Yin (音, “music”) is a weekly Radii feature that looks at Chinese songs spanning classical to folk to modern experimental, and everything in between. Drop us a line if you have a suggestion.
This week I’ve been listening to one of my favorite China-based musicians, Li Daiguo, since he’s gearing up to play a rare live show in Beijing tomorrow night. I’ve written a lot about Li in the past, including a short profile for The Wire magazine last summer and a piece from earlier this year for Sixth Tone about music in Dali, a small city in China’s southwestern Yunnan province where Li has lived since 2014.
Originally from Oklahoma, Li is a consummate multi-instrumentalist who first honed his chops on violin. He was gifted enough to land a scholarship to study violin in university, but decamped to China after graduating to follow a more diverse musical path than the straight-ahead conservatory track would allow. In recent years he’s focused his playing to three instruments: cello, the Chinese pipa, and the African mbira. (He’s also a solid beatboxer, incidentally.)
In my opinion his breakout recording was 2016’s Li Shurui, a solo album for pipa that shows Li’s personalized style on the instrument, which he’s honed over years of meticulous daily practice. Since dropping the solo album, Li has also released a few duo collaborations: one with Brooklyn-based trombonist Rick Parker, one with peripatetic percussionist Slim Rothaus, and, most recently, an album with fellow Dali-based experimentalist Huanqing.
If you happen to be in Beijing, catch on him on Saturday, September 9 at La Plantation. If not, here are some streams to enter the singular sonic world of Li Daiguo:
What’s life like when you move to a new country with a completely different language and culture?
How do you achieve balance between work and family?
How do you make sure your young children can adapt to the new environment?
On today’s show, Jingjing and Yajun sit down with Handan Bao, a mother with two children who has lived in three different countries over the past 8 years. Based on her unique experience, Handan shares her life stories, insights and challenges from living in China, Germany and the United States.
As with Artificial Intelligence, the field of robotics presents a technological arms race in which China is keen to gain an edge. CNBC reports:
In addition to the Made in China 2025 plan, the government has also released the Robotics Industry Development Plan, a five-year plan to rapidly expand the country’s industrial robotics sector. By 2020, China wants to be able to manufacture at least 100,000 industrial robots annually. The country is racing full steam ahead to a robot-powered future in a push to not only remake its own economy but also to transform into the world’s robot capital — overtaking Japan, Germany and the United States in the process.
That’s three years away! The CNBC article notes that currently most of the robots in China are not made in China, but the country aims to make it an even 50% split between domestic and foreign robots by 2020, and — a familiar refrain — is willing to spend frantically to get there. CNBC continues, quoting MIT robotics researcher Matthew Beane:
Producing robots in-house, so to speak, is where China is looking to outpace America. Beane noted that China has “never had this character of deliberately going toe-to-toe with another global power.” But what they do have is a desire to look toward the future by investing billions of dollars in robotics and complementary technologies, like artificial intelligence, in order to not rely on other nations to outfit their factories.
“China will throw tons of money toward [robotics] that we will not,” Beane said. “They’re looking to play a long game where, through steady investment, they make it less and less likely that countries that act impulsively can catch up.”
Factory vs Service Robots
Now, the robots that CNBC is talking about are mainly the ones above, the factory-job-stealing type of robot such as those produced by Kuka AG, a German robotics company that was acquired by Chinese appliance maker Midea in a multi-billion dollar deal last year. When it comes to heavy government spending, it’s usually these kind of infrastructural, top-down technologies that get the investment money. But some of the most interesting advances in robotics in China today are happening in the startup sector, with consumer- and service-oriented robots that are often imbued with some kind of AI brain and thus much closer to the Muskian “killer robots that’ll end us all” model that’s making the rounds in the press of late.
Take this lil’ guy, for example: the Domgy, by Beijing robotics and AI company Roobo. While it might look at first glance like a crappy ripoff of that Sony dog robot that was so big in the early 2000s, there’s a lot more going on in Domgy’s dome. Roobo’s core product is an artificial intelligence operating system that can be tailored to operate across a suite of service robots. Their robotics arm exists pretty much only to demonstrate use cases for their AI system, like this dog robot, which can mimic human emotions (cool?) and run facial recognition software to alert you via text if an intruder enters the house when you’re out.
