A Middle-Aged Man Pays for Rock: 马智勇 on Live Shows and the Industry

Summary

• Rock Chronology was a show staged by fans for themselves, built through forced execution: by the end of 2024, every artist agreement had been signed and the dates locked, but no one knew which city would host it. 马志勇’s method is to “set a fixed goal and deadline, then force yourself to deliver—the stage can’t wait”; one friend told him, “Prepare to lose RMB10M.” He knew the production and promotion process inside out. The only thing he couldn’t handicap was the box office.
• A concert is a product with no chance to turn the game around: “The moment tickets go on sale, the product has effectively launched; there may be only a month between ticketing and showtime, and what it is then is what it is.” His rule of thumb is that the initial planning accounts for 80%, while subsequent additions can at most bring execution to 85%-90%. The most nerve-racking moment is the official announcement: “My child has been born. At that point, you know whether it is beautiful or ugly, and whether it has a congenital defect.”
• The Jincheng station’s weak box office followed a clear chain: a “cliff-like” deterioration in the overall environment, an unfavorable May holiday slot for the core 35+ audience, the perception of a repetitive lineup despite an actual overlap rate of only 27.x%, and the forced cancellation of the originally planned January Shenzhen show after a partner breached its agreement—“that Shenzhen show had at least a 99% chance of not losing money.” He rejected artificial crowd-filling: “Would you buy a ticket just because I was losing money?” Market rules still apply; if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The box-office loss hurt only him and his partners—not fans. “That is not the measure of success or failure.”
• China’s festival market is being cleared out from both sides: from “180 or so” festivals a year before the pandemic and more than 700 at the peak, the tally fell to half that level last year and will reach at most 300 this year, with another 60%-70% likely to be canceled or postponed. Wedding planners rushed into festivals and copied the same playbook—“even lobster gets sickening if you eat it every day.” The supply side has only so many bands that can sell tickets, while the demand-side pandemic dividend lasted at most 2-3 years. In the end, only localized festivals and operators with strong IP and reputations will survive.
• His hedge product, Laifu Island, is stripping away both artist dependence and band dependence: a hard cap of 5,000-8,000 people, water at RMB2 a bottle, and tickets gone in a second; he says he has yet to see a negative review. The logic is that artist-price inflation is unsustainable: “A RMB3M appearance fee may bring in only RMB300K in ticket sales, and the organizer simply can’t absorb that.” He also says, “As far as I know, no band earns more from copyrights than from live performances.”
• AI’s biggest impact on music will be a shift from “songs finding people” to “people choosing songs”: type in “I like Eason Chan,” and AI generates a song in his style based on the weather, mood, and whether you are driving. 李翔 called the prospect “terrifying.” 马智勇 thinks the training corpus could eventually turn on the industry: “You will keep rummaging through the same 10 million songs forever. Everything will sound alike and washed out, because the human spark is missing.” Responding to 高晓松’s claim that there is no music AI cannot write, he said, “Technically, yes; emotionally, no—under my test, AI cannot write a song that makes me cry,” citing last year’s global AI composition competition, where not one entry made his hair stand on end.
• His view of music history is that every major revolution has been tied to a format—cassettes, CDs, the internet, and now AI—and each one has reshuffled the incumbents; the ringtone era once looked like a “money-printing machine.” The one constant is copyright and content. His end-state scenario is a platform and AI integrated into one system, removing intermediaries and going “directly to every end user”—good for users, but creators “must prepare for unpredictable change.”
• At a personal level, this was high-cost idealism: he says he lost an amount equivalent to “several Ferraris,” suffered severe somatic symptoms from anxiety and had to use a teleprompter for the closing remarks, yet his “final chapter” declaration has not changed, while Jianlibao has promised to follow every edition of Rock Chronology. His closing confession carries the most weight: “When I was young, I believed I could do anything. Now I believe that was just luck.” What makes it worthwhile is that “one day, when I am gone, some people may still listen to songs I wrote and watch the concerts I staged.”

Deep dive

1. Origins: Missing the 1994 Hong Kong Coliseum show and staging the concert he wanted to see

• 马智勇’s starting point was simple. The 1994 Hong Kong Coliseum show was “the pilgrimage every rock fan wanted to make,” but he was 12 and could not attend. “No one had done it all these years, so I thought: why not do it myself? I still had the ability and the means.” While he was still physically capable and the major artists could still take the stage, he wanted to lay out Rock Chronology “like a textbook in front of the fans,” from 崔健 as the “founding figure” through 汪峰 as the finale, strictly ordered by debut date.
• The idea emerged in 2021, the second year of the pandemic, when live shows were at their scarcest and demand was at its most intense. A few artists were putting concerts online, including 崔健. “People who love rock would never be satisfied with sound coming through headphones. Live music is their lifeblood.” The proposal sat in a drawer until the pandemic ended and he had “paid off the debt” of postponed, already-committed shows. It finally moved into execution at the end of 2024.

