When unknown Chinese singer Yang Chengang wrote and recorded the song Mice Love Rice in Wuhan, Southern China in 2000, he would have had no way to predict it’s eventual impact. While the pop ballad languished in relative anonymity on CD format for four years, it’s eventual arrival on the recently booming internet in 2004 sparked off a word-of-mouth phenomenon that would ultimately peak with 6 million legitimate ringtone sales on China Mobile in one week as well as a rumoured 200 million illegal MP3 downloads within a year.

Once exposed to the powerful Chinese internet, Mice Love Rice and it’s exemplary use of instantly recognisable melody as well as inoffensive, syrupy lyrics – in this case a chorus that includes ‘I love you, loving you, just like mice love rice’ – came to define what is now known as a ‘wang luo ge qu‘ or ‘network song’, a literal reference to the exponential spread of a song through internet networks. This process of musical ‘crowd sourcing’ has proven to be the paradigm of the modern Chinese musical landscape.

Song Ke, founding CEO of one of mainland China’s leading record labels, Taihe Rye, employs a team who use software to monitor the various chart systems and music networks around the internet, looking for songs that are ‘making noise’ and stepping in and signing them up once they have proven to be a crowd pleaser. The practice has paid off: a few songs by unknown artist Dao Lang were “making a lot of noise on the internet,” says Song “We got in touch with him, signed all his digital rights, put our new media marketing team behind it and sold 30-40 million ringtones in 2005 alone.”

Unlike in the west, however, this ‘democratisation’ of music success – where the web organically decides which songs reach the top of the pile, or at least the attention of the likes of Taihe Rye – has not led to a vast broadening of musical tastes. In fact, the chat boards, blogs, instant messaging systems and peer to peer networks that organically built Dao Lang and Mice Love Rice into hits have shown the opposite to be true. Instead of a range of defined sub-genres, the network effect has crystallized music into one much larger homogenous category, based on the commercial pop song style and format exemplified by Yang Chengang’s hit. The much-feted ‘long tail’ of alternative music and niche genres has, to date, failed to emerge.

Songs that satisfy the ‘network song’ criteria for mass acceptance and go on to become internet hits are frequently gathered together by portals and websites into charts of ‘deep links’ to unlicensed MP3s or streamed music. “The charts we present are simple marketing tools to attract visitors, who mainly love pop. We do have a social network section for discovering music but it is our MP3 search which represents on average 40% of our entire traffic“, says Gregory Wu, Associate Director of Digital Entertainment for music search behemoth Baidu. While the IFPI estimates that China’s physical market was worth only $37.7 million dollars to the labels in 2007, Wu says that Baidu receives roughly 100 million MP3 search enquiries every day, giving some idea of the gulf between the ‘paid for’ and ‘not paid for’ music markets.

According to the latest China Internet Network Information Center report, 84.5% of Chinese netizens listen to music on the web, making it the most popular internet usage ahead of even search and email. These legally suspect music charts are therefore key traffic drivers and are typical of the average Chinese music browsing experience. They also represent bottlenecks that impair music exploration and “perpetuate low common denominator music, leaving music discovery to chance,” according to Wu Jun, CEO of digital distributors R2G, the company behind Wawawa, a non-mainstream legal MP3 store. “The big players are not necessarily music specialists, so have no real desire to develop music recommendation/discovery facilities beyond the simple chart format”.

The Chinese internet user base, which reached 253 million in June, is also getting, on average, poorer, younger and less educated every year as the socio-economic barriers to internet access are gradually lowered. Song Ke explains how this increasingly worse off audience skews the tastes further towards mainstream pop. “People who do not have a lot of money want to look up to their pop stars and imagine what life is like up there. Alternative music is a luxury for the middle class; for people who have tasted some of the high life and are looking for something else”.

What has resulted is a kind of echo-chamber effect, in which only low common denominator, crowd approved pop music is fed back into the network through these curated bottlenecks. The priority for the Chinese labels is to please the network and make it into these bottlenecks, not push musical boundaries forward, as failure to make it into these top strata of recognition brings with it a hefty price. As one of the only other major sources of music industry income, brands focus the bulk of their sponsorship monies on the highly visible hit artists, compounding the relatively anonymous non-chartees to further suffering.

According to analyst group Music 2.0, however, 64% of users surveyed said that they frequently could not find the music they were looking for on a music search engine suggesting that there is at least some desire to stretch beyond what is presented, but as Song Ke puts it “these music sites, search engines and charts are run by a generation of people who grew up on melodic Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop. They are pushing what they know and like. Future generations will want to change this and demand more variety, but it may take some time”.

© Ed Peto 2008

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As a musician and DJ (and regular pool hall patron) David couldn’t take much of this. He politely suggested to the management that he make compilations for them to play. The bosses were thrilled with the idea so the next day David brought back a lovingly compiled CD of vintage funk and soul. The pool hall played it, loved it and asked him to do the same again, which he did, a number of times. Before long, however, David began to suspect how much people were actually paying attention to his finely crafted mixes. His friend Matt suggested that, as a test, he make a CD which featured the same song repeated 18 times on it, the song being ‘What A Fool Believes’ by Michael McDonald/Doobie Brothers:

As normal the management put the CD on loop and, after two hours of playing pool to the same song, David asked the management and some of the regulars what they thought of it. The assembled staff and punters unanimously declared it to be their favourite CD so far. They absolutely loved it. That was the last CD David gave them.

It is difficult to know what conclusions to draw from this story, if any, suffice to say that the Chinese engage with music in a totally different way to the west. Recognition through repetition is a stock feature of the Chinese psyche, the most obvious example of which being the teaching of characters in Chinese schools (with some 11,000 characters in use in modern Chinese, classes are a necessarily ‘parrot fashion’ learning environment where children repeat pen strokes and character recognition ad nauseam). If a song hits a chord with the country and reaches a certain level of exposure/repetition, it will take on a life of it’s own, become a MONSTER hit to be played, replayed, covered, sync-ed, performed live and sung at KTVs (Karaoke bars) with a fervor very rarely seen in the west – it will become a part of the fabric of everyday life.

If you were to compile a ‘Now That’s What I Call Chinese Pop Music’ you could get away with a five track EP (rather than the 40 track annual double albums we get in the west) and still cover 60% of the musical mindshare of urban China. The relentless repetition of these monster hits in almost every conceivable environment and incarnation mirrors the teaching of Chinese characters and the CD in the pool hall: There is an overriding comfort to be had from recognition alone.

That’s enough theorizing. Anyone who has spent any length of time in China, regardless of whether or not they listen to the radio or watch TV, will recognise at least one, and probably more, of the following songs. These are what the Chinese monster hits sound like, with Mouse Loves Rice being the biggest by some distance (a real phenomenon, the story of which neatly sums up the music environment in China, but that’s for another time):

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL CHINESE POP MUSIC Vol.1:

David Tao & Jolin Tsai – Jin Tian Ni Yao Jia Gei Wo (Today You Must Marry Me):

S.Wing – QQ Ai:

Yang Chen Gang – Lao Shu Ai Da Mi (Mouse Loves Rice):

A Niu – Tao Hua Duo Duo Kai (Peach Blossom):

Kenny G – Going Home:

© Ed Peto 2007

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