We are on holiday. It is lovely. However, there are a couple of things to do. First, to round up all the various bits and pieces around the web on Chinese music, the second, to write an editorial about why we think the Beijing music scene is suffering. The editorial will come next week, but in the meantime, here’s some reading for the October national holiday.
- Shanghai Bands getting their dues: Dan Shapiro, columnist and band member extraordinaire, is potentially departing Middle Kingdom shores fairly soon. In a long and detailed article, he highlights the profusion of Shanghai based bands that, long ignored, are starting to populate October holiday festival week. It’s a measure of the increasing strength of Shanghai’s music scene that there are so many bands making so many journeys to play big stages around the country.
- China Festivals run wild: a pretty basic article at the pretty basic Global Times (Chinese English language mouthpiece anyone?). Not much to see here
- Zebra Festivals: the Global Times (again) run a quickie on the launching of Zebra Festival in Hangzhou. Forbes also runs a profile with Zebra founder Scarlett Li, talking about her experiences with the festival and her plans for the future. Zebra does seem to have their house in order, but we cannot stomach this oft repeated (and perpetuated by the festival itself) attendance figure of 150,000 year one and 200,000 year two. We were at Zebra #1 and would estimate the numbers at 10,000 max per day. Once again, inflating the numbers does nothing for any of the festivals with regard to sponsors or attendees. Glastonbury festival has a capacity of 177,000 people and is by far and away the biggest music festival in the world. How Zebra can claim to be larger is beyond us.
- Beijing Today with a well researched and realistic article, Music Festivals and the Illusion of Success. We like this article of course, number one because it quotes us, and number two because they agree with our prognostications.
Happy holidays everyone. We will have some festival reviews upcoming. Until then…