Clicks for beats
Sweet-faced Yvonne, a 26-year-old executive living in Guangzhou, is a musician's worst nightmare.
She has no moral qualms downloading illegally-derived music from the internet. It's just too easy, she says: a quick search on Baidu.com, China's most popular search engine, yields numerous links where one can find and download illegal music. To the frustration of the global music industry, Baidu is allowed to do this through a legal loophole. As long as Baidu is only facilitating, and not providing, illegal music downloads, the site cannot be touched by the law.
Although Yvonne only feels slightly guilty for downloading these tracks, she thinks 'the responsibility should fall on the companies providing the links, not the users'.
Clearly Yvonne is not alone in her thinking. On the mainland, 99 per cent of all downloads are illegal, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). China might be the world's leading criminal when it comes to pirated music. Whether this is the case or not, piracy is a global problem. Earlier this year Zach Horowitz, president and CEO of Universal Music Group, estimated that only one in three music compact discs and one in 20 downloads around the world were sold legitimately. But while the US and Europe continue fight piracy, the music industry in China has resigned itself to the problem and no longer relies on record sales to generate revenues.
'It's all evolving here,' says Brian Woo, manager of MC Jin and managing director of Catch Music Group Asia. 'You're treating album sales as more of a marketing gimmick than a big revenue generator. Of course we'd love to go back to the days when artists sold millions of records but that's just not the case anymore.'
Perhaps this is why the industry was so enthusiastic about the launch of Google Music, which offers free, legal music downloads to the mainland market.
The Big Four labels - Warner Music Group, Sony, Universal Music Group and EMI - along with smaller ones have contributed their music libraries. The service will be monetised by online advertising revenues, which will be split between Google and the labels.
'I can't say I'm 100 per cent in favour of this, but anything is better than piracy,' Mr Woo says. 'Everyone complains about piracy but the problem is not going to go away. It is what it is, you just have to make do.'
Elaine Ng of Love Da Records, an independent label, thinks it is an effective way to raise awareness of music piracy on the mainland. 'Hopefully, it will educate Chinese people to choose legal music, and later develop a legal music-buying habit,' she says. 'Also I think it's a positive thing for artists, especially for indie artists trying to build their profile.'
Mr Woo agrees. 'A lot of unknown artists are getting new fans and exposure through these avenues. We'd like to think that people who really like the music will support the artist, like through buying the CD, merchandise, [tickets for] live shows, things like that.'
Consumers, Ms Ng adds, will benefit the most.
'It's legal, so you won't get crazy viruses on your computer,' she says.
