The Future of Taiwanese Pop

Anyone visiting a record store can tell at a glance that the industry has hit hard times: crowds have thinned, floor space has shrunk, and releases on the racks are sparser. With fewer listeners willing to pay for actual CDs, the industry is throwing more and more into packaging, making albums flashier and flashier and using gimmicks like unusual sizes and eye-catching special gifts. Often, an album is re-released with new packaging or added songs only shortly after being first released. The idea is to shear the fleeces of loyal customers several times.

With music that blends R&B and hip-hop, Jay Chou is currently Taiwan's most popular mainstream singer. In recent years he has started acting in films as well.

Many-faceted performing artists

The market transformation has brought a new music culture. Ho Tung-hung, an assistant professor of psychology at Fu Jen Catholic University who studies the sociology of pop music, says that power in the Chinese music industry has moved from traditional recording labels to agents in recent years. With record sales declining year after year, the chief source of revenue for mainstream pop stars has shifted to advertising endorsements, live performances, mobile phone ring tones, films and KTV licensing fees. Record sales themselves have become much less important.

Music critic Wong Chia-ming, a longtime observer of Chinese pop music trends, says that CD sales have become like singers' "name cards," serving to maintain their status as stars. Albums have become stepping stones that allow performers to nab more lucrative "moonlighting" gigs.

Faith Yang, a veteran singer, released a new album in 2006. It rekindled the fashion for "independent women singers."

Creative idols

In Chinese pop music circles the "pop idols" and "creative singers" have traditionally been placed in two distinctly different categories. In the 1990s pop stars like the Little Tigers or Jacky Cheung didn't excel at writing their own music. Instead, their trademarks were their flashy dance moves and cool images. Singer-songwriters such as Luo Ta-you and Bobby Chen, on the other hand, who were known for creating their own music, were not noted for their elaborate dance routines and smoldering good looks.

But in recent years, there has been a line of male singers, including Jay Chou, Wang Lee-hom, and David Tao, who are both pop idols and behind-the-scene musicians, handling everything from writing their own music and lyrics, to producing their own recording sessions, but are also good dancers with pop idol looks. True supermen, they do it all.

Wong Chia-ming explains that the model for the multi-talented performing artist comes from American R&B and hip-hop. The trend bears witness to Taiwan's pop-music transformation from being like Japan, where the emphasis is on pop idols' looks and dance skills, to being more like the American market.

Their music has a Western sound but sometimes employs Chinese images (such as dragons and nunchaku). Added in are youthful themes (basketball, racing cars, and street dancing) matched with global hip-hop styles. It is a mix that makes this type of music popular both in Taiwan and other Chinese-language markets.

With income streams growing more diverse, album sales are no longer big stars' main source of revenue. The photo shows Stefanie Sun at a motorcycle promotion.

Independent female singers

Another major feature of Taiwan's new music scene has been well summed by Yan Jun, a famous music critic from the PRC, who referred on a visit to Taiwan in 2006 to the strong interest in the mainland toward Taiwanese "independent female singers." Interestingly, this term is rarely used among music critics in Taiwan, but it does accurately define a common spirit shown by certain Taiwanese women singers in recent years.

For Chinese music fans, the term "independent female singer" refers to a woman singer who has "a fiercely unique and personal style or a non-mainstream conception of music." The term was first used to describe the singer Faye Wong and her main influences: the British band the Cocteau Twins and the Irish band the Cranberries. It has become a defining feature of Taiwan because of the singers that have emerged here since the mid-1990s, including Faith Yang, Huang Hsiao-chen, Tanya Tsai, Yeh Shu-yin, Patricia Ho, Sandee Chen, Cheer Chen and Zhang Xuan.

Most of these women singers in Taiwan are independent musicians at the margins of the commercial industry, who write their own music and sometimes even produce their own albums. Their musical styles are close to European and American folk music styles or alternative rock. In terms of image, they have moved away from the gentle, soft-spoken voice of the "second sex" to create a voice for the new woman of Taiwan, who is independent, full of personality, and bold about expressing her own opinions.

