Midi Awards were back, this time in Shenzhen. Had some interesting nominations this year and Beijing Daze brought up the point that it’d be great to get some more female talent through (there’s got to be some amazing musicians out there, just got to unearth them).
Some of the highlights:
Best rock album of the year: Xie Tianxiao – Illusion (谢天笑 – 幻觉)
Best rock song of the year: 万能青年旅店《乌云典当记》
Best Rock band of the year: 万能青年旅店
Best Female rock singer: 付菡
Best Metal band of the year: 战斧
Best live rock show: 谢天笑
Best album artwork: P.K.14《1984》
Full announcement info here.
ZhongChou / Pocket Music
So we mentioned this over the holidays: one of the biggest Chinese crowd-funding websites ZhongChou (众筹) is making moves into music.
On Nov 22nd, they announced a collaboration with the specialist music crowd-funding website Musikid (乐童音乐平台) to launch a fund of 1 million RMB to support Chinese musicians. They chose 8 – 10 artists in their first round of funding, and allowed users to decide how the money was distributed. Via MusicKid’s virtual currency, for every “coin” a user gave to an artist, the artist would receive 10RMB from the fund, to go toward recording costs etc.
Then on Dec 25th, ZhongChou announced a partnership with Pocket Music to launch another fund of 1 million RMB to support live music. The money will be used to bring international acts to China, proposing to put on (an ambitious) 400 shows. After that, they are thinking about raising the foundation to 10 million to support more independent artists, which is fine and dandy.
But why Pocket Music?
They’ve had a few drawbacks in the past with festival cancellations, but nevertheless have managed to pull together over 100 shows in +10 cities each year. They’ve also helped release and distribute records, so from an outsider’s perspective – the perspective of a company who’s target market is pretty much exclusively comprised of young Chinese music fans from the lower tiers who are often (well arguably) not interested in the more obscure indie projects they’re supporting – there’s a clear pull. Pocket Music provides another avenue, as there’s nothing quite like a live show to wean you off easy listening c-pop hits. Each to their own, each to their own…