Last weekend I attended SPOT Festival 2009 in rainy/sunny Aarhus, Denmark. The organisers kindly flew me in, along with a number of other international music industry types, to soak up some outstanding up-and-coming Danish artists as well as generally spew forth about our respective markets. More… »
Chinese mega portal Netease recently released their 2008 China Internet Communication Report (h/t Adam Schokora). The report generates statistics from the behaviour of some 200 million Chinese netizens who use Netease’s range of online products (ie. Netease Blog, Netease BBS, Youdao Search Engine, Netease Channels and Netease Posts). According to the authors: More… »
In April 1985, big-haired pop-duo Wham! took to the Worker’s Gymnasium stage in Beijing infront of thousands of screaming Chinese fans, becoming the first western pop act to play communist China.
This unlikely event had taken band manager Simon Napier-Bell 18 months of negotiations to organise; a process documented in his 2005 book I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch. More… »
Almost exactly a year ago I posted on the hype surrounding the Chinese music scene. I boiled my feelings down to a kind of cautious optimism ie. way too early to start billing Beijing as one of the best music cities in the world (as some over-zealous mainstream western media would have you think) but a genuinely exciting place to be nonetheless. More… »
A friend of mine, David Mitchell, has been a regular at his local pool hall in Beijing for going on a year and a half now. It didn’t take him long after his first visit to notice the lack of care put into the music choice in this vast twenty table room. The management had made the effort to get nice pool tables and cues and, in doing so, had earned themselves a loyal crowd of patrons, but they seemed to just stick the same CD of offensively bland wallpaper music on day in and day out. More… »
