Rockers Tuning in to Chinese Market

BEIJING: As she would anywhere in the world, Karen O of the arty New York rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs strode onto a festival stage here last month in costume, looking like a wild, futuristic harlequin in her cape of silver wings and blue-and-green striped tights. Shouting to 10,000 mud-soaked fans who shouted her lyrics right back at her, she thanked them in gasps of Mandarin: "Xie xie ni!"

A couple of days earlier the Brooklyn rapper Talib Kweli was at a gleaming new club across town. And last Sunday, Linkin Park, a group of rap-rock titans with worldwide sales of 45 million, played in Shanghai to a sold-out stadium crowd of 25,000.

They are among the latest in a growing tide of Western acts hoping to crack the vast new entertainment market of China. Once largely closed to foreign music, the country has gradually loosened restrictions and — at a time when record sales in the West continue to plunge, and new sources of revenue have become essential — emerged as a crucial territory on pop's global map.

"China is on the tip of everybody's tongue," said Peter Grosslight, worldwide head of music for the William Morris Agency. "There's 1.3 billion people there. It's becoming a much wealthier place. How can we ignore that?"

For the Western music industry China is a mix of new challenges and familiar frustrations, with rampant piracy of CDs and a minimal touring infrastructure. And many services taken for granted elsewhere, like the collection and distribution of recording royalties, are not fully established. But despite these obstacles, the broad commercial potential makes the country an irresistible draw, with money to be made from live shows, merchandise and technologies like cellphone ring tones. Five years ago a concert by Kenny G was big news. Now Chinese cities frequently turn up on the touring itineraries for a range of acts; this year Beyoncé, Eric Clapton, Nine Inch Nails, Avril Lavigne and Sonic Youth have all played in China, along with underground rock bands that travel by train through a network of sweaty clubs in second-tier cities.

Linkin Park has already toured in Southeast Asia, but the group was looking at its first concert in China as a particularly lucrative opportunity. "This one show could break the band wide open in a brand-new frontier," said Michael Arfin, Linkin Park's booking agent.

The concert grossed $750,000, Arfin said. On a per-ticket basis that is roughly equivalent to the band's take on recent American tours.

For musicians the thrill of playing to crowds who may be seeing their first foreign band can be intoxicating. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played the Modern Sky Festival, a three-day event at Haidian Park on the west side of Beijing, the fans waited in reverential silence between songs but erupted once the music kicked in, with fists in the air and young women screaming in the front.

"It was like nothing we've done before," Karen O said afterward. "From the very beginning they were hungry for us."

But the bulk of that rapidly urbanizing, discretionary-income-wielding audience might not be terribly hungry for foreign music. Well-scrubbed pop singers from Taiwan and Hong Kong dominate the airwaves and the popular imagination, with relatively little attention paid to rock.

Rock 'n' roll has had a short and shaky history in China. After an initial flourish in the 1980s it went underground in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. For much of the '90s the only Western rock to reach Chinese ears came in the form of remaindered CDs from overseas distributors, and musicians were frustrated to find that their music faced too many cultural barriers to take root.

"There was ample idealism then, but we hit the rocks pretty quick," said Kaiser Kuo, a founding member of Tang Dynasty, one of the biggest Chinese rock bands of the '90s. "We realized that we were doomed to life on the margins."

Chinese rock got a second life with the arrival of the Internet, which flooded the country's youth with new music. A small but vibrant scene developed, with sometimes startlingly up-to-date reference points. This year two Chinese bands traveled to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, a ringer for the angular post-punk of Gang of Four, and Lonely China Day, which borrows from the cinematic grandeur of Sigur Ros. Of the 120 bands at Modern Sky, all but 10 or so were Chinese.

To capitalize on this emerging market, the international touring and record industries have in recent years established beachheads in China. William Morris opened a Shanghai office in 2004. This year Ticketmaster bought a majority stake in Emma Entertainment, a Chinese promoter and ticketing service that presented the Linkin Park show.

What works in China, however, can sometimes conflict with the larger goals of Western businesses. Linkin Park is among the biggest foreign bands in China, but its label, Warner Brothers, has not released its latest CD there. And despite recent tours by Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Chinese division of Universal has not released their records either.

The labels say that piracy has made the effort futile. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group, estimates that 85 percent of the CDs sold in China are counterfeit. Leong Mayseey, the federation's regional director for Asia, says the piracy rate for downloaded songs is close to 100 percent.

