepts to debate future behaviour. ‘Hoarding’ especially – that’s an incredibly important concept for the music industry to get its head around.

Eric Garland

EP: Do you think that once music recommendation/discovery services have fully developed you will still see the same head-heavy results as you are seeing now?

Consider the following hypothetical online music platform:

• Every track in the world is one click away, with negligible download/buffering time.
• Each user’s music preference profile is perfectly mapped and updated continuously in real time according to their actual listening habits, as opposed to music they just download and then ‘hoard’.
• Music is recommended to this user purely based upon this profile (and other users with similar profiles).

WP: The first thing to appreciate is that it could go either way – ‘good’ recommendation tools could fatten tails, or concentrate activity around heads. What’s going to be fascinating is that we’ll soon be able to answer your question with evidence. By that I mean that excellent sites like We7 and Spotify have gained incredible traction already this year, and that will allow them to further develop their offerings in line with the customer’s demands. From there, we can see what demand looks like, given the infinite choice from supply. .

There’s an important point to be made here, though – which is when critics have dismissed my work by saying that a long tail market without a good discovery tool is just noise. I mean, sure, I take the point – but I’ve got to counter it, as it implies ‘when the facts don’t fit the theory, then there has to be something wrong with the facts’. The objective, surely, is for these promising music sites to become profitable first and foremost, whereas fattening the tail is an optional extra. If the latter results from the former, cool – but it doesn’t necessarily have to work that way.

What I’ve seen so far – and by that I mean some of the staggering success stories of digital music in 2009 Q1 – suggests that the idea that ‘when you offer people more choice and help them make that choice’ their behaviour is a lot stickier, and their willingness to roam a lot more tamer, than the theory would have had us imagine. My colleagues Chris Carey and Gary Eggleton (who are both far brighter than me) think that our work in this area now has us close to helping the music industry understanding the limits of unlimited choice. That’s really exciting as we’ll be able to offer our songwriters and publishers important new insights that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

On that note, I’d like to quote psychologist Barry Schwartz who summarizes his excellent book, The Paradox of Choice, in a recent TED lecture: “There is no question that some choice is better than none, but it does not follow that more choice is better than some. There’s some magical amount, I don’t know what it is but I’m pretty confident that we’re long since passed the point where options improve our welfare”.

EP: How do the results of this research impact upon your work at PRS for Music?

This question is two-fold: what does it mean for PRS for Music and what does it mean for its stakeholders – the rights holders and users who we bring together. I think you can see three applications of the long tail work, those being costs, segmentation and investment strategies. With regards to the latter, there are some fascinating debates to be had. For example, Anita Elberse has looked into why you get irrational bidding wars in the book publishing industry, even when the market is not in a healthy state. Her work is really inspirational and I’d strongly recommend your readers check it out. My interpretation, for the music industry, comes down to this – if you’re in a market affected by the long tail, do you bet large, bet small or do you bet at all.

One final point, though, is this. My work is not ‘anti’ long tail, nor does it have anything to do with ‘bashing Chris Anderson’ – the press love a Punch and Judy show, but this is about understanding markets. Let me reiterate, I really rate the Long Tail Book and recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet read it. Moreover, Chris Anderson’s ‘blog’ was an excellent tool for engaging people like me into the debate that we would otherwise not have known about. I’ve always said that as soon I find real evidence of the long tail at work, Chris will be the first to know and I’ll be the first to celebrate. There’s another collaborative project we got going here in London, it’s wrapped up in confidentiality just now but the way things are beginning to look, I should be letting him know very shortly!

© Outdustry 2009

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Normally I would have turned this down as the money tends to be poor and the deadline was a bit abrupt, but the magazine in question was Rolling Stone China - re-named ‘InMusic’ after a disastrous launch left them unable to publish under that name – and the album was Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’.

Ultimately the prestige of the publication and the immediate relevance of the album (I had it on rotation at that point) saw me sitting down the following day to churn it out.

