#c-indie reference

Hi there!  First of all, good luck on your upcoming adventure!  =D  

There have been a couple of Beijing venues close recently, MAO closed in April or May.  (More about the closing/last show)

Time Out Beijing, Smart Beijing, City Weekend Beijing and The Beijinger should be helpful for finding near-term upcoming shows.  Those sites have all sorts of cultural/restaurant/getting around the city info.  Also check out Live Beijing Music (LBM facebook) for lots of show reviews, release info, and especially the calendar of upcoming shows. [Forsaken Autumn and The Twenties on Sept. 10th at DDC!]

I think these venues are all still going: DDC (Dusk Dawn Club) 黄昏黎明俱乐部, Jianghu Bar (江湖酒吧), School Live Bar, Temple Bar, DMC club, XP (小萍), 愚公移山 YugongYishan.   Modernsky Lab has events, but I can’t find a direct link to the venue. (Modern Sky douban).   

Foursquare has a recent list of The 15 Best Places For Live Music in Beijing, published last week. Eclectic list that includes jazz clubs and concert halls along with live houses and popular ex-pat bars.

And if there are bands you like, check their weibo pages for show/tour announcements.  Probably the best for making longer term plans, whereas the media/weekend entertainment sites are good for spur of the moment decisions. 

I’ll add to this if anyone wants to chime in with suggestions.  =)

UPDATE: Thank you to Brad @seippelabel informed me that: XP and DMC are now closed : (    The DMC weibo is still blogging regularly about the punk scene, lots of promotion.

Also added a couple of more links above that I forgot to include yesterday. Please feel free to let me know about things I missed. or got wrong.  This is the kind of post that I use as reference for these occasional queries.  (It also comes up in Google searches, lol)

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UPDATE: @niubibeijing re-posted with some good info!:

Mao fake-closed about 5 times but is CURRENTLY STILL ALIVE. DDC is temporarily down. I don’t know what jianghu or DMC are. XP has been closed for ages.

School, Temple, Yugong, Modernsky (here’s their website.) and Fruityspace are where it’s at right now.these are just rock venues.if you’re interested in other music (eg salsa or funk) there is loads to check out, like 4 Corners, Modernista, Migas etc.

Hi there!   Wow, you must be super psyched for this trip, I hope you get the chance to see some bands  =D   I know it’s music festival season, but I’ve been reading that some events are scaled down or even canceled. Also some hardcore bands have had their shows canceled in certain cities. 

I still think the club/live house scene should be strong; Time Out Shanghai and Time Out Beijing always preview upcoming shows, and both sites have profiles of area music venues.  Similarly, Smart Shanghai and Smart Beijing cover the same ground. I’m not savvy about the scene to recommend one site over another. City Weekend Beijing and The Beijinger both look good for browsing a bunch of near-term upcoming shows.   I should add that these city sites all look excellent for all sorts of cultural/restaurant/getting around the city info.

Some venues: MAO Live House you already know about in Beijing, and they are also located in Shanghai. You have to select the city to see the events.

XP (小萍) Beijing Xiao Ping formerly D22, run by people from Maybe Mars label

愚公移山 YugongYishan in Beijing

DDC (Dusk Dawn Club) 黄昏黎明俱乐部  in Beijing

School Live Bar in Beijing

YuYinTang in Shanghai  (YYT douban)

On Stage Shanghai  (OnStage facebook)

现场酒吧 / Live Bar Shanghai  (they may have more than one location?)

New in summer of 2015 is Modernsky Lab in Beijing, with plans for many more locations around China

Let me know if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer. And if any readers want to chime in on this to recommend different live houses, I’ll add them to the list.  =D

bubbletearex: “Yess! So excited. Thank you you are the best!!”

Hi there, thank you for getting in touch!!

This is a good question, and I wish had an equally good answer.

For digital buying:

7digital.com has a limited selection (e.g., Peggy Hsu, Deserts), which is a shame because I like that store. Search on an artist and maybe you'll have luck!

iNDIEVOX.com has a lot of the indies' releases. I've bought from there many times. (the *mp3 bit rate could be better (*SEE BELOW), but it's a good way to support the bands, imo) The site is in Chinese, but quite easy to navigate in Chrome, which has Google Translate. Another plus for iNDIEVOX is how close they are to the indie scene, it's so much more than a store.

iTunes is definitely worth trying. You may get diverted to the US store/TW store, depending on the artist. 