When Jeff Antebi, manager of the R&B duo Gnarls Barkley, was looking over worldwide accounting statements, he was perplexed to see that the group's song "Crazy," a Top 10 hit around the world, registered no sales at all in China.

It was a "black hole," he said. Frustrated when the label, Warner Brothers, blamed only piracy, Antebi recently decided to open an office in China to protect his interests.

"Major record companies have two options in a place like China," he said. "Adapt or die."

But many Chinese labels, nimble and unencumbered by tradition, have adapted to the contaminated marketplace in ways that Western companies are struggling with. Viewing CDs as a loss leader they routinely sign groups to all-encompassing contracts that allow the label to share in revenues from touring, merchandise and endorsements.

"The Chinese music industry will be the model for the world's music industry one day," said Shen Lihui, the founder of Modern Sky, a small company that has released around 100 albums — most money losers, Shen said — but also has a host of auxiliary businesses, producing books, videos and Web sites.

Strolling through the festival grounds Shen, dressed in a lavender Burberry shirt and white shoes, pointed out the many corporate sponsors: Motorola, Levi's, Diesel jeans. These deals bring in the money needed to run the event, he said, and his audience has no objection to advertising. By the main stage, which was flanked with giant Motorola-branded screens, one young man waved a big red flag that said, in a Beijing dialect, "I rock!"

For most concerts sponsorships are a necessity. Traveling expenses and the need for low ticket prices — anything higher than $6 or $7 or so is prohibitively expensive for many young Chinese — mean that many shows would lose money unless sponsors pick up the slack.

Advertisers can also lend essential brand identification to acts that have less recognition in China, said P. T. Black, a partner in Jigsaw International, a market research agency in Shanghai.

"In the U.S. an artist becomes big, and then a brand latches on to borrow their credibility," Black said. "Here there are virtually no artists who have more credibility than the brands. Coke is a lot cooler brand than any young musician today in China."

Many of the Western acts reaching Chinese shores operate far below the radar of multinational corporations. A decade of exploration by punk and metal groups has carved pathways through clubs in a dozen or so cities, and economical musicians — going by train because of the expense and unreliability of highway traveling — can break even on a tour.

Even little-known American bands can easily accommodate a Chinese jaunt. Last month the Birthday Boyz, a Brooklyn quartet that describes its sound as "very dire, dynamic, metallic post-hardcore" and plays tiny clubs at home, hustled through two weeks of Chinese shows.

Dodging other coach-class passengers in the aisle of a train from Changsha to Wuhan, two smog-choked inland cities with strong punk scenes, Jeff Bobula, one of the Birthday Boyz' guitarists, described the culture shock: "The basis of touring the U.S. is, you hop in a van or car, you drive all day, you play, hopefully you sleep somewhere, and then you wake up and go to the next show. In China all the traveling you do is very public."

Small bands can escape the notice of the Chinese government, but any band playing a gig above the club level will inevitably encounter the Ministry of Culture and its censors. Every lyric on a CD and every song planned for a live performance must be approved to obtain the necessary permits for a concert or retail release of an album. Approval can take months, and the ministry has a way of undercutting the best-laid plans of global promotional campaigns.

"Most of the rejected tracks are smash hits in the international market," said Danny Sim, the marketing director for international repertory at Universal Music China. "Akon's 'Smack That' and 'I Wanna Love You,' those tracks were rejected by the government. They were the first and second single from the album."

Censorship can rear its head in less obvious ways. When Sonic Youth played Beijing in April, its hand-picked opening act, a Chinese band called Carsick Cars, was taken off the bill at the last minute. No explanation was given, but Thurston Moore, one of Sonic Youth's guitarists, said he suspected the government had been alerted to his band's participation in the Tibetan Freedom Concerts in the United States in the 1990s and was offering an oblique punishment.

"Who do you argue with?" Moore said after returning home. "You don't. If you argue, you go to jail."

Bands touring China face more prosaic hurdles as well. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were preparing to play at

Modern Sky, their sound check took far longer than usual — "10, 12, 15 hours," Karen O said with a groan — because the local crew's professional standards were low.

But after the concert the band celebrated at a cavernous dance club, calling the show a success. Nick Zinner, the guitarist, said playing in China was something the band had wanted to do for years. When asked why, Zinner opened his eyes wide and looked at the crowd of well-dressed young Chinese.

"It's the future," he said.