Hong Kong's foster father of indie music
Tommy Chan helped open up Hong Kong to a wide variety of new music, writes Pavan Shamdasani
For all the praise about our city's rapidly growing music scene - the regular international acts at AsiaWorld-Expo, the weekend-long festivals at West Kowloon, the cult DJ favourites at underground clubs - few remember that it all started with a few humble music stores.
After years dominated by the major music chains and their underwhelming selections, a few dedicated souls hoped to change that by importing the world's finest sounds, then selling them for barely a mark-up - all in the name of good music.
What I feel is most important, is that a record company believes in what it releases
Hong Kong-born Tommy Chan is possibly the most well-known of the bunch and probably the only one still plugging away at a record label. As the owner of the Love Da Group, he can now count a music café in San Po Kong and sister divisions in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan among his ventures. But before Chan built his mini music empire, there was a humble little local label called Love Da Records.
"In the mid-1990s, I worked at Form Music in Singapore, a publicly listed company," says Chan. "Unfortunately, the 1997 stock market crash took a toll - while I received interest from other majors, my boss told me to start my own company. He planned on selling and his new set-up would streamline a lot of the 'smaller' independents at that time. His advice was for me to take in these smaller labels."
In 1998, Chan founded Love Da Records, starting out by distributing a number of overseas labels that were largely unknown but held great potential in their musicians. The labels included Ministry of Sound, Warp Records, Ninja Tunes, React! and Hooj Choons, and it was their artists who all but built the foundations of Love Da.
"Our philosophy from day one has been simple: bring quality music to the people," says Chan. "We've had numerous successes over the years: we broke Sigur Ros and Carla Bruni onto Hong Kong radio charts, both of whom weren't singing in English at that time. We've had great experiences with Ministry of Sound. And recently, we found Two Door Cinema Club success in Southeast Asia with radio rotation and a No1 iTunes album."
Love Da Records is now arguably the biggest distributor of choice independent music in all of Southeast Asia, dealing with more than 200 overseas CD labels and more than 2,000 digital labels. But the world is changing: the halcyon days of independent record labels are dying out, quickly being replaced by pay-what-you-want systems, iTunes and Spotify.