2. Forced execution: Artists signed, city unknown, and a warning to prepare for a RMB10M loss

• The previously undisclosed detail was that every artist agreement had been signed and the dates fixed, while the city and venue remained completely undecided. That forced him to make the show happen within “a little over 2 months, less than 3 months.” His operating philosophy is straightforward: “Once you have set a goal and a deadline, force yourself to complete it. Otherwise people are naturally inert—but the stage can’t wait.”
• One friend told him directly, “Prepare to lose RMB10M.” After more than 20 years and several hundred shows, he knew the process, execution, planning, and promotion. The only variables he could not judge were fan acceptance and ticket sales. “Whether we lost or made money was the second consideration.” He crossed the river by feeling for the stones, with mixed emotions.

3. A first-of-its-kind format: A monument in time, neither festival nor package show

• The visual core was a monument: “These names deserve to appear on the monument to Chinese rock history.” Debut dates determined the running order, and every placement needed a historical basis. He believes there had been no precedent: the Hong Kong Coliseum show was a phenomenon built around 4 figures at their peak, while “rock heroes” shows were broad packages. A vertical IP focused solely on rock and structured along a timeline was new. “You could call it unprecedented. It will be difficult for whoever comes after us, too.”
• 李翔 observed that the format itself was the innovation: it was neither an 8-hour festival on a grass field nor a package show built around 2 or 3 artists. The product was designed for “us and the generation before us”; standing for 8 hours was unrealistic, so the show used seats and gave each act about an hour. “The first edition had 12 headliners—effectively, you watched 12 concerts over 2 days.”

4. Adding more and more: “The Gift,” Children’s Day, and a football match

• Most shows stop adding content once the agreements are signed. Rock Chronology kept expanding: a “The Gift” segment commemorating 张炬; a Children’s Day performance of the song he wrote, “The Child Who Never Grows Up”; 铁风筝 and other representative bands; and a closing football match between rock stars. The operation was “armored down to the bathrooms,” with menstrual-care facilities, French fragrances, and printed lyrics. He brought in 2 Italian perfumers to create scents for each act, synchronized across dozens of machines. “Pull one thread and the whole thing moves: add 1 band and you add 10 or 20 people, plus appearance fees, flights, hotels, and local costs.”
• When 李翔 asked whether the additions might compromise the product’s coherence, he said they strengthened it. “The Gift” was “a milestone song for rock. No matter whether you hear it in good times or bad, it resonates deeply with me.” When the opening prelude began, fans at the entrance “started sprinting inside.”

5. Artists raised the bar themselves: 黄贯中 rehearsed for half a month, 谢天笑 played for more than 100 minutes

• 黄贯中’s team asked to add songs beyond the 8 specified in the agreement; all 9 songs in his set were selected through fan voting. The team also spent more than half a month rehearsing systematically in Hong Kong. 谢天笑 nearly doubled his planned slot, playing for more than 100 minutes and bringing his friend 江青. 崔健 performed songs he had not sung in years. 汪峰 sang “Goodbye,” which “should have been only the third time he has sung it onstage in all these years.”
• The same spirit carried into the Yancheng station. 吴彤 appeared under his own name, but “the shadow of 轮回 can never be removed—he was the soul of 轮回,” and he was considering bringing back some former members to perform familiar songs. 李翔 noted that the presence of multiple suonas was especially powerful. 脑浊 brought back the key punk bands from the 嚎叫唱片 era. “Because 1.0 laid the groundwork, everyone understood the show’s significance more deeply, and the presentation was correspondingly more complete.”

6. The invitation: Treat it as your own concert, and pitch anything you have never done

• The invitation was effectively a fill-in-the-blank exercise. He had a timeline-based list in mind and secured 90% of the artists he wanted. Those he could not book were blocked not only by schedules but also by “things they had against each other… they couldn’t share a stage. Everyone understands without my saying more.” Only afterward did he learn that many invitees had initially thought the project could not be done: “I wasn’t the only person thinking about it, but people felt it might not have a strong commercial outlook and would be difficult to execute.”
• Artists were paid normally, albeit at “relatively favorable rates.” “The market price is what it is. I am already very grateful for the relative discount.” None of the artists made excessive demands; “they understood roughly what kind of position we were in.”

