CHINA // INDUSTRY NEWS
// EDITOR’S NOTE
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Summers in China are brutal, and everyone is feeling it these days. Noticeably less people out and about in Shanghai, and multiple friends and colleagues have told me they are avoiding going out on the weekend because it’s too hot. Most of the big festivals have either run in early summer or are returning in September/October, and most students and teachers have left the big cities to travel. As such, I’m not covering any big live music stories this month. Go drink some water everyone.
Side note, this newsletter has a (slightly) new design, but I will always keep it deliberately free of images and fluff, so please continue to enjoy and share.
// TIMBALAND SELLING BEATS ON NETEASE
I’ve written several times about China’s flourishing producer and musician community, this month Timbaland is tapping into that market with a new deal for his Beatclub service which will allow local artists to buy beats from Beatclub sellers directly in the NetEase app for use in their own music. NetEase has a great track record of promoting up-and-coming artists — they’ve had their own beat selling function for a year or two, a game-like web-based production software, and the ability for artists to distribute directly to the DSP online. In my opinion, their biggest hurdle is education. I don’t think artists know what it means to buy a beat, what the copyrights are that go into such a process, and how they can legally make and distribute their own music if they care to. I still do takedowns for clients regularly for illegal uploads, remixes, and bootlegs on Chinese DSPs, and many of those appear to be out of ignorance rather than mal-intent. As always, an uphill battle that is showing promise and progress.
Music Ally // Timbaland’s Beatclub sets sights on China with NetEase Cloud Music
// WHY CHINA LOVES TAYLOR SWIFT
A great podcast from The Spectator this week covered Taylor Swift’s popularity in China, with interviewees Jocelle Koh from Asian Pop Weekly and Outdustry’s Alex Taggart providing some valuable insight on the market for Taylor. Some general highlights: she is popular literally everywhere, China loves melody-driven music, and there is a precedence for Western artists blowing up in China despite the language barrier. What was most interesting to me, her social media following in China is actually pretty low, if you look at other big Western artists and especially local pop stars. Alex says it directly, “it’s her popularity in the rest of the world I think, rather than her engagement with China, that’s driving her popularity.” Yeah, she has accounts and followers in China, but does little to foster that audience. Her socials are mostly copypasta from other platforms, she skipped China on the recent global tour, and doesn’t appear to try very hard. What a missed opportunity to reward her diehards in China and take advantage of a valuable market. This is a strategy that can really burn a fanbase in the long run. The pod is a great listen.
Chinese Whispers // Why China loves Taylor Swift [Podcast]
// DSPs MOVE TOWARDS PAID-ONLY STREAMING
Historically, Chinese DSPs have moved in waves in regards to their priorities with music and the product they provide to users. As I’ve worked in China and consumed a lot of music through all of this, I’ve seen it quite clearly over the years. At first, the platforms all launched with music that was completely unlicensed, a total free-for-all. Then, they worked quickly to license from as many labels and distros that they could, often paying huge up-front fees and leveraging those deals to their competitors. The next push was for user acquisition, listening was free or ad-supported, the apps had sponsorships at every major festival, and they were doing everything they could to gain users. It worked. Now, they’ve flipped the script again, and started forcing listeners into paid VIP to access music in their catalog. For some, this is only popular songs over a certain play threshold. For others, it’s a window of time, like three months after release. Once again, it’s working, as DSPs are pulling in record revenues and conversions are happening across multiple segments. For rights holders, it’s worth doing an audit locally to see where your tracks are at and checking with your distributor to see what options are available. Here’s to hoping it continues to drive the value of the market upwards, and that fans don’t turn back to piracy because of these trends.
No ‘further reading’ link for this story, as it’s based on my own observations and conversations with other parties.
// AI IN CHINA
Nobody reading music news in the last year has been spared from being forced to hear about AI. Lawsuits and YouTube takes are flying, tracks are being put up and taken down, and we all have one friend who is putting oddly-specific Suno tracks in the group chat. What’s the reaction in China? Mixed. As you could have guessed, ChatGPT is blocked, but a slew of local companies have their own offering. Outside of music, Kimi is the most popular, used much in the way ChatGPT is for copywriting, analyzing text, etc. Bytedance’s Doubao has chatbots and image generation, and the functions above. Baidu has multiple products, one focused more on speech-to-text, translation, meeting notes, etc. and one based on image recognition and generation. All of the short video apps have AI in their editing tools for creating stickers, sounds, text, and more. There are others, you get the idea. But none have really crossed the line and entered the mainstream in the music sense. What I mean is, there are no Chinese Drake’s making a Chinese diss track using AI. But there are a lot of people making cool social media content around it. Great read from Caixin below, “Unlike in the U.S., where AI-driven platforms that allow users to create songs almost instantly with a text prompt have sought to challenge the conventional music industry, China’s initiatives in the space take more of a support role. Rather than trying to create Top 40 hits, they focus on enhancing song recommendation algorithms and auxiliary functions like providing soundtracks for short videos.”
Caixin Global // AI’s Impact on China’s Music Business Has Yet to Top the Charts
SPOTLIGHT // CHINESE MUSIC
This section highlights local Chinese artists, DJs, and labels.
// 那奇沃夫 – CHEKI
Chinese drill anyone? Hard lyrics, fat distorted 808, pitched-up vocal sample, a dude wearing a balaclava in the cover art. That’s CHEKI by 那奇沃夫 (aka Narchywolf). This song is killer. There’s even a key change in the middle. This track is a couple years old, but is going viral because people are using AI to make various public figures’ mouths do the rapping to the song on videos. It’s on repeat in my headphones this week because it’s a banger. What else can I say?
