How can Taiwan step up its game in promoting local pop music overseas?

The News Lens
Date: 2019/07/04
By: Maggie Yang

London’s cultural diversity provides rich soil for different genres of music to grow. Living here as a student provides me with the opportunity to examine Taiwan’s pop music from a new point of view.

Quite often we hear how successful Taiwanese artists are with their world tours, but 80 to 90 percent of those concerts are hosted in Asia, and mostly in the Sinophone world. The question then arises, what strategies can artists who want to enter new music markets employ, especially outside of Asia?

Having attended the concerts of HUSH and Jay Chou, two Taiwanese singers, I was able to observe these two shows in terms of their scale, organization and audience.

HUSH’s gig was held in a small live house Redon with the maximum capacity of 300 people, while Jay Chou’s world tour was held in the O2, with 20,000 attendees for two seductive nights. HUSH’s performance was organized by his record company, which made contact with the venue and confirmed the show directly. Jay Chou’s show, however, was organized by an entertainment company with hundreds of professional staff. The only similarity shared by these two gigs was the audience formation: almost everyone in the audience was from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and the few Western audience were accompanied by Chinese friends.    [FULL  STORY]