7. A 10-hour record and security drills: The first city to take the risk

• The longest single-day program ran for roughly 10 hours, “a very long record for a concert.” The organizer had to handle transport, food, and basic needs because venues generally do not provide meals. Train formations and crowd-surfing are prohibited in many cities, so he showed security teams videos of rock shows, wrote the boundaries into the agreements, and conducted the only full-scale rehearsal of his career. “There is no precedent in China for a rock concert lasting more than 8 hours. Whoever does it first is the first person to eat the crab.”
• Nearly 100 people in the command center watched broadcast screens and handled different lines. Traffic police worked to a rule that everyone had to be evacuated within 20 minutes, shuttle buses had to arrive continuously, and no one could be left behind. “The public-security authorities were under considerable pressure, and we kept communicating dynamically.” The result: “I originally staged this show for myself, but I didn’t get to watch it either.” Still, one regret was removed from his life’s list.

8. Jincheng was an accident—and a matter of trust

• The first discussions with Jincheng concerned an entirely different concert project. “As we kept talking, we realized this theme fit the city particularly well,” and the conversation expanded to building a rock industry there. The practical constraints were obvious: few mature venues could support an ultra-long show, while larger cities had tighter calendars.
• He felt Jincheng’s determination “to do this properly.” In a first collaboration, “when you are still at zero, someone is already willing to trust you.” The city treated the show as “a cultural symbol representing the city.” The return was tangible: Jincheng became the most-searched city in China on Ctrip during the Dragon Boat Festival, every hotel in the city filled up, and fans came from dozens of countries. “That is what this city deserved.”

9. Free interprovincial shuttles: The hardest part of the journey is the last 10 kilometers

• Jincheng has no airport, and a point-to-point trip for him took 6-7 hours. “If I were a fan, this would matter enormously.” So he created what he called “the first interprovincial intercity shuttle service in Chinese concert history,” covering several surrounding cities for free. The campsite had to be leveled and built with excavators. “The workload was far greater than for a normal concert. Normally, a dozen or 20 stage-equipment containers arrive together; once the venue is selected and approvals obtained, you’re done. Here, everything was an innovation.”

10. The outcome is set when tickets go on sale: Planning is 80%, and the announcement is the most frightening moment

• The central economics are blunt: “The moment tickets go on sale, the product has effectively launched. There may be only a month between ticketing and showtime, and what it is then is what it is. There is absolutely no chance to turn it around.” Unlike a film, a concert cannot rely on word of mouth after release to generate a second wave. His formula: “The initial planning accounts for 80%. With continued effort and additions, you can try to get to 85% or 90%.”
• His experience with the ticket curve is that the initial sale signals the overall market; momentum falls before sellout, then returns near showtime. But “you don’t dare bet on that,” because complimentary and secondary-market tickets will emerge. “At the very beginning, you already have a pretty clear sense—8 or 9 times out of 10—of what the box office will be.”
• The moment he feared most was the official announcement: “My child has been born. At that point, you know whether it is beautiful or ugly, and whether it has a congenital defect.” During the warm-up, he posted only the five-pointed star on 崔健’s hat to Xiaohongshu. “I never expected that post to explode. It gave me a lot of confidence.”

11. Rejecting 30-40 copycat offers: “Then the uniqueness is gone”

• After the Jincheng show, he received 30-40 local offers to replicate it: “We’ll buy the package. You don’t need to worry about the box-office risk.” He rejected every one. “Taking it to city after city would satisfy fans who wanted to see it but missed it. Historically, though, its uniqueness would be gone.”
• His accompanying market judgment was that he did not believe China’s rock market was large enough to support 8 or 10 stops. “The box office couldn’t support it either.” Rock Chronology could not become a nationwide tour like 纵贯线.

12. The truth about sound: Beyond sound-field design, each band’s sound engineer has a preference

• In response to fans’ most common complaint, he said the sound field is designed first, with different requirements for arenas, stadiums, and festivals; the venue itself has “built-in deficiencies.” But once the system is in place, each band takes over with its own sound engineer, lighting director, and VJ. “If he pushes the vocals louder or the guitar louder, any resulting overloads or dropouts are mistakes made by different teams.”
• The same show can sound good to one person and painfully loud to another. “Music has no fixed scale and no ruler by which it can be measured.” 李翔 cited the repeated criticism of the sound at 罗大佑’s concert-hall shows, where the artist himself explained his mixing philosophy between songs. Disagreement between musicians and audiences over presentation is normal.