Blurring boundaries

Many people lay the blame for music industry woes on the Internet. They hold that MP3 has eroded sales, spurring a decline from the 1990s when singers like A-mei and Jacky Cheung would sell over a million copies of their records, to the current day when top artists like Jay Chou can at best sell 300,000, and in 2005 S.H.E, Stefanie Sun, and Jolin Tsai had trouble breaking the 100,000 mark. A typical release will sell only 8,000 to 20,000 copies, so an album that sells even 10,000 copies today can be described as doing pretty well. It can't be measured against the glories of the past.

What's more, Wong Chia-ming notes that explosive growth in media outlets in recent years has fractured the mass market. Consequently, listeners' tastes have grown quite diverse. The old approach taken by recording companies of purchasing large amounts of advertising or music video play doesn't garner the same results these days. "But that's all mainstream recording companies understand; it's really stupid!" he says in frustration.

"What people are looking for these days often isn't 'the fashion' that is popular with everyone else but rather something that distinguishes them from others, something that conveys their personal 'attitude,'" Wong says. "Hence, a single song or single album isn't likely again to sweep up all of Taiwan as it once could!" His assessment is borne out in industry figures.

According to statistics from Taiwan's two main music store chains, TCR/Rose and Five Music, only the top-selling two albums have any shot of garnering 10% of the weekly market, and they almost never surpass 30%. An album that's tenth on the list will only account for about 1% of sales. This conveys how listeners' tastes are varied and no longer monopolized by a few products.

Lin Kuan-chun, president of the Internet music platform KKBOX, observes that KKBOX has more than 1 million items of music in its database, but so-called "mainstream" Chinese music accounts for only 10% of that. When you add up the site's leading 100 songs, they only account for 20% of consumption. Everything else accounts for 80%. And 90% of the music on the website has been listened to "at least once."

Landy Chang, CEO of Neutron Innovation (BVI) Ltd., used to be the general manager of Magic Stone recording, where he experienced the glory days of Taiwan's recording industry. Back when access to information was much more limited, music was sold to consumers like "fish food fed to aquarium fish; they would eat what you fed them." "Back in those days, there may have been artists that only deserved a grade of 70," he says, mincing no words," but because listeners only had a standard of 20, their albums still sold well!" With the development of the Internet, young people can now stay up on musical trends from around the world. As a result it's harder and harder to sell albums. But it also means that musicians with the right stuff have greater opportunities to stand out and make something of themselves.

Independents break through

The disappearance of super-albums has reduced the difference between mainstream and non-mainstream albums. Consequently, non-mainstream music that has long been overlooked is better able to compete against mainstream music. Notably, in Taiwan in 2006 the non-mainstream group Sodagreen and the singer Zhang Xuan both had albums that sold more than 30,000 copies, more than many a mainstream act that had invested large sums in promotion and packaging. It was a classic example of a little guy making it big, and it further blurred the lines between the mainstream and alternative. It bore witness to the recent rise of independent music, and the inroads that genre is making in the Taiwan market.

It used to be that non-mainstream music, with its small sales volume, was not emphasized. Generally available only through special channels, it was hard to find in the chains. But over the past two years TCR/Rose and Five Music, both of which have repeatedly downsized and merged, have both installed racks devoted to independent Taiwan music with more than 50 different choices on display. And this doesn't include many bands' self-produced CDs that are only distributed in a few outlets or sold at concerts.

The declining fortunes of the recording industry are reflected in the declining numbers of chain record stores and the smaller size of the stores that remain. The photo shows a branch of TCR/Rose, the industry's largest chain in Taiwan, near the Taipei Station.

Independent waxing

For a long time now, Taiwan has lacked a trustworthy mechanism for auditing music sales. Figures for radio plays, television video plays and sales released by record companies are all typically used for promotion and are unreliable gauges of popularity. But from certain evidence we can clearly see that creative singers and independent musicians are beginning to gain a foothold.

