Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the VIP lounge of the Golden Melody Awards Conference drinking free coffee and staring at the event logo, which was plastered everywhere around the Grand Hyatt’s lobby and conference rooms: “The 26th GMA.” GMA was uncomfortably close to GMO, and in my mind I kept reading it as “Genetically Modified...Art?” It was not, what they call in business-speak, a “positive.”
The GMAs, or the Golden Melody Awards are generally considered to be the “Taiwanese Grammies.” They are the recording industry awards and, despite growth in China’s music industry, are still the top prizes in Mandarin music. This year marked the 26th annual awards, and aside from the celebrity-studded awards ceremony, the event has for the third time added an international conference and showcase (June 24 to June 26), the aim of which, according to the press release, is to “become the iconic trading and training center of entertainment industries.”
The whole shebang is organized and paid for by the Taiwanese government, though the actual organizers this year, TTV, one of Taiwan’s top television networks, at least managed to invite some international heavyweight speakers. Chief among them were South By Southwest (SXSW) general manager James Minor, Spotify’s global head of content Steve Savoca, CMJ Music Festival’s Matt McDonald and several stage designers, business strategists and managers associated with the overproduced Japanese all-girl techno-pop act, Perfume.
Photo: Chao Shih-hsun, Taipei Times
News does not tend to happen at conferences like these, but I went anyway to check the industry’s general mood. But midway through my first of 10 possible conference sessions, I realized that most of the panelists were there just to make corporate sales pitches, and for some reason they all kept repeating the cliche “content is king” and talking about how massive K-Pop is in Mexico.
Most of what these experts were saying could be found online, but there were free notepads and some of it is worth repeating. Last year, global digital sales of music came even with physical music sales for the first time, meaning that if the trend continues, which is inevitable, digital music sales should become the leading source of music industry revenue this year.
Spotify, among the one billion playlists already on the subscription music service, now thinks it can make more money by making playlists for people to listen to while they sleep.
Photo courtesy of Golden Melody Awards & Festival
“The idea that you can create the soundtrack to the user’s day became much more valuable to our minds” said Spotify’s Steve Savoca, speaking on the panel Practice in Music Big Data. Savoca added that each part of the day can be targeted with unique listening experiences, meaning background music, music for commuting, music for working out and of course music for sleeping.
The buzzword that justified all this, in his parlance, was the “lean back experience.” You just lean back and let the service do all the work, a plan most likely conceived in a Thai massage parlor. It also carries the creepy implication that someone would want a computer network to decide what music they listen to 24 hours a day for the rest of their life.
As for the music festival big shots, SXSW’s James Minor claimed to be enthused about SXSW’s Taiwan Night, which has been held since 2011, though for some reason he said it was new this year.
Photo courtesy of Golden Melody Awards & Festival
CMJ’s Jeff McDonald, meanwhile, gave some candid and rather surprising advice to band applicants: “Just because we invite you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should come.” His point was that if you are not ready to market your band, mobilize your own fans, and create your own springboard to further success, showcase festivals like CMJ and SXSW will do you no good.
I couldn’t help thinking of all the Taiwanese bands that had been excited to “get in” to SXSW, a handful a year since at least 2010. While I believe that these plane tickets are not a bad thing for Taiwan’s government to spend money on, at some point the next phase of this strategy has to materialize, meaning some actual follow-through, like record releases or touring.
But that involves the much larger concern that was underpinning this entire event, namely, how can a Taiwanese artist somehow get famous in the West? Or in other words, where is Taiwan’s Gangnam Style?
Obviously no one had any idea. And if that was the big question, inviting reps from SXSW and CMJ as conference headliners was an extremely weird move. The conference wanted mainly to find a way for Mando-Pop to follow the success of K-Pop and J-Pop. And to achieve this goal, the organizers somehow chose to interrogate emblems of Western indie music, who have built their businesses on organic diversity — the exact opposite of manufactured Asian pop.
A lot more could be said on this culture gap. But for now I will close with an observation from Masa, bass player for Mayday (五月天), one of the first superstar Mando-pop bands that came out of live houses rather than major music studios. He noted that at Taiwanese music festivals, “The people don’t seem like they are especially enjoying the performance. They just stand there like this,” and he made a gawking zombie face. “It’s more like research or study, but not enjoyment.”
Enjoying music? Now that would be a step in the right direction.
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