Fears over the music industry's future in Hong Kong after the handover will be addressed at the Midem Asia trade fair in Hong Kong next Tuesday.
Issues scheduled for two pre-opening panel discussions include how the music industries in Hong Kong and China will affect each other after June 30 and how their Western counterparts can collaborate with them.
'Hong Kong has a lot of sophisticated legislation concerning a lot of things, but people are obviously concerned about what can happen here,' said Mirko Whitfield, director of sales and marketing for the Hong Kong office of organisers Reed Midem Organisation.
'Obviously, we get the newspapers and watch television, so we know what's going on.
'But I think a lot of people have had this vision, you know, that the People's Liberation Army is going to walk into Hong Kong and everything is going to change,' Mr Whitfield.
'I think people need to hear from local people what is going to happen as far as the music industry is concerned. People should be given the opportunity to say, 'Look, everything looks fine in Hong Kong with respect to the music business'. A lot of things have been going on between the Hong Kong-based companies and China-based ones.' Mr Whitfield cited the case of the Composers and Authors' Society of Hong Kong helping its mainland counterpart, the Music Copyrights Society of China.