It was only after I got my copy back that I started to wonder why they had approached me, a westerner, to review such an important album. I met for a coffee with my editor Lua Zhou to ask how it came about:

Lua Zhou: There is a problem with Radiohead. We talked about this in the editors meeting and we found that so many people love Radiohead but no-one has ever clearly said why they are so good. There is no clear answer, no clear review in the past. So I thought maybe I should find a foreign writer to write about it. Especially someone who has experience working in the western music industry, or who is a musician, because they are really a musician’s band – that way we can find out technically why they are good.

Ed Peto: Would none of your writers be more suited to write about Radiohead for the Chinese audience?

LZ: In the past I have given my writers a list of things to write about to make a perfect article: Relationship the musician has with label, what kind of instruments do they use, who is the producer and how have they influenced the music. They all say to me, ‘why do you want to be so technical?’, because Chinese writers are only used to writing things from their feelings.

There is no clear line between categories of music as the genres are not mature enough, it is not so clear what type of music you are playing so things are described in a more general way. Reviewers do lots of comparisons – Say compare this album to Kid A. I don’t think they can do as much technical analysis. Traditionally they don’t do this. They always start with a factual band introduction – which I normally cut – then go into the spiritual side, the meaning of the lyrics and how it makes you feel.

EP: Do you think genre awareness is important?

LZ: I think China is a real mash-up country. We just listen to different stuff. The record shops don’t tell us what is what, they just put all the records together and you take all different styles at the same time.

EP: So would Chinese musicians not understand genres and the recording process and be able to write technically?

LZ: Actually, I included a small interview with a Chinese rock musician after your review. He’s a guitarist from a band (Sound Fragment) that actually quotes some of Radiohead’s songs in their music. He gave me very short answers. He could not explain why Radiohead is good:

• Do you listen to Radiohead? : Yes.
• How did you hear about In Rainbows? : The Internet.
• Why is it attractive to you?: Because they are Radiohead.
• Are you satisfied with the album? What do you think of Thom Yorke’s performance?: Surprisingly wonderful experience.
• What do you think of how they released this record?: Because they are rich, they can play with their record.

So, when you write about Jigsaw Falling Into Place, it sounds like a band who has very good control of their music, of their skill:

“It is back to the five-guys-in-a-room for album highlight and first single Jigsaw Falling In To Place. If ever there was a song to unite all Radiohead fans past and present this surely must be it. Starting with a simple acoustic guitar riff, then beefed up with bass and drums, then enter the vocals and backing vocals. There aren’t many acts in the world that can build this level of heat from the basics of band music. It just requires the change in vocal pitch to send this into the stratosphere, ready for the smooth middle section on 2.53, once again building to a second climax, now including strings, then winding down to a breathless finish.”

- Excerpt taken from original English draft of my article.

It takes a good technical explanation to show this. Chinese writers would never write like this, how Radiohead make the peak, how they control it with the voice.

EP: How would a Chinese writer describe that song then?

LZ: They would use an image to describe it. I think it is about the language. The Chinese language is more about scenery than English – more emotional. I think English is more technical. Colder.

EP: So what do you think are the advantages to writing in a more cold, technical way? Why do you want to influence your writers in this direction?

LZ: I think we need professionals. It is a basic thing, as a music journalist, you should know how the music is made and then you can go on to talk about the emotional side. Because anyone can write about emotions.

After we published this article I sent it to all of my writers some of my review writers [amended 09.02.08] and said ‘take this as an example of how western writers write about music’. I think they can do this if they just learn.

EP: Is that not telling them that they do not know how to write?

LZ: Japanese review writers also always talk about their personal life or feelings in the review. I don’t care about their personal life, all I care is if this album is good or not, how did they make it, what type of sound it has. I guess this situation in Japan is similar to China.’

