Venture capital is pouring nicely into China’s music scene. See Chinese ringtones specialists Hurray earlier this year spending US$3 million on a 61% stake in Taiwan's Seed Music Group Limited. But will those big deals stop, now that pension funds won’t be so easy to hand cash over to the VCs? The man who knows a lot about these things, Ed Peto runs events managers Red T Music and writes a fine blog, OutIndustry.
Heck, in researching this blog I've gotten bogged down in the other blogs out there on the China music scene. I like both http://www.music2dot0.com/ and China Music Radar. There are others out there too, mostly started by foreigners living in China. The best English-language blog written by a local Chinese fan - and likely the best of all the blogs on Chinese rock, Rock In China.
I've come to the conclusion that they're all snazzier looking than Beijing Beat but that many of them, especially the expat-authored blogs, seem to blur out after a few fantastic entries and then go silent for a few weeks, then a few months. I'll have to meet some of the folks behind these. More on the VC later: I'm meeting Modern Sky next week.
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2003 - Witnness 2003, a comprehensive review by Brian Kelly of the 2 days of what transpired to be the last ever Witnness festival (in 2004 it was rebranded as Oxegen when Heineken stepped into the sponsor shoes).