13. Same-night review and a wrecked office: Finding the person responsible

• They reviewed the first day that same night, and “that night I also smashed up the office.” The review covered everything from chairs, crowd barriers, and portable toilets to the resolution of the stage screens. “For the audience, every angle can become a point of dissatisfaction.”
• Accountability was strict: “Whoever was responsible for the sound had to guarantee it. If this kind of issue happened again, they would leave the team.” But the answer was never, “The sound had problems this time, so we won’t touch it next time.”

14. The regret list: A football fracture and the invitation that 窦唯 declined

• As both fan and organizer, his biggest regret was, “I didn’t play in that match—I came on and went off after 10-plus seconds.” He spent a month in bed, never had surgery, and is still disabled: “This hand only goes this high.” As for the content itself, “If I did it again with the benefit of memory, it might not be any better.”
• The lineup had its boundaries. “We did invite 窦唯, but he had his own reasons. You can’t force someone.” In other words, “the people we couldn’t book may not be bookable by anyone else either.” He generally offered artists suggestions without interfering. At Yancheng, his only suggestion was to have 张楚 perform 何勇’s “Bell Tower” and “African Dream,” among 3 songs: “The three 魔岩 figures—bring 何勇老师 to the stage in another way.”

15. Why he left Jincheng: The 2.0 agreement and the detour to the 40-year reunion

• The understanding with Jincheng was to stage Rock Chronology 2.0 there. It might continue strictly along the historical timeline, including 新裤子, Joyside, 达达, and later generations, as well as 许巍 and 朴树. The Yancheng lineup overlapped heavily with Jincheng’s, and “for a city, repeating a lineup has much less meaning.”
• Before making 2.0, however, “I wanted to finish the 40-year reunion, and that needed a new city to host it.” That was the origin of Yancheng. He and Jincheng had already set a preliminary understanding on 2.0 while he was still in a hospital bed. “For an IP, safety is the most important thing. Safety means allowing the reputation to continue and ensuring that no audience member is disappointed.”

16. Reviewing Yancheng’s box office: A cliff-like market decline, the May holiday, and only 27% overlap

• The chain of causes began with the broader market, which this year was “in a cliff-like decline.” The May holiday was “not particularly friendly” to the core 35+ audience: people with families were pulled in different directions, but it was the only period when everyone could align. Getting 40-50 artists onto the same schedule is extremely difficult, so the slot had to be booked early. The lineup looked repetitive, though the actual deduplicated overlap with Jincheng was only 27.x%. “It doesn’t matter. People who understand will understand.” Yancheng’s airport connections were also less convenient for out-of-town fans.
• The more fundamental issue was that the original plan had been a January show in Shenzhen: suitable weather, few large-scale rock specials in the south, and no competitors. Yancheng, frankly, “was not a particularly perfect choice,” but it was the alternative that allowed him not to miss a historical moment. “So a full box-office review isn’t especially meaningful. Commercially, the disappointment was a failure for us, but in terms of the event’s historical significance, I don’t think it was a failure.”

17. Rejecting artificial crowd-filling: “Would you buy a ticket just because I was losing money?”

• Some people suggested using “technical means to fill the venue” so it would look lively and no one would know, while he and his partners absorbed the loss. He refused. “Bringing in people who don’t love rock would affect the emotions of the people who do. That would be a failure. Market rules apply: if it’s good, it’s good; if it’s not, it’s not.”
• He acknowledged that Yancheng was behind Jincheng in 2 respects: box office and atmosphere. “The box-office loss hurts me and my partners. It does not hurt fans at all. That is not the measure of success or failure.” Atmosphere depends on headcount: more people in front of the stage create positive feedback for the crowd and for the bands. In every other respect, “everything improved from 1.0, including the sound.”

