As musicians and record companies come to
grips with the fast-paced changes of the music
scene, industry insiders recognize Taiwan's
potential to market its music beyond its shores.
In an alternative Taipei cafe just a stone's throw from National Taiwan University, the front-man for young indie band 1976 and a club DJ are talking music. A-kai, who sings and plays guitar in a band noted--before military service and overseas study put the music on the backburner--for its shimmering British-influenced melodic rock, is in some ways at the opposite end of the musical spectrum from Rez, who pumps out electronica on the local club scene. But that does not stop them talking music. They talk little else--they live music. A-kai, or Chen Ray-kai, works by day as an administrator at BenQ's Digital Music Center, a pioneering local effort to make the Internet pay as a medium for delivering music. Rez, or Lin Yu-kuang, works in sales at the independent High Note Records.
And, they agree, it is the best of times; it is the worst of times for the Taiwan music scene. First the bad news: As any local music industry executive will tell you, sales have plummeted 57 percent since 1997. Recently released Council for Cultural Affairs numbers show that in 1997 local industry sales were at NT$11.6 billion (US$351.5 million ); by 2002 that was NT$4.9 billion (US$148 million ), and the numbers continue to contract, leading headline writers to reach for words like "crisis" when they run stories on the industry. The good news: The Taiwan music scene is livelier than it has ever been, with concerts attracting record turnouts, dance clubs that serve as apprentice shops for a new generation of DJs opening by the day, and audiences becoming increasingly sophisticated.
But, in a sense, that is a way of saying that the good news is as much a part of the problem as the bad news. "It's got so that it's very difficult to find something that everybody can relate to," says A-kai.
The saccharine staples that were the hallmark of the Taiwan music scene are no longer the reliable market pleasers they were. In fact, they were already under siege in 1997, the last bumper year for the music industry, when it became obvious that sales by perennial favorites such as Stella Chang were being undermined by a host of newcomers like independent-turned-mainstream rocker Wu Bai, hip new-age singer-songwriter Chang Chen-yue , and even quirky indigenous retro acts like the Kings of Kinmen .
But, as veteran music industry insider Alice Chang notes, the changes had begun long before that. "The campus music scene of the 1980s really shook things up," she says, pointing out that artists like Luo Ta-you, who famously joined the hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square in the 1989 student movement, initiated a trend away from cabaret and mass-market songs of love and loss to reflective self-written folk songs that celebrated life in Taiwan, and urged listeners to think differently about their lives--even rebel a little. That opened the door for a new generation of musicians like Wu Bai, whose rock and roll evolved in the Taipei live pub scene in the early 1990s, and whom Chang helped promote in her early days with Magic Stone Records.
Fast-forward to this year, and the scene has become even more complex. Old-fashioned sing-alongs have been kept afloat by the continued popularity of karaoke, which emerged in the late 1980s, says Chang, while Luo Ta-you and Wu Bai continue to perform to packed audiences--and in Wu Bai's case still crank out a worthy, if less than best-selling, album once a year. Meanwhile, industry-created idol-pop bands like S.H.E. and 5566 jostle for airwave space with the likes of Jay Chou, Taiwan's musical prodigy who fuses rhythm and blues and rap influences to create a unique local style.
But talk to young musicians like A-kai and Rez, and they will point out that not only are Taiwan's annual mass-line-up rock concerts, Spring Scream in Kenting, and the Hohai Yan Rock Festival in Fulong, attracting dozens of bands and tens of thousands of punters, but that the burgeoning Taipei club scene is kindling a new enthusiasm for club music. And, for an industry that's hooked on regular doses of mass-selling albums, this growing diversity of local tastes presents a real problem, says A-kai.
Enter the Internet. If diversity is creating headaches for music executives worldwide, Internet file sharing has been blazing a scorched-earth trail through the once lucrative CD industry. The generally staid but influential New Yorker ran a lead story in July last year entitled "The End of Music?" It is a rhetorical headline that perhaps over-dramatizes the recent turn of events--but not wildly. The digitization of musical recordings for the CD format in the 1980s made it possible for the Internet generation, two decades later, to "rip" CD content into MP3 format, and then share songs, or even entire albums, among Web communities--and Taiwan has been no exception.
The culprits are so-called peer-to-peer, or P2P, web sites, whose software allows users to search the databases of multiple other users for MP3s. Web sites, like KaZaA and LimeWire, are difficult to shut down because there is no central database of illegal songs for download, though that has not stopped the industry in Taiwan from launching lawsuits against homegrown Kuro and Ezpeer, both of which have as many as 30,000 users online at any given time swapping music. The two companies have vowed to fight back, and the threat of legal action is doing little to deter the legions of young people--formerly the mainstay of the music industry's profits--from downloading songs.