Take, for instance, the bestseller list at Five Music, which is regarded as one of the more reliable measures within the industry. Early in the year, apart from the mainstream singers Wang Lee-hom and Jay Chou, the cutely mischievous independent band Natural Q also placed on the charts although it had spent almost nothing on publicity. On the chart in late December, you can see Monkey Insane, Chairman, and Sodagreen, and three singers--Faith Yang, Summer Lei, and the old rock-and-roll warrior Wu Bai--who, although recording for mainstream companies, have independent styles. With these six in the top 20, it exposes the myth that only pop idols can sell records.

The truth is that when it comes to album sales, mainstream recording companies still take the lion's share. But take Stefanie Sun's A Perfect Day, for instance. Although about 100,000 copies sold, when you factor in the NT$10 million-plus spent on promotion, it's still a money loser. On the other hand, although the sales figures for independent and creative artists aren't that high, their costs are more reasonable. Now, with mainstream companies gradually going into retreat, and with the trend toward more varied, fractured tastes among the general public, there are greater opportunities for non-mainstream music.

In countries like the United States and Britain, there are often separate lists for independent music. With different lists for different genres, you can divide the market according to taste. For example, Billboard's Modern Rock Chart lists the most popular songs on college radio stations. It's a way of tracking the tastes of "educated youth," those aged 18-30 who have or are working toward a bachelor's degree or higher. Currently, there are no statistics of this kind in Taiwan. But the truth is that those buying music by creative artists and those buying albums by pop idols are not the same group. In this age of thin profits, the vast difference in costs between the music of these two groups means that mainstream and independent musicians are not totally competitors by nature. Groups taking the creative path are in fact incubating another market segment, opening it up for many consumers that had already abandoned Chinese-language music.

Seeking integration

Confronted with the rise of independent and creative music, mainstream companies are hoping for some form of integration, but perhaps because of their old habits of operating the star-making machinery, these attempts haven't turned out as hoped.

For instance, when Luan Tan won a Golden Melody Award for best group in 1998, they shouted that "Taiwan's age of the bands has arrived!" And then in 1999 when Mayday's first album sold well, it caused many people, including many in the mainstream market, to await with much fanfare a great age for Taiwanese bands. Yet, with mainstream companies not understanding how to market creative bands, that coming age turned out to be just a mirage.

In 1998 a group of students who were members of the song-writing club at Chinese Culture University created the band Peppermint. With the "band fever" of that era, mainstream companies expressed interest in signing them, "but the condition was the lead guitarist had to be replaced with a woman, so that Peppermint could be marketed as a girl band!" says the band's lead singer Lin Chien, half angry and half amused.

The Brit-pop-styled rock band 13 released an album with a mainstream recording company in 2001. Trying to replicate the successful model of Mayday, they were packaged as a creatively talented "Visual-Kei"-style boy idol band. Consequently, they were ridiculed by fans, and although Universal Music Group spent more than NT$10 million on a release of their record, only 1000-2000 copies were sold. Afterwards, they kept a low profile for six years, and it wasn't until the end of 2006 that they finally released an album with an independent label. The lead singer Hsu Te-huan says that this time they handled the music, lyrics, videos and styling themselves: "It's not like before when the company would meddle in everything." He says with great emotion that now it's as if they've returned to their true selves, and this is their first real release.

Zhang Xuan, whose 2006 album My Life Will... was a surprise hit, selling more than 30,000 copies, in fact finished the album more than five years ago, but mainstream record companies thought it was "not commercial enough" and refused to release it. She had no alternative but to take her music directly to the people. Only after the unique charm of her live performances won over many fans did a record company try releasing this "old work." They were amazed when Internet presales alone surpassed 6000. Now that's a black horse.

The new order

Confronted with this creative wave, Wong Chia-ming believes that mainstream companies "still haven't woken up," and are stuck in their old ways of stoking the star-making machinery. But independent labels are ready to go, prepared at any time to spark revolution.

In truth independent music isn't an enemy of mainstream music. If handled correctly, it could be another fertile field for Chinese-language pop music, adding rich diversity to it.

Ultimately, as the popularity of singing idols rises and falls, those who work hard to create substantial music will be the ones who transcend the whims of fashion to move people's hearts over the long haul.