18. The canceled Shenzhen show: A partner’s breach and the regret of a 99% sure thing

• “A painful memory; I won’t go into detail here.” A partner breached its agreement, forcing the show to be canceled. “It wasn’t just anxiety about the event itself; it was anxiety about human nature.” He still believes “that Shenzhen show had at least a 99% chance of not losing money.” The box office, reputation, and the bands’ expectations were all very strong.
• He jokes that the IP has been cursed. The first edition went smoothly, but he broke his leg, spent a month in bed, then developed severe appendicitis and landed in the ICU; it took more than half a year to recover. The second edition brought the Shenzhen cancellation and disappointing ticket sales. He refused to cancel or discount Rock Chronology, although he has said that he would cancel or postpone an ordinary commercial show. “Once you call it Rock Chronology, it becomes an important item on your life’s wish list—something I can recall when the reel plays one day, when I truly can’t walk and am lying in a hospital bed.”

19. Somatic anxiety: The teleprompter, deleted posts, and speaking through glass

• Around the Yancheng show, he experienced “quite severe somatic symptoms of anxiety” and at one point could not work, deleting all related posts from Xiaohongshu and Douyin. After an hour of livestreaming, “my whole body started to stiffen, and my neck locked up.” He needed a teleprompter for the closing remarks: “I couldn’t remember anything. I was afraid I would forget what I wanted to say or fail to thank someone I needed to thank.” During the recording, he said, “Talking to you feels like there is a pane of glass between us, like I am dreaming. I may not remember what I said a few seconds ago.”
• The trigger was a pileup of small problems: delayed receivables, minor breaches, and substandard efficiency. “When you are anxious, certain points get magnified, and the feedback you give other people gets magnified too.” He became irritable, even hysterical.

20. Not failure, but regret: Jianlibao’s promise and what “the final chapter” really means

• Commercially, the project “laid some things bare” and affected outside confidence in Rock Chronology’s commercialization. But insiders remained. The head of Jianlibao told him, “However many editions Rock Chronology stages, we will follow for every one.” They understood what the team had endured and what the project meant to everyone involved.
• “The final chapter” was not an emotional outburst: “It has not changed as of this moment.” The reason is his health. 2.0 would need “major innovation”; otherwise it would be a step backward. Calling a lineup of different artists 2.0 would be “a rather perfunctory state.” That requires a concentrated working state he cannot currently provide. 白岩松 told him, “Don’t worry. One day you will hear birds singing and see blue skies. That is when you will truly be well.” He left the door open: “Perhaps one day this regret will become fulfillment. The trademarks are all still with me. If someone exceptionally capable can carry 2.0 and 3.0, I would have no problem handing it over.”

21. “Why you?”: Five or 6 hurdles and the cake metaphor

• During 1.0, there were “5 or 6 hurdles where you genuinely felt the project could not go ahead,” involving artists, partners, and every other side. “Many I can’t explain. They were absolutely the kind of things that could break you.” The most painful challenge was: “Why you? I’m not a major figure in the rock scene, not someone with decisive influence. Why are you doing such an important concert?” It came from people inside the scene, people who were jealous, and parties with interests at stake.
• His answer was the cake metaphor: “Once you make the cake, people recognize it as a cake. Before you make it, they think it has none of the color, aroma, or taste.” When interested parties questioned the repeated increase in spending, “all you can say is: don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.” That was the best way to eliminate doubt. The fundamental reason 1.0 succeeded was that everyone was willing to give something up to create something together. Otherwise, those 5 or 6 hurdles would have stopped it cold.

22. The lightning rod for abuse: “90% has nothing to do with me, but I have to carry it”

• He chose to stand in front because he wanted to be the fan’s “entry point and exit point.” “With other concerts, you can’t find out who is responsible. If you want to curse someone, you don’t even know who to curse—you can at most dig up the company. I am willing to stand here and hear what people have to say.” The cost was real. In the first edition, a platform’s seat-allocation mechanism led fans to create a 200-person group to “roast 老马.” Some threatened to kick him and run, or throw chairs at the venue. His defense was that the platform was responsible: “The first buyer and the last buyer were in the same section. I charged everyone RMB900. I had no motive to give early buyers bad seats. That was the platform’s mechanism.”
• “Honestly, 90% has nothing to do with me. It wasn’t my problem, but I had to carry it. At first I was extremely uncomfortable—I had never experienced that in my career. Now I am completely immune. I just do what I need to do.” As for people calling his open letter “performative” or accusing him of playing the victim: “Those were genuinely the words I wanted to say at that moment. The core message was that I would not cancel and would not cut prices. If my writing style disgusted some people, then I apologize. All I could do was delete it. I was genuinely in a bad place—would you buy a ticket just because I was losing money?”