N.B: For any Chinese readers wanting to read Chinese music writers, here is a quick list of some of the better known blogs:

Yang Bo
Yan Jun
Haofang
Wang Xiaofeng
Sun Mengjin

© Ed Peto 2008

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New podcast ‘Pissing On The Bamboo Curtain’ will be a real godsend to anyone looking at making sense of this exciting little scene. Podcasters Ian Sherman (who also happens to be Music Editor for Beijing Time Out) and Kyle Schaefer’s high-brow, yet somehow low-brow, ramblings will also be a godsend to anyone who enjoys apocrypha, obscure references and general verbosity.

Kyle Schaefer and Ian Sherman

These guys know their stuff. They play good tunes as well. Here are links to the first two gloriously amateurish installments, hosted on the Tagteam Records site:

Sept ‘07

Oct ‘07

I took it upon myself to send a few questions their way – pulling back the curtain on Pissing On The Bamboo Curtain, if you will. They replied in a typically wordy and waggish fashion. Good stuff. Read on…

Ed Peto: DESCRIBE THE OTHER PERSON’S BACKGROUND A LITTLE BIT. WHAT QUALIFIES HIM TO COMMENT ON THE BEIJING MUSIC SCENE?

Ian Sherman: I always imagine him [Kyle] coming from a place where it’s always dusk, people are polite but wary and there’s always a cooler full of beer on the back porch. It’s essential that there is a back porch. Kyle has a history as a DJ on late night college radio where, as far as I understand, he would mix Ministry with Diamanda Galas and Star Wars samples and no one would give a shit, ‘cos no was listening, except whatever girl he happened to be corrupting at that point. Said girl would think that he was the greatest thing since the cheese grater and would no doubt demonstrate her admiration for him through the medium of repulsive carnal depravities. He is very good at radio/podcast stuff, even though he puts on a special ‘voice’ for broadcasting; In real life he has a voice like Betty Boop’s castrato cousin. Still, he actually thinks about what he says before he says it, unlike my impetuous self.

[Kyle] has been intimately connected with Tag Team for a few years now. He goes to a lot of shows – not as many as me, but then he’s an indolent fucker. Most important, I suppose, is that he, like me, wants to and we have both been here an awfully long time so, in our own small way, we’ve been witness to the development of the Beijing scene. That’s it.

N.B. The ‘Bamboo Curtain’ podcast is not exclusively about Beijing. We’ll play any Chinese music, no matter where it comes from. We’ll be starting a Beijing specific podcast within the next few months (it won’t be on the Tag Team site but elsewhere)

Kyle Schaefer: Well, aside from his professional credentials, Sherman is one of those people with an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of rock ephemera. I’m not sure if that ‘qualifies’ him to do anything (I don’t think we had to take a test or anything), but it’s nice to be able to find out who the back-up cymbalist was in the original line up of the Yardbirds and if there is any truth to the rumor that he made a series of novelty records with tape loops of whale song (Ian says no). As far as being an able commenter on the developments of independent music here in China… Ian’s an avid, enthusiastic and informed gig-goer, which is more than I can say for most.

EP: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONAL TASTES IN MUSIC?

IS: I know its a fatuous thing to say, but I simply like good music. Alright, I’ll try again. My ‘comfort blanket’ music is Van Morrison. The man can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. But much like the religion it borders on, that’s a personal thing and not really something that comes up all that often. I like slow and loud music: Mogwai, Godspeed, MBV etc. Or I like shit with a lot of guitar. Distortion please – lots of fucking distortion. I generally look for a melody – it can be as fucked up as you like, just as long as its there. Or I like good old fashioned power pop. Or I like Acid Rock. Or the holy trinity of 70s metal (Zep, Purp and, to a lesser extent, Sab). Or Ennio Morricone. Or mid-60s psych. I find most recent British music uninteresting – either prematurely ponderous or glorified stodgy pub rock. Enough, I hate being pinned down on this, it may well change tomorrow. Extremely broadly, though – I’m an indie kid.