This might seem kind of trivial and niche, but Roobo just raised 350 million yuan (over 53 million USD) to take a deeper dive into their AI chipset in a B-round investment (link in Chinese) that also sees Xiong Minghua, former CTO of internet behemoth Tencent, coming on as chairman.
Roobo’s core technology is more of a behind-the-scenes operating system aimed at enterprises, but more directly consumer-facing robotics companies in China are also successfully raising fistfuls of cash, often directly from customers via crowdfunding campaigns. This guy, the Alpha2 by Shenzhen robotics company UBTech, raised over a million on Indiegogo last January:
And you might remember the Hexa, a spider-like robot that can climb stairs and lift things and comes with a fully programmable software development kit. Wrote about that at the beginning of its modest $100,000 Kickstarter bid; it’s now doubled its fundraising goal, with just under a week left to burn. (Check back on Radii early next week for an interview with Vincross, the Beijing robotics company behind Hexa.)
And there are more, like Suzhou-based company Ecovacs, which makes a Roomba-like vacuum robot, as well as the Winbot for your windows, and the Atmobot, which roams your flat looking for airborne pollutants (admittedly, maybe more of a China Problems thing):
You might not associate the Segway with robots, but the company behind the transportation device was acquired by Beijing company Ninebot in 2015, and they’ve since Voltron’d up with smartphone and appliance manufacturer Xiaomi to create these things, which are f*ckin everywhere in Beijing now:
So, in conclusion, the robots are coming! And by 2020 many of them will be Chinese-made. But don’t take my word for it! Here’s television’s Mark Cuban on the subject:
In an open letter to President Donald Trump last December, he said the United States should invest $100 billion into the robotics industry in order to compete with China.
“We have to win the robotics race. We are not even close right now,” Cuban wrote.
Another one from Burbex, here’s a rather depressing snapshot of the long abandoned Emperor’s View Hotspring and Ski Slope, which has neither hot springs nor ski slopes, just a bunch of sad animal statues and “various marine-themed slides and chutes” emptying out into empty swimming pools (kind of a sub–theme for us this week).
The weirdest thing about this park is its location inside Jing Jin New Town, a satellite town between Beijing and the nearby port city of Tianjin meant to absorb residential overflow and create a three-way mega-megacity the government is calling Jingjingji. They built 3,000 villas in Jing Jin New Town, but nobody came.
Well, at least all the ghosts in that town have a fun theme park to haunt.
While music streaming might be starting to turn a profit in some segments of the Chinese economy, for the vast majority of artists who aren’t TFBoys it’s still a struggle to make a buck. Independent musicians who want to make ends meet with their art can pretty much only do so in the relatively sophisticated markets of Beijing and Shanghai — maybe Chengdu if you’re a trap rapper with sufficient clout — and even then most of the bands scrounging around the underground scene must maintain a day job to make it work.
That said, there’s been a steady stream of fresh tunes coming from Shanghai over the last few months, mostly new projects by seasoned veterans of the city’s underground rock scene. Here are five worth spinning, and maybe throwing a few dollars toward if you like what you hear:
1. Scorpion Prisoner 69 – 四部复仇曲
First up, here’s Scorpion Prisoner 69 with 四部复仇曲 (“four vengeances,” or something like that), a fast-moving EP that bounces freely between punk, thrash, grind, and stoner metal. This was released at the top of the month, a followup to the band’s 2016 debut, which is mostly covers. It took them a year to come out with their first collection of originals, as the band members have to make time between their daily grind and side stints with fellow Shanghai punk miscreants like Round Eye. Bonus points for the album art by Sensitive Word, aka Guangzhou artist Tony Cheung, who’s become kind of a go-to for underground Chinese punk album art.
A bit rougher around the edges, here’s the debut recording from Green Land Ball (绿陆球), the newest unit to feature the vocal talents of Huang Pei, aka Little Punk. Pei shot to Shanghai underground-stardom on the strength of her early solo work and as frontwoman of the band Boys Climbing Ropes, which broke up years ago but will briefly reunite for a standalone performance at the Concrete and Grass festival later this month in Shanghai. (Radii will be on the ground there for a full report — stay tuned.)
