WHEN POP MUSIC fan Yang Chengang composed Mice Love Rice in 2001, he was too lazy to knock on the doors of record companies. Instead, he gave the song to his friends. Two years later, one of his friends made it into a flash film and offered it for free online.
The song spread quickly on the internet. Last year it received the highest hits for months on the mainland's largest music search engine, baidu.com. The popularity of the song not only landed Yang a contract with Guangzhou Feile Record Company, but gave him the chance to show up at its Lunar New Year gala. Yang, who used to earn a living performing gigs in bars in Wuhan, Hubei province, became a household name.
'If there hadn't been any support from the internet, I wouldn't be this popular,' says Yang, sitting in Feile's Beijing offices. Dressed in a white T-shirt and unbuttoned black coat, the 25-year-old sports stylish reddish curls and a silver treble clef dangling from the neck.
He is one of a growing number of raw musical talents emerging from the internet. Cyber singers, as they are being called, are musicians whose big breaks come from being discovered after their recordings are heard on the internet. In response to this latest music trend, even the official China Golden Record Award recently included a category devoted to cyber music - songs that were first recorded for the internet.
'China's music system is not as developed as those in western countries,' says veteran music critic Wang Xiaofeng. 'It's easy for western music lovers to form a band and make an album by themselves. But here, those who have a passion for music can't find such an outlet. In a lot of cases, they turn to the internet.'
One of the benefits is that much of the content would never be allowed on officially sanctioned mainstream releases, allowing artists to express themselves more creatively. Indeed, cyber music contains more than its fair share of expletives, politically incorrect terms and critical comment.