Kyle’s inner goth is barely hidden, but he manages to function nonetheless. He and I have rather different but quite complementary tastes in music. He’s kind of hard to nail down – just when I think I have him pegged as a machine-music person (which he is, very), he’s an archetypal yank indie kid, and then he’s a punk, but wait… now he’s into weird shit like hyper hardcore. I think we share a love of mesolithic riffheavy sludge rock, but I could be wrong. I have a fairly extensive, not to mention anal, knowlege of the dark nooks and crannies of music – past and current – but when we DJ together, I spend most of the night in a state of awe at the endless succession of wonderful obscurities (to me) he pulls out of nowhere. Bastard. It’s an education with Kyle.

KS: I cut my teeth on horrible noise. Shuddering distortion is my bread and butter. I’m also rather fond of gloomy things and absolutely anything synthetic. Ian is bit like the rainy-day craft drawer, all these bits and bobs and glue-on wiggly eyes. Just a little something of everything. He’ll probably say ’shoe-gaze’ after agonizing for a few hours, but the man can comfortably shift from Van Morrison to Norwegian death-twee.

EP: HOW DID THE PODCAST IDEA COME ABOUT?

IS: Well, I think I once heard a podcast back in 2002 and thought ‘fuck I could do that’. Of course, I couldn’t – not without someone who actually could. One of us bought it up last year, I think, and nothing happened. But I have these rare, and really rather shocking, spurts of decisiveness. Every morning I wake up, stare into space and let my mind fill with brilliant plans, then I’ll have my weetabix and fall asleep on the sofa. Occasionally, though, I’ll actually follow through on these plans. This would be one of those instances. It’s all a question of presentation really. If you go to the pub and float the idea of a podcast, it’ll get kicked around the table for a bit and then the conversation’ll get back to Kagler’s latest distribution deal; but if you stride in purposefully and slam an actual plan down on the table, it’ll happen.

KS: It was Ian’s idea. He started bugging me and I went along with it. I’m a remarkably passive person. I’d had a similar idea for Tagteam, that we should do a podcast of b-sides and live stuff and interviews to coincide with new releases. Everybody thought it was a good idea but I couldn’t manage the motivation to actually produce it. When Ian said we should do a music thing I jumped on his wagon (Seriously, he has a wagon).

EP: WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE WITH THIS PODCAST?

IS: Less time asleep on the sofa. Oh… and demos, lots and lots of demos. Basically, shitloads of free stuff. Maybe a girlfriend as well. Doesn’t seem too much to ask.

KS: The usual: Global Domination of Popular Culture. But I’d settle for getting Ian a date.

EP: DESCRIBE THE PREPARATION THAT GOES INTO EACH SHOW AND HOW YOU GO ABOUT RECORDING IT.

IS: To be honest not much. We both negotiate with each other about time and place of recording (probably the most complicated part of the whole process), show up. There’s a slight internal struggle – whereas I would be happier with an hour long podcast, Kyle is more of a short and sweet kind of bloke. He tends to win because otherwise he gets all passive aggressive and I am powerless in the face of a steath sulk. We each bring three or four tunes with us and erm… that’s about it. We don’t necessarily know anything about the music the other wants to play. I’m happy with that. I’ll like to learn and be suprised and that’s mainly what keeps me interested, that and the sound of my voice. I don’t really want to do that much preparation or, god forbid, rehearsal. That just sucks the life out of a cast. We’ve had complaints from would-be-management that we should have a big meeting before hand and share all information. Those people can eat my shit, in the best possible way.

Generally, we’ll waste all the best banter just talking to each other as we set up. The mikes are switched on and then… well, as is easy to tell, then we just make it up as we go. I like it that way, but inevitably we will get more organised and professional as time goes on.

For source material, I’ve got a pretty good pipeline for new demos and albums, but I tend to spend a lot of time scouring the interwebs for good stuff that I may have missed over the past few years. Kyle has this enourmous library of older Chinese music from his days in the wilderness when that’s all there was. As for newer stuff, he probably gets most of it from me – that’s how cool I am.

