Hong Kong pop music invading Asia

Hong Kong pop music invading Asia

By Carrie Lee

HONG KONG (Reuter): Move over Madonna and Michael Jackson. Here comes Jacky Cheung and the Chinese pop invasion. The music of Hong Kong, a tiny territory on China's doorstep, is conquering vast Asia with its pop music.

The British colony's Cantonese and Mandarin song industry is reaching 1.4 billion Chinese speakers from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia alone, not to mention the wider diaspora of overseas Chinese around the world.

Enthralled audiences shriek in frantic excitement, bawling a chorus of cheers to their idol, showering him with huge bouquets and scrambling forward for a mere handshake. The scene is typical of Hong Kong. But now it's happening right across the continent.

"People in China, Singapore and other Asian countries are even more enthusiastic than those in Hong Kong," said Tommy Chu, a general manager at PolyGram Records Ltd., a division of music entertainment group PolyGram NV.

"Most pop songs in Asia are sung by Hong Kong artists. The popular, famous ones are often from Hong Kong," he said.

"One of the albums of Jacky Cheung -- Kiss Me Goodbye -- had global sales of over four million copies. That was on PolyGram's annual top 10 roster," Chu said.

Hong Kong singers have crept on to the regional music chart in recent years as record companies launched regional marketing drives, boosted by satellite television beaming local music programs across the region and the Asia-wide screening of movies starring Hong Kong singers.

"Today Hong Kong is the most important regional center for pop music," said music journalist Mark Levin, describing Hong Kong as the capital of Asia's music industry. "Whatever happens in Hong Kong is important to Asia," he said.

Hong Kong record firms have branched out setting up regional offices one after the other.

"Hong Kong's music industry has begun to mushroom. It is continuously growing," Chu said. "There is a lot of room for further growth. Our company aims at taking more singers to the Asian market, not just one or two."

China, which will take over Hong Kong in mid-1997, is the fattest potential market. Its huge population of 1.2 billion are profoundly swayed by Hong Kong pop culture.

"Hong Kong and Taiwan singers have always eyed the China market. Record companies started setting up offices in China a few years ago," said Clint Shum, head of programming at Channel V of Star TV, a unit of News Corp Ltd.

Uncertainties

But widespread compact disk piracy needs to be erased. "Its regulatory regime is not established. After the piracy problem is solved, China will be the biggest market," Chu said.

Simon Ngai, music director at government-funded Radio Television Hong Kong, said another obstacle was uncertainties in China's policy towards foreign artists.

"Sometimes foreign singers have problems staging concerts there but sometimes it seems to be open to them," Ngai said.

Mandarin pop songs or "Mandopop" are gaining popularity in the Chinese language music world currently dominated by "Cantopop" songs in the southern Chinese Cantonese dialect spoken in Hong Kong.

"Cantopop is going down very quickly and Mandopop is replacing it," Levin said. "Mandopop is very, very strong."

"If you look at sales in Hong Kong you probably see that half of the top 10 sellers are Mandarin pop singers, whereas five years ago nine of 10 would have been Cantonese," he said.

A fair proportion of locally-produced records now have both Cantonese and Mandarin versions, instead of just Cantonese.

"Mandarin songs are gradually being accepted in Hong Kong. No doubt some people listen to them to learn Mandarin," Ngai said. A Mandarin learning craze has swept Hong Kong as people anticipate great demand for the language in jobs after 1997.

But industry participants generally attributed the upsurge of Mandarin songs to regionalization rather than politics.

They said record companies diversified into Mandopop because they had Mandarin audiences throughout the region. But Cantopop was largely limited to the Hong Kong Cantonese market.

"In Asia Mandarin songs have a bigger market than songs of other languages. They have audiences in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and have certain sales even in Japan," Chu said.

Some record companies are also signing up mainland Chinese and Taiwan singers in Hong Kong to market them throughout Asia.

"I guess many people want to use Hong Kong as a music center for southeast Asia. Mandarin singers are coming to Hong Kong with the hope of reaching other parts of Asia," Ngai said.

"It's not very convenient for Taiwanese singers to enter China. So Hong Kong is an important entrepot," he added.

But the industry expects Cantopop to maintain a strong position. "Cantopop will always have a good share of the market because the singers who sing Cantopop -- like Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung, Faye Wong -- they have entertainment images and are not just singers. They are movie stars, personalities," Levin said.

PolyGram's locally-based artist who could sing in both Cantonese and Mandarin released only one Mandarin record for every two Cantonese released, Chu said.