23. Warmth inside the scene: Encouraging calls and 白岩松’s make-up football match

• Around the Yancheng show, company staff took turns livestreaming to answer questions and sell merchandise, and he sometimes joined. 陈辉, 指南针’s 刘忠, and 田震 had not arranged it in advance; “when they saw me come online, they connected and encouraged me.” Other band frontmen added him on WeChat through intermediaries to say, “You are doing something great. You have to keep going.” 田震 said onstage that he would do whatever he could in the future.
• To make up for the football match he missed after his fracture, 白岩松 organized a new game. On a Beijing afternoon in 35-36°C heat, he played with the 梦舟明星足球队, 黄健翔, 景岗山, 陈辉, and 罗征, then gathered at 白岩松’s home that evening. “I was close to passing out from the heat, but I was incredibly happy. It was the happiest day I had had all year.”

24. 崔健’s absence from the 40-year reunion: A reinforced edition, with no unresolved grievance

• He defined Yancheng as “a reinforced version of 1.0,” filling in the artists who had not been booked and the figures who should have appeared for the 40th anniversary. 崔健 had already appeared in 1.0, and this edition coincided with preparations for his own concert. “His absence is a regret, but in the Rock Chronology chapter, 崔老师 has already appeared.”
• He directly denied online rumors that there was a misunderstanding between the organizer and 崔健’s team: “There is no misunderstanding and no knot that cannot be untied. There will be more cooperation in the future.”

25. What makes a legendary show: Timing, place, people—and realizing a trip was great only after returning

• His analysis of Woodstock is unsentimental: “From an event perspective, it was a complete failure—you couldn’t get food, traffic was gridlocked, and sewage was everywhere. But it was the first time in human history that such a huge gathering took place, with so many bands and people there for rock. Its historical significance was enormous.” As for the Hong Kong Coliseum show, 马智勇 stressed, “From a concert perspective, wasn’t it just a package show with 4 people? But those 4 held immense status in rock history and represented a showcase of mainland culture in Hong Kong. The specificity of the people made the history.” 李翔 added that the show may not have been commercially successful and that 窦唯 had also been unhappy with the performance.
• His analogy for how classics emerge was travel: “During the trip, you don’t feel that it is especially beautiful. You return to where you live, spend 2 days there, and suddenly realize how much fun the trip was.” Many painters were ignored in their lifetimes and declared geniuses years after death. When he made Rock Chronology, “I never thought of matching the Hong Kong Coliseum show. It was the fans who gave it meaning, and only then did I feel the responsibility. In some ways, that made the pressure greater.”
• The tension between a one-off masterpiece and a repeatable IP is deliberate. “With the Yancheng lineup, I can say it will be impossible to bring the same people back together in full again.” It is a singular work; its artistic value is for future generations to judge. Rock Chronology “is a book, and books have an ending.” The original script had only 3 stops, and none of the 3 was intended as a tour.

26. The three 魔岩 figures are untouchable: “回春丹 could equal 100 张楚s at the box office, and you still wouldn’t become 张楚”

• His view of historical status is categorical: no matter how many new bands emerge, the position created by the three 魔岩 figures through the right time, place, and people cannot be displaced. He uses 回春丹 as the example: its box office “might equal that of 100 张楚s,” but “you still cannot become 张楚,” because 张楚 was specific to a particular historical moment. As Rock Chronology moves forward into 3.0, “perhaps there will be 回春丹.”
• Every generation has its own three greats. People born after 2000 lack the same historical sediment and youthful memories; their new three might be 旅行团 or 2 other bands. He also separates personal taste from business: “The bands I personally like account for a very small share of the shows I produce.”

27. A box of memories: 张楚 on a Walkman and tears over “Bell Tower”

• His personal answer dates back to high school, when he was a student athlete running laps around the field at 5 or 6 every morning. He repeatedly played 张楚’s first and second albums on a Walkman. “I actually listened to 窦唯 the least. I sang 何勇 more often at KTV. 张楚 is still number one in my mind.” He listens to new bands too, “but I will never listen again the way I did then, wearing out an entire cassette.”
• Two moments cut deepest. At the Jincheng rehearsal of “The Gift,” “a song I had heard hundreds or thousands of times through headphones suddenly had the people from the song standing in front of me. The impact was overwhelming. Some were no longer the original members, but that didn’t matter. Once they stood onstage, they were gods.” At Yancheng, when 张楚 sang “Bell Tower,” “I wasn’t misty-eyed. I was crying uncontrollably.” His theory is that the song is “a can of memories.” “Were my tears for 张楚, for 何勇, or for that era? You can’t really say.”

