Bands on the run: musicians urged to look outside Hong Kong for a bigger audience
A shrinking local market, unstable venues and a lack of artistic curiosity blamed for limited traction for city’s groups
Before taking the stage at Live Wild Music Week in Guangzhou in January this year, Hong Kong indie rock four-piece The Sulis Club had only performed for small, tamed crowds at venues known only to a niche group of independent music followers. Making it big was only a dream.
“But performing in Guangzhou was such an eye-opening experience. If you only play music in Hong Kong, you’d never know how big the world is out there,” Jonathan Synn, the band’s vocalist and guitarist, says.
The Sulis Club isn’t the only Hong Kong band that has had such prominent exposure outside the city. They are one of six budding acts selected to take part in an initiative called Ear Up Music Global.
Organisers the Renaissance Foundation – a charity co-founded by a number of leading cultural figures in Hong Kong, including musician Anthony Wong Yiu-ming and lyricist Chow Yiu-fai – aimed to groom local young musicians by giving them training on music, production and distribution as well as opportunities to perform outside Hong Kong. The ultimate goal was to help them build a bigger, more global audience.
Wallace Kwok, a well-known figure in Hong Kong’s music scene and currently manager of Canto-pop star Sammi Cheng Sau-man, observes that the local industry, once glamorous and glorified, has gone through tremendous changes, and the old system dominated by major record labels and broadcast media no longer works.
“Hong Kong’s music industry has changed so much over the past two decades. Established musicians such as Anthony Wong, Denise Ho and Rubber Band have left the old system and found their new ways of making and promoting music,” Kwok, also a board member of the Renaissance Foundation, says.