Compounding the problem for industry executives faced with dwindling sales figures is the emergence of CD burners. They may not be an automatic add-on with every computer sold, but they are inexpensive and widely available, and allow anyone with a copy of a CD to make multiple copies, or to make their own compilations with downloaded MP3s.
For Landy Chang, former president of Magic Stone Records, all this amounts to a convergence of problems that the industry can only respond to by coming up with new models for doing business. Chang, who is working on a new music industry project he will not discuss, ticks off Taiwan's musical maladies in short order, like a man who has rehearsed his lines.
"One," he says, "Taiwan is a small market. Then you have the fact that after the lifting of martial law in 1987, there was, within a short time, an end to limitations on the media. Since 1994, we've seen hundreds of new media emerging, so it's very competitive. Then you've got outside influences. In the past, people didn't listen to foreign music much. Now it's everywhere. And that's serious competition. We're not just competing with ourselves now; we're competing with the globe. And, in a small competitive market like Taiwan, it's hard to come up with the budgets to reach international standards."
Chang is far from finished. A new economy of sprawling product diversity also muddies the waters, he says. "Music today is competing in a market of unlimited choices." That's Chang's way of saying that the kids who 15 years ago had NT$100 (US$3) in loose change to buy a cassette tape of their favorite artist are more likely today to save their money for a laptop computer, or an I-pod, or the latest mobile phone, or perhaps a digital camera. While this is a phenomenon that others in the industry are fighting--the first file-sharing computer user was successfully taken to court late last year--Chang is phlegmatic about what it means for the future. "It's a consumer choice," he says almost defiantly, hinting that unless the industry changes with the times, music--long Taiwan's most dynamic cultural sphere--will go the way of the island's movie industry.
"At the moment, the only thing supporting the market is the big names," says Chang, who adds that this reliance on the money acts also makes it difficult for performers to get a start. "If the local market cannot support creativity, it loses its ability to maintain its edge."
But is Taiwan losing its edge? Nobody seems to think so, despite the problems. The reason for that lies precisely in one of the thorns--the diversity factor. Take the songwriting, singing phenomenon Jay Chou. Before he released his debut album, "Jay" in 2000, Chou was a songwriter for Alpha Records, a subsidiary of the Holiday KTV chain and brainchild of prime-time gross-out comedian Jerry Wu. Considered too shy and not telegenic enough for Taiwan's preening music business, Chou might have languished in studio obscurity forever if he had not been, well, not to put too fine a point on it, so well versed in musical trends and so good. Like so many young Taiwanese, 25-year-old Chou is steeped in musical influences that stretch far beyond the backyard of his native Linkou. The result is a sound that crosses borders, making Chou the latest in a series of artists that have put Taiwan on the map as the musical headquarters of the Chinese-speaking world, and increasingly in recent years even non-Chinese-speaking Southeast Asia.
This is no new phenomenon. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, balladeer Theresa Teng--who shares her surname with China's grand patriarch of open-door economics, Deng Xiaoping--enchanted Chinese audiences, winning her the nickname of "Xiao-deng" (little Teng), as opposed to "Lao-deng" (old Deng), who held the reigns of power. In the late 1990s, Taiwan aboriginal singing sensation Chang Hui-mei (or as she is popularly known, A-mei), following in the footsteps of predecessors Shunza and Coco Lee, wowed China with her gutsy rhythm and blues. And targeting China, says Landy Chang, is probably the only way forward for Taiwan's embattled music industry. A-kai and Rez agree.
"You need to make China your backyard," says Chang. "And if Taiwan is not more aggressive about doing that, it'll lose everything. We need to build our position against China, and culture is the only way."
A-kai points to Sweden and Iceland that export music in an enormously disproportionate proportion to their populations. "Taiwan should have an even bigger future when you look at the potential size of the China market," he says.
So, is this where the government steps in? Views are mixed. A recent government announcement that it plans to develop the island as a musical center has created much debate, with the skeptics wondering, even if the plan gets implemented, whether its results will have anything to do with the genuine needs of the music industry.
Some like A-kai and a gathering chorus of industry insiders reckon government money could be put to good use by establishing a homegrown version of the successful Seattle Museum of Rock, with an attached library and resources that might inspire and educate future generations of musicians in Taiwan.
Landy Chang falls among the skeptics. He does not see Taiwan's future in terms of big-budget government handouts, but in terms of something uniquely Taiwanese. "There are so many great young talented people here doing amazing things--they're the future." He stops and thinks for a moment, as if looking for the perfect sales pitch. "Think about it," he says. "This is the first time in our history that young people have had complete freedom to access and exchange information. That's the future."
Chris Taylor is a freelance journalist based in Taipei.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Chris Taylor.