28. Entering the industry: A first lyric sold for RMB500 and a succession of benefactors

• His first lyric, “Yesterday,” was written in high school and bought by a musician for RMB500 before being released. While still in school, he moderated Sohu’s mainland-originals forum and earned RMB700 a month, compared with RMB500 in living expenses. As a brash teenager, he called 麦田音乐 and 宋柯 to invite 青蛙乐队 to hold a forum chat. He studied computer science, then moved from hobbyist into the music business—a transition he describes as both painful and joyful.
• The key break came when teacher 李汉颖, who wrote “I Really Want You” and “The One I Care About Is Me,” contacted him online. His submission was rejected, but 6 months later she invited him to write an album for a 17-year-old singer. They collaborated on 7 or 8 songs. “Teacher 李 brought me into the industry. She was my first benefactor in music.” He then organized a “star-making movement,” soliciting entries worldwide for 7 elements including the artist’s song title, lyrics, composition, Flash music video, and album cover, while bringing together 30 or 40 media organizations including China National Radio and 九天音乐网. “I definitely wouldn’t have the courage to do that now.” The project introduced him to the founder of 九天; after graduation he joined as music director and later co-wrote songs with 刘志宏, 周华健’s producer.

29. The 九天 years: A pioneer—and casualty—of legal digital music, more than a decade early

• 九天 was “China’s first music website to go legitimate.” While piracy was rampant, it spent tens of millions buying copyrights from record companies. “The industry was shocked. We didn’t become pioneers; we became casualties. We brought legitimate digital music forward by at least 10 years, but that experience paved the road for those who came later.” Legalization ultimately had to wait for 腾讯 and 网易 to reach “consensus and tacit understanding,” along with a shift in national policy. “As long as one site still offered piracy, the model couldn’t work. The traffic would all run to the pirate.”
• It was also a golden period for product innovation. The team effectively lived at the office to build “九天星访,” China’s first online celebrity interview product; the first guest was 任贤齐, and because the company had no host, he hosted it himself. Later, 陈奕迅, 李宇春, and every artist who was popular at the time appeared. They also produced 《九爱》, China’s first electronic music magazine, which won an Asian award. “We would work without sleep for several days, then someone would say a new film had come out and we would all go watch it at 2 p.m. That was one of the happiest periods of my life.” They also tried charging national KTVs based on actual play counts. “We were too early and became casualties, but the idea was right. Public performance and on-demand licensing will eventually mature like film and television.”

30. Confidence from writing for Super Junior, and the “Europe-US first, Japan-Korea second, Chinese-language third” hierarchy

• He wrote 4 songs for Super Junior. “They were at the height of their popularity in Asia. I was probably the Chinese person who wrote the most songs for them.” He later wrote for 安七炫 and SF9 and began to feel that his music could cross borders. The hierarchy then was “Europe and the US in the first tier, Japan and Korea in the second, and Chinese-language music in the third.” Chinese writers often rewrote lyrics for songs popular in Japan and Korea, while Japan and Korea learned from the West and localized it for Asia.
• Why was K-pop ahead? China was also trying the trainee model, working backward from the market to determine what training a 权志龙 should receive at each age. TFBOYS succeeded within that system. “Japan and Korea simply industrialized it more completely, treating artists entirely as products.” Star-making also requires the right distribution vehicle. Bands have gained momentum in recent years, and 《乐队的夏天》 was crucial. Artists produced by the Super Girl and Happy Boy shows remain active onstage.

31. The startup beating: The financial crisis, selling his car, and realizing that survival comes first

• The company he worked for collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis. He was COO; the company had a 100-square-meter office, a driver, even a barista, with branches in Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing. He left with colleagues to start a business without even knowing what they would do. “Looking back, it was reckless and irrational.” They produced entertainment programs and built websites, and he learned how expensive websites were—expensive enough to sell his car and exhaust his savings. “At 九天, it wasn’t my own money being burned.”
• The way out came through a hard realization: “Don’t aim too high and imagine you can build another 九天. The most important thing is how to survive.” He cut the grand but vague ambitions and focused on the concert execution business he understood best and where he still had an information edge. “When I was writing songs, I got RMB10K per song. How many songs would you need to keep a company alive?” His advice to would-be founders: before leaving a platform, make sure cash flow and the business line are stable. Much of the respect and access you receive on a platform belongs to the platform, not to you personally.

