And so, Shanghai has two big shows this coming week. Based loosely around Zhangbei InMusic Festival, Panic at the Disco and CocoRosie are both coming to Mao Live House. Both shows are pretty expensive (300RMB and 120RMB presale), but while Shanghai is used to 120RMB at the upper end of the ticketing spectrum, 300 kuai hasn’t been seen for quite some time (if you disregard the stupid prices charged for “top 1” DJs).
It will also be interesting to see if these two bands and Killing Joke will have the pulling power necessary to drag people out of Beijing and all the way to the Zhangbei Grasslands. The InMusic festival was a brave, brave effort in 2009, but are the Chinese masses ready to travel long distances for the music they don’t always yet love?
We always thought it was going to take a biiiiiiggggg headliner to get serious numbers in 2010, and while PATD! is certainly more than just a mid level emo band (we called them that a few weeks back and were asked to check our facts – PATD! actually has 1.3m Myspace friends and does indeed have significant pulling power in the USofA), they may not be the mega headliner that the festival needs. We hope they are because Inmusic is pioneering a type of out-of-city festival that Chinese kids will learn to enjoy.
Incidentally, there will be 3 out of town festivals around Beijing in the 4 weeks from 27 August (Tanglewood) to the 24th September (Dreamvalley).
Time will tell…