KS: We spend about two weeks putting off actually seeing one another. Then we sort of rush around and try to get mics hooked into computers. We’re sorting out the technical stuff as we go (we’ve learned that mics need to be turned on, etc.) We assemble all the music and trade off on selections, generally pontificate a bit and then cut it together on Ian’s laptop. It takes about six hours longer than it needs to, but most of the fun is actually making the damn things. I try to forget about it as soon as we finish and start thinking about the next one.

EP: D-22’s MICHAEL PETTIS HAS BEEN QUOTED AS SAYING THAT “2007 WILL BE THE YEAR BEIJING BROKE”. WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT?

IS: Sheesh. How many thousand words do you want on that? Pettis would say that. I think the argument is moot. Pointless. If he means ‘break’ as in San Francisco ‘67, New York ‘78, Chicago ‘86 or Seattle ‘91 then no. Who cares whether Beijing ‘breaks’ internationally – what is important is that Beijing in 2007 finally had a great scene that you could talk about without having to couch it in terms of regional context. A scene is made up of bands. Bands break, cities do not. Bollocks to that. Pettis’ hyperbole is unfair. Plenty of bands ‘broke’ in Beijing in 2007, but not in the way he means it. No one sold out Madison Square Gardens or had Rolling Stone blowing coke up their arse, but finally bands that we know and love started putting out decent records and non-derivative bands were on the rise in 2007 – Hedgehog, Guai Li, etc – spun out of nowhere and didn’t really sound like ONE BAND, which has blighted the beijing scene in the past. The dynamic changed. Typically Beijing bands who blazed live put out shit, unrepresentative albums that turned everyone off. This year not only have excellent live bands been putting out excellent discs (cf. Hedgehog), but even bands who want to make me kill myself when I see them live have put out great – and I mean great – fucking albums (cf. Carsick Cars and Queen Sea Big Shark). That is the way it should be. Bands, if they have to chose, should suck live, not in the studio.

2007 has been enormous for the Beijing scene, as m’collegue Kyle says; ‘all of a sudden you turn around and you’re in a city with good bands’. Credit where credit is due – a lot of this has been down to Pettis and D-22. At a press conference this summer, Jason Magnus, mediocrity-loving honcho of the Beijing Pop Festival, used the expression ‘a D22 band’. At that one instant not only was the expression rendered incredibly passe, but also pervasive. D22 was set up to encourage and propogate a scene and by criminy that’s exactly what they’ve done.

KS: I think that’s total bullshit and probably true. The environment for music and musicians has been relentlessly improving since Wham! played Beijing in 1984 and I think it’s impossible not to feel like we are reaching some sort of critical musical mass here, but people said the same thing in ‘87 and ‘97 and they might still be saying it in 2027. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves and, frankly, M. Pettis has more invested in the local scene than most. What’s been different this year is the number of promising new bands and albums and the amount of international press Beijing is starting to receive. (White) people are finally really taking an interest in Chinese music, and in 50 years when music historians start digging through the documentation, the paper trail may certainly look like it all started now. However, until Chinese musicians start forging truly unique musical paths that ignite something in the collective imagination, Beijing’s just another big city with a great local scene. I also feel, quite firmly, that if Beijing breaks it will be beholden on us to fix it pretty quick.

EP: WHICH BANDS ARE YOU CURRENTLY MOST EXCITED ABOUT?

IS: Every single band in beijing, because most of them are so nearly there… except Mafeisan.

KS: Fistpig, The Boyfriends of Nancy Drew, Sudden Infant Sex Syndrome, The Prone Position… which aren’t real bands but I’m going to make some t-shirts anyway and I’ve got a rad stencil for Fistpig I made to put on all my notebooks and my Trapper Keeper. Seriously, do people still get ‘excited’ about bands? Ian and I will choose the exact same ones anyway… Guaili, Muscle Snog out of Shanghai, basically everything we put on the podcast, or I wouldn’t put it on.

© Ed Peto 2007

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