Web Offers ‘Business 101′ for Musicians

By Wang Yu

The Internet era is changing the music industry.
MP3s have decimated CD sales; contracts with record labels no longer guarantee that music will spread; musicians sell songs directly to their fans; live concerts are the new way to make a living; and vinyl releases attract vintage music lovers to new bands.
How does an artist survive in this tumultuous new world?
Musician Guide, a Chinese website built to share information about new ways to promote music, has the attention of the industry. But it may have a tough battle to win attention with its limited market capacity and fickle Chinese audience. It takes more to adapt a model for the domestic market.

A year ago, when Music Guide founder Ma Jialong started to blog about promoting music online, he was merely a college student researching the domestic music industry. As an international business major, Ma never imagined entering the music business.
That changed in his senior year.
Ma was commissioned to help promote his friend, an up-and-coming hip-hop artist, who had already cut a demo CD his freshman year. Like many young entrepreneurs in Guangdong, Ma was known for making money even in high school, and so the young rapper turned to him for help.
He took a business trip to Beijing and Shanghai, hoping to help his friend land a contract, but no record label was interested in the music.
“I knocked on the doors of every record label I knew, including Sony, EMI and other big names,” he says. “I failed to sell the demo, but I did meet some industry insiders. That’s when I learned that because so few are ever profitable, record labels are unwilling to gamble on new artists.”
Ma spent the following three years studying the mainstream and indie music scenes both home and abroad and found somewhat surprisingly that many Chinese people in big cities see weekend live concerts as an essential social activity, and that they are also willing to pay for digital music.
“We have a lot of consulting services we could offer mainstream artists, but since our budget is limited we cannot do much to help them. Now with an indie artist, we have a lot more options. There are lots of young, talented artists who only need a business guide,” Ma says.
Together with his high school classmate Jingjing, who majored in film directing in Beijing, Ma started Musician Guide as his new business after graduating.
Today he lives in Foshan, where the indie music scene is almost nonexistent: his knowledge of the indie music scene is dependent on friends and the Internet.
Musician Guide introduces overseas music sharing sites, analyzes successful singers’ business models and discusses how overseas artists promote their music.
“Basically, indie artists are no different than mainstream stars,” Ma says. He envisions the indie scene as a pyramid, where the artists at the top make big money and the base expands as opportunity develops.
“Now is the time to unite everyone to promote music,” says Tony Li, co-founder of Yi Record, a label that helps overseas artists build their reputations in China.
“Consider our last project for the Canadian band Jets Overhead. At first they came to China for an Expo gig. Then the promoter Split Works organized a tour for them and the digital music company R2G took charge of their digital music distribution, we worked as a coordinator,” he said.

Each agency took care of only its own job, but when they came together, the effect was remarkable. Of course, these trends can hardly summarize the entire indie scene. While the last generation of underground artists made a name for themselves through years of hard work, today’s young musicians are unwilling to struggle and instead taking straight jobs.
For many contemporary indie artists, music is a pastime.
“[But] if an artist could earn money from his music or live concert, I think he would probably quit his job,” Ma says.
At two gigs per month played to an audience of 100 and a 50-yuan ticket price, artists could earn at least 6,000 yuan every month. They can also earn money by selling CDs.
Sometimes, all an artist has to do is make him or herself popular on Douban,” Ma says.

His Music Guide also has lessons to teach indie artists to shoot creative music videos on a budget. Popular videos on YouTube are chosen as examples, and the site lists every step of the process including relevant techniques in Adobe Premiere. But much of the information for how to turn a profit remains English-only.
“The overseas indie music scene is mature. I’ve noticed that many of the sites Musician Guide links to are in English,” says Chasez Zhao, music critic.
While their advice may make sense for foreign artists, things are very different in China.

For those trying to reach the larger audience, the Internet coupled with aggressive self-marketing might be the only option,” Zhao says.
But be wary of thee new business partners. Even musicians who circulate their songs for free to promote the band can end up trapped. Several unscrupulous companies are known to profit off songs to which they do not own a copyright.
“In China, artists are all at a disadvantage. They get sucked into unfair deals with record labels and festivals because they think those are the only ways to spread their music,” Li says.
Music Guide and Ma’s consulting company are long-term projects, he says. Unlike many similar newcomers to the music scene, he and his partner are not in for the short term.
“Everything will depend on how the scene grows. Our costs are minimal and our investors know they must be patient,” Ma says.