Promotion of artists in China

Why China?

With a population of 1.4 billion people, of whom about 800 million are active Internet users, China is now the largest market for the music industry with an annual 10-percent growth rate and market cap of 370 billion yuan (approximately $50 billion) a year. Streaming services and music platforms provide hundreds of millions of Chinese people daily with music content, where instead of the usual Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play we have dozens of local streaming services that you have never heard of. The music market is divided between the media giants Tencent (QQ Music/KUWO/ KUGOU) and Netease Cloud Music with an audience of 700 million and 400 million people respectively.

The beginning of the 21st century was marked by rapid economic growth in China, which became the starting point for all C-pop culture that had been hidden behind the screen of Chinese censorship and made inaccessible to western listeners for a long time. Active investments in local show business, as well as partnerships with major foreign labels and the development of the Internet (including the first music services), allowed China to adopt Western music trends and develop C-pop sounds in new and exciting ways.

However, Chinese pop culture is very difficult to identify as breakthrough, especially against the backdrop of popular music performers from the United States, where the musical subculture reaches into the mass population and sets new trends. On the contrary, the Chinese show business is fairly conservative, the once trendy style of 2000s continues to top the Chinese hit charts, and today's most popular pop stars are reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears at the very peak of their careers. The hip hop genre, which has recently been dominating the music industry on the world stage, was considered an underground genre in China for a long time and became widely popular only in the last decade.

Of course, in China there are a lot of very talented musical performers on the local scale, but the language barrier does not allow them to project their artistry beyond China. Songs targeted at an English-speaking audience do not “take-off” because they tend to repeat what we have already heard from Western artists. In addition, mechanisms for popularization of Chinese music performers' creativity are also exclusively local in nature. This also applies to promotion in social media and PR campaigns in general, which focus only on the target audience within China. Social network accounts attain millions of subscribers, and video clips and streaming provide tens of millions of views. Product placement media content, reposts and mentions on the official pages of stars generate enormous revenues from their Chinese advertisers.