Things look pretty glum for music in China.  I was out at a vegetarian restaurant with three friends, two of which are former members of a hip hop men's dancing band, one of which is a music producer.

According to them, the main issues with popular music in China is that there is no money to be made.  Nobody buys songs over here, everything is downloaded for free over China's google: baidu (including all the foreign hits, though somehow they don't show up on the search engine when I'm in NY).  And that means less money for producing and therefore, a lower quality of music.

The only companies who will invest money in recording artists are movie companies.  Movies do make money in China, and I'm guessing the movie companies want to get some extra publicity for their products through marketing their actors as recording artists.  Which means that you have a lot of good actors who sing off-key on the radio waves and on almost every TV concert show.

The Chinese music industry is the opposite of the US music industry, according to my dinner mates.  In the US, singers become famous by doing concerts, then they sign onto a record label and they are pushed to bring out albums.  Although personally, I doubt whether this is true. I've heard of US singers being put on the back burner by record companies and not getting finance for their new material.

In China, you live ten years off of one song: you get signed on by a label, they finance one single and its music video, and then you perform that song everywhere in the country for as long as it's profitable.  The only way the record company can make money in China is off of concerts.  Which means singers are flown this way and that, doing two concerts a day, maybe one in Shanghai, one in Beijing.  And they don't have time to create anything new.

So the challenge for me (watch how Aventurina takes on the world!) is to find a way, if I can manage to create good songs, to make my music, my products, my brand profitable.  Or at least, profitable enough for me to eat and feed my cat, and continue creating.  I have to think of a new model that I could create and that would work over here.  Quite a challenge, quite a lot of fun!