This new project is still pretty raw, but Pei’s energy and vocal drive is undeniably there, this time around backed by crunchier, wah-wah heavy grunge. The album description says:
Back in December we spontaneously jammed out a few songs and recorded them as iphone voice memos at Chow’s underground rehearsal space. Then Qiu went to jail cuz he’s too punk for his own good and they have been collecting virtual dust in an invisible cyber cloud ever since. Here’s 2 of them.
More incestuous Shanghai music underground overlap with this one, the April debut from math rock duo Foster Parents. One of these guys works for the music promoter Split Works, which is behind the aforementioned Concrete and Grass festival. Small world of indie rockers in Shanghai, but that underscores the point made earlier — many working musicians in Shanghai supplement their income in other areas of the industry to be able to pay the bills. Anyway, Foster Parents came out with this polished LP of instrumentals earlier this year, which was physically released (and quickly sold out) in the form of a cassette tape by Guangzhou label Qiii Snacks Records. Highly recommend you dig into Qiii’s back catalog to hear what else is happening on the lo-fi end of the Chinese music spectrum, with a special focus on the southeastern tip of the country.
Here’s another brand new release, less than a week old: the debut album from Shanghai riot grrrl outfit Ugly Girls. The opening track “Fuck Boss” is your anti-work anthem as you look forward to the coming weekend, for sure. Ugly Girls features Andy Best on guitar, an old hand on the Shanghai underground scene who was among the first foreigners to start paying attention to underground Chinese music in a systematic way via his Kungfuology blog, and also had a hand in supporting some of the other artists on this list, like Little Punk. The Ugly Girls album is pretty great, a spirited collection of diatribes against gender stereotypes and anti-LGBTQ sensibilities — topics which are pretty common overseas but crop up rarely in the Chinese punk conversation.
Here’s the band showing solidarity with a performance at this year’s Ladyfest Shanghai, an annual event promoting female empowerment and gender equality:
Last up, another (mostly) instrumental long-player by Anti Dogs. The Poem of the Night is the band’s debut, but they have a deep history in Shanghai, featuring ex-members of one of the city’s most storied and legendary underground acts, Top Floor Circus. Time Out’s Jake Newby writes:
Having formed from the ashes of one of Shanghai’s most revered bands, Top Floor Circus, Mei Er’s new project Anti-Dogs have released their first record, a five track album that’s completely different in tone to Dingma’s previous work. It’s a rewarding listen nonetheless and an accomplished debut.
On a scorching night in August, thousands of Chinese youngsters filled a grand stadium in Nanjing to celebrate the four-year anniversary of the Chinese boyband TFBoys. Those who couldn’t attend — 118 million of them — spent a no less memorable night by watching the shows aired over the internet. Screams became a waterfall of real-time comments, called danmu, rolling across the live video. Regrets over not making it in person materialized into 340 million units of virtual gifts sent through the live streams, all of which were run by Tencent that night: QQ Zone, QQ Video, QQ Music, WeSing, Kuwo, KuGou, and KuGou Live.
None of these products, except KuGou Live, were designed specifically to live stream. That’s the point. A user of the social network QQ Zone, for example, wouldn’t have to switch over to KuGou Live to watch her idol TFBoys. Tencent — the Chinese tech giant that has revolutionized how people communicate, pay for, and play video games — is now ready to redefine the ways music is consumed.
To start with, Tencent has been able to dominate almost the entire market. Last July, its flagship music streamer QQ Music merged with competitor China Music Corporation (CMC) to form Tencent Music and Entertainment Group (TME). Together, Kuwo and KuGou — formerly owned by CMC — and QQ Music, control a whopping 75% market share, according to a report by the Data Center of China internet (DCCI).
Top music streaming apps in China 2016-2017 (Data source: DCCI; graph by TechNode)
That dominance alone, however, doesn’t equal a lucrative business. For decades, Chinese people have gotten used to getting music for free in a piracy-unhampered country. “Our number of monthly active users accessing music is actually over 600 million, which means, at 15 million [paying subscribers], our conversion to subscription is still less than 3%,” says Vice President of TME Andy Ng in an interview with International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). He adds that in more mature markets, the percentage is around 20-30%.
But Ng is optimistic: “We see a huge opportunity and potential for growth.” The numbers are no doubt promising. In 2016, recorded music revenue in China grew 20.3 percent driven by a 30.6 percent growth in streaming alone, according to IFPI. And the music giant is already finding ways to lure Chinese people into paying something that used to be so easily free.
