BEIJING — In the foothills of
the Great Wall, in a hotel
room outfitted with recording studio
equipment, musicians from the United
States, the United Kingdom, Panama
and the Netherlands, among other
countries, are trying to create China’s
next pop hit. Nine international
producers and songwriters, including
Ivor Novello Award-winning Wayne
Hector from the United Kingdom and
Erika Ender, who co-wrote “Despaci-
to,” have been working all week to cre-
ate demos they hope China’s pop stars
will record for the country’s growing
pop music market. With so many
potential listeners — there are already
33 million paid music streaming sub-
scribers in China, according to IFPI, in
a country with 1.4 billion people — the
stakes for the artists and songwriters,
many of whom have never visited
China before, are high.
BMG put together the weeklong
hotel session, called a SoundLab. It’s
the German company’s third such
writing camp in China. Among the
visitors on its final day is the manag-
er of singer-actor Kris Wu. Landing
a song with Wu could be worth up
to six figures in U.S. dollars for the
songwriters; a previous SoundLab
song that Wu recorded, “Juice,” fea-
tured in his 2017 movie xXx: Return
of Xander Cage.
With music labels vying to get into
the Chinese market, gone are the days
when fans had to choose between
Mandopop ballads and foreign artists.
An entire industry has emerged to
build pop idols on Chinese soil, and the
world’s top songwriters are flocking to
write for them in songwriting camps
organized by a variety of companies.
BMG’s SoundLabs are part of the
company’s concerted effort to replicate
the success of K-pop acts like BTS for
a market that is seen as having massive
potential. But it’s not just trying to
imitate a South Korean sensation. The
project is “part of creating that distinct
sound for China,” says Marian Wolf,
BMG’s vp global writer services.
Zhu Xingjie, aka J.Zen, is a case in
point. With his artfully mismatched
Louis Vuitton earrings and paper-white
complexion, the 25-year-old Zhu is
every inch the xiao xian rou, or “little
fresh meat” — the slang name for the
androgynous, coiffed male idols pop-
ular in China today. The term sprang
from the androgyny of K-pop stars, but
Zhu isn’t hung up on the dominance
of the Korean export. “K-pop is not so
important [in China] anymore,” he says.
“Chinese artists are starting to make
their own sounds, but the [Chinese]
audience still needs to be educated.”
While K-pop has been a huge global
success, its honeymoon in China is
waning. Some of the genre’s biggest
stars — such as Wu, Lu Han and
Tao — were drawn from China by
the mega-industry machine in South
Korea. But they have all since quit the
boy band EXO, citing unfair profit dis-
tribution, and have gone on to be major
celebrities in China.
Politics also have been a factor. In
2017, the government of South Korea
allowed the United States to build a
missile defense system in its territory.
China viewed this as a security threat
and responded by slapping a two-year
ban on Korean cultural imports into
China right at the peak of K-pop’s
global explosion, which has slowed
the genre’s infiltration of the main-
land market.
But developing the Chinese music
market isn’t straightforward. For
starters, there is a lack of world-class
songwriters. “Especially in the time of
the one-child policy, families did not
want their children to become music
producers,” says Wolf, noting that
Can China Produce
A K-Pop Successor?
Companies like BMG are organizing songwriting camps to turn Chinese talent into superstars
BY AMY HAWKINS
parents preferred that their children
pursue more stable careers.
Other labels are trying to bridge
the gap between Chinese artists and
Western songwriters as hard as BMG.
In 2017, Warner Chappell Music Chi-
na ran a songwriters camp in collabo-
ration with Chinese label EE-Media.
“In Asia, the way we write music
is very different from international
writers,” says Monica Lee, president
of Warner Chappell Music Asia Pa-
cific. International songwriters who
parachute into China “need more
patience” to deal with the vagaries of
Chinese culture, she says.
Piracy used to dominate music in
the country — until 2015, when China’s
National Copyright Administration
launched a campaign to regulate
online music copyrights. Tencent and
NetEase threw their weight behind the
effort, effectively legitimizing the mar-
ket, says Guy Henderson, president
of Sony/ATV’s international division.
Still, Alex Taggart, head of internation-
al at Outdustry, a music-services firm
in Beijing, says “it is still too cheap to
infringe copyright in China.” He points
to a recent case where online celebrity
Papi Jiang’s media network, PapiTube,
was sued for infringement; the damag-
es are unlikely to cover the claimant’s
legal costs.
Lyrics are one of the challenges that
Western songwriters often find when
working in China: Sex, profanity and
politics are taboo subjects, and the
languages are vastly different. Ender
navigated the linguistic dilemma in
her demo “Jetlagged” by focusing on
locations that are similar in English
and Mandarin. “From Beijing to New
York/Barcelona to Hong Kong/From
Shanghai to Dubai/You got it going
on,” she sang to J.Zen.
Sony/ATV’s song camps have similar
mass-market ambitions. TF Boys
recorded a track from a previous song
camp called “Our Friend” that was
streamed over 10 million times, hitting
No. 1 on streaming service QQ Music.
Universal is setting up a “songwriters
lounge” in Beijing later this year to
facilitate collaborations between Chi-
nese and non-Chinese writers.
By the end of the week at the
SoundLab, the writers are excited,
exhausted and a tad hungover as they
emerge from their rooms at lunch-
time. BMG estimates that between
70% and 80% of the songs created
here will end up being recorded for
the China market. The result, says
Ender, is that maybe they are “taking
China all over the world.”
Shurui Zhao (left) and Pink
Slip at the BMG SoundLab
on Aug. 23 in Beijing.
THE MARKET GLOBAL REPORT
● Singer-songwriter and former Romeo Santos backing vocalist LUIS FIGUEROA joined Sony Music Latin. ● SIMON FULLER’s pop group NOW UNITED signed with AWAL worldwide.
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LI^26 BILLBOARD • SEPTEMBER 28, 2019