Tenzenmen (http://tenzenmen.com/) sells thru bandcamp, but they carry a lot of the mainland indies (as well as Australian bands). Lots of punk and noisy things!

You already know about bandcamp, but I want to reiterate how great that site is. High quality, full previews, competitive prices = win, win, win. =) 

Xiami.com is blocked outside of China (with some possible exceptions, or if you are able to mask your location). It's a semi-sketchy business proposition for the artists (Lin Di of Cold Fairyland told me the payments are a joke), yet a lot of the mainland bands link to xiami from their douban pages.  (It's in Chinese, but the process is not too difficult)

For cd:

I haven't tried far out distant sounds (http://faroutdistantsounds.storenvy.com/), but that looks pretty good. 

A lot of the TW indies link to books.com (http://www.books.com.tw/CD/sa/index.php) when their cds are coming out. I have never bought from there, and I'm not even aware if it ships abroad. In any case, it's a Chinese site. 

I would say Amazon is nearly useless. What little they have, usually carry an appalling import price. 

A friend of mine suggested going to a record store in your local Chinatown, but I'm imagining a sea of Mandopop & Cantopop, and not so many indies. (I'm basing this on web browsing of a store here in Houston) 

One thing to consider is that the indie labels seem to only do small print runs of their releases, that's why you often see the out of stock/sold out message at YesAsia, etc.. I'll add that YesAsia will sometimes have a true bargain price on somewhat older releases, and another thing is if you have the money to put together an order of a few cds, you get a slight break on price. 

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So there you go - not much help, I'm sorry!  

If anyone out there has some good suggestions, PLEASE HELP! This is a topic that interests most of us, right? I know we have some bands that occasionally visit FYCI, if you read this, your insights would be most helpful.

For Taiwan, I gotta say StreetVoice is the non-stop resource for the indies. They have the song of the day, individual band pages with music players, and all sorts of news & promotional stuff going on, it is crazy informative. They have partnered with iNDIEVOX, covering a lot of the same promotional ground, but at iNDIEVOX you can buy/download music, purchase concert tickets, and that site also has a music player. Some of musicians use their StreetVoice pages for personal 'diary' posts.

For China/HK, you need to explore douban. It has a lot of the same things you would expect: band pages, current songs to hear, recommendations, and a great music player. (I love how it remembers your previous listening, playing those songs after whatever you have just selected to hear. So helpful, in case you forgot the name of the band you loved from your last visit to douban)

And don't forget YouTube!   Although searching for C-indies can be a frustrating for English speakers, it is so easy to discover bands, once you have found a few good YT channels.  (the same can be said for China's Youku)

(I have signed up at all of these sites)

Hi there, thanks for checking out the playlist! (For everyone's benefit, there is a music player on the main page, 24 songs). And I agree, Around is a awesome song!  =D

I would suggest 4 things:

1. Search for the band on the main page (http://fyeahcindie.tumblr.com/), and scroll thru looking for a post(s) with a link to their SoundCloud, iNDIEVOX, StreetVoice, bandcamp, douban, or YouTube page. There are very few bands that don't make their music available for web listening.

For example, Papaver has most of their songs - including Around - at SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/papaverbandtw). 

2. If you are Google searching, add one of those sites I mentioned to the band name in your search. For example, I just tried [Palapelit streetvoice] in a google search, and not only did the StreetVoice link come up, but also their official YT, their SoundCloud, and facebook page. 

3. Some bands (e.g. Papaver, Palapelit, Manic Sheep) only have non-Chinese words for their names, but a lot of bands will have a Chinese name also. In come cases, they seem to use an English name for their logo, but if you ever hear them introduce themselves in a video, they might use the Chinese name, or both names. It depends on the band.

So for certain bands, you will have better search results if you search with the Chinese characters. 

4. If you know the band is from mainland China, (where some western sites like facebook are off-limits) you might have better search results if you add a China-based site like douban, or one of the China video sites like youku (http://www.youku.com/) or tudou (http://www.tudou.com/).

douban is a good place to start for mainland bands, because there is almost always music to hear on the douban player, but you can also find links to bands' blogging/twitter type pages. 

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