Unmatched copyright control
While licensing fees can easily eat up the bulk of revenues, Tencent knows that in the long run, the investment will pay off. In May, TME signed with Universal Music Group (UMG), the last one of the “Big Three” record labels to strike an exclusive licensing deal with the Chinese music giant. With the added roster of major Chinese labels through the CMC merger, Tencent’s streaming rights in China is unrivaled.
The music giant also sub-licenses this content to competitors. One of them is NetEase Cloud Music, the music subsidiary of Nasdaq-listed NetEase Inc. Over the past two years, QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music have been aggressively suing each other over copyright infringement, hoping to snag users once certain music became exclusive on their own platform.
The copyright bloodbath is happening against a backdrop of China’s tightened regulation over online music. In July 2015, the government finally stepped up to order all internet music providers to delete their pirated content. Samuel Chou, CEO of Sony Music Entertainment China and Taiwan, went as far as calling 2016 “the first year of a new era for music in China”.
Beyond music streaming
Adding more legal gunpowder, however, is not enough. “Music was considered a free commodity in China for so long that it will take time to change people’s perception,” reckons Simon Robson, President of Warner Music Asia. “We’re talking about a situation where about 90% of the market was piracy.”
To help smooth the transition, Tencent charges little. QQ Music has a three-tier monthly fee at RMB 8 and 12, and 15 ($1.22/$1.83/$2.18). In comparison, Spotify Premium is priced at $9.99 a month. But this is nothing new to Chinese users, who have long been beneficiaries of the constant price wars between internet companies heavily subsidized by investors. The bike-rental battle is a sobering example. Kuwo, KuGou, and NetEase Cloud Music all offer similar price points as QQ Music.
Just as Tencent’s WeChat goes beyond a messaging app to permeate every aspect of the Chinese service economy, TME is building an ecosystem of value-added services around music streaming to make music pay. Basic tactics include perks for premium users like concert tickets, professional sound quality, and game credits—a luxury from having a parent company with a global dominance in online gaming.
Tencent’s ecosystem of apps that were used to stream TFBoys’ concert (Poster image: TFBoys; graph by TechNode)
QQ Music also tested out what it’s called the “digital album”. When the platform released a high-profile album, it will take the album out of the streaming pool and offer it for a one-off fee. After two to three months, QQ Music will then migrate the album back to its streaming service.
Lastly, Tencent has looked beyond the audio and tapped into arguably the hottest buzzword swirling around the Chinese internet circle since 2016: video live streaming. A recent report by iResearch puts the market at an estimated RMB 20.8 billion (around US$ 3 billion). Audiences fixated on their screens toss virtual gifts over the virtual stage to their idols—be they established star under the spotlight or farmers toiling in the potato field from a small town. The online fervor for TFBoys proves that there is still room for Tencent in the crowded space.
TFBoys concert live streamed via QQ Music (Screenshot taken from the QQ Music app)
Tencent certainly hasn’t overlooked Chinese people’s obsession with karaoke. WeSing, an app that lets users sing karaoke on the phone and share the recorded work with friends and strangers, has surged to become the biggest player in the vertical totaling 460 million users (in Chinese). When the live streaming wave hit, WeSing naturally bolted the function onto the platform, and virtual gifting has, in 2016, gained popularity on the app as highlighted in Tencent’s annual report.
Turning a profit
With an array of business models surrounding music streaming, TME is already giving revenue boost to its parent company. In 2016, Tencent’s social networks revenues increased by 54 percent to around $4 billion (though still dwarfed by the its $10 billion gaming revenues). That increase mainly reflects growth in digital content services, which include Tencent’s music business and virtual item sales. According to someone familiar with the matter, a significant amount of TME’s live streaming revenues came from KuGou Live, in which Tencent has a controlling stake via the CMC merger.
QQ Music is also, amazingly, profitable. Over in the west, Spotify has yet to reach profitability despite having 20 million paying customers. Like Spotify, the biggest source of revenues for the Chinese music app are monthly subscriptions followed by advertising (in Chinese). As TME is on course for IPO at a $10 billion valuation, the world will be listen closely to how it makes its numbers sing.