32. Buying back 九天 and refusing outside capital: “九天 is my 张楚”

• In 2016, while 九天 had not yet disappeared completely, he bought the declining company out of nostalgia. 李翔 put it plainly: “九天 is your 张楚.” He agreed. “It was the best memory of my youth, the first time I felt that something I wanted to do was recognized and actually made real.” He cut the broad portal model and focused on original content. “We couldn’t beat them. The other 2 were aircraft carriers and I was still a small boat. Small boats turn faster.” In practice, the turnaround did not succeed.
• He never systematically sought financing or investors. “I am genuinely bad at asking people for money. Ninety-nine percent of my company’s partnerships came to me. My thinking is more like a musician’s and may not appeal to capital; to investors it is too idealistic.” He once hinted to a longtime friend about investing, but it never became a conventional financing round. His self-assessment is blunt: “I am a musician, not a good businessman at all. My EQ is too low.” A truly good merchant can find a business angle in every industry. 沈黎晖’s 摩登天空 has done that well, as has 太合, which is about to list.

33. The digital music base: RMB16B-17B in revenue and a bid to make Hangzhou a new music center

• The Hangzhou base he operates is one of China’s national-level music bases, alongside Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. It was built latest but is now the largest by scale, with annual revenue of roughly RMB16B-17B and tax payments of RMB400M-500M. Its 26 resident companies cover the full chain, from songwriting and publishing to promotion, artist discovery and management, shows, equipment, and NetEase Cloud Music. 王力宏’s company has just moved in. He relocated from western Hangzhou to Xiaoshan because “you can’t damage a national-level brand.”
• The next steps are the Laifu Island music park on the Qiantang River and an incubation platform for small and midsize music companies, to launch this year. The definition is revenue below RMB500M: “There aren’t many rock companies above RMB500M.” “I am a musician and run a music company, so I know where the pain points are. I want Hangzhou to become a new music center.” The platform and Rock Chronology will reinforce each other. Many of the companies behind the 70-80 artists in the first 2 editions qualify, and “because they trust me through the events, they will join the platform. It is about to happen.”

34. If Tencent or NetEase staged Rock Chronology: 80% easier for them, 20% harder

• 李翔’s thought experiment drew this answer from 马智勇: “Government relations, promotion, partnerships, and the trust they can give every partner would be easier for them in 80% of the areas.” But they could not make decisions as quickly. Requests to increase spending or add projects would go through approvals and might be rejected. They would not act as emotionally as he does; projected revenue would have to be executed line by line. Artist prices would also certainly be higher, because everyone knows the counterparty is a wealthy large company.

35. Formats drive revolutions: From cassettes to CDs to the internet, and the ringtone money-printing machine

• His view of industry history is that “every major transformation in music is tied to a format.” In the cassette era, pirated copies had materially worse sound and lacked the booklet, creating obvious differentiation. In the CD era, the sound-quality gap disappeared. In the internet era, pirated and legitimate versions had “no difference; it depended on the playback device,” which destroyed the old business model. Large record companies and record-distribution channels were hit first. Even the standard 10-song album was originally just a function of “the cassette’s capacity being 10 songs.”
• Every transition reshuffles incumbents. Moving from cassettes to CDs meant replacing the entire production line. During the ringtone era, “some people made real money—like a money-printing machine.” His team also worked on ringtone and Super Girl/Happy Boy voting projects. “You have to have some projects that make money.”
• What does not change is “copyright and content.” The promotional vehicle has shifted from radio and television to Douyin and Kuaishou, but the content still has to be good. “The things young people want to hear still need to be good content. If you do copyrights and content, from cassettes all the way to today, what is good remains good.” 摩登天空 and similar companies retain influence through first releases by top artists. “Once you hold a few points of market share, the scale is already enormous.”

36. AI’s biggest impact: From “songs finding people” to “people choosing songs”

• The qualitative change is stark. In the past, 张学友 released a cassette, the artist promoted it on radio and television, and the song went looking for its audience. Now you enter that you like 陈奕迅, and AI uses the weather, your mood, and whether you are driving to create a 陈奕迅-style song suited to you: “people choosing songs.” It can sound and feel right, although “there are still some legal gray areas.”
• Corporate songs show how the barrier has fallen. He used to write many songs for Alibaba. Now a company can input its slogan and culture into Tongyi Qianwen to generate lyrics, use Suno for the composition, and present 10 or 20 versions to management. “The efficiency is extremely high. They don’t ask for lyrics by 方文山 and music by 周杰伦.” His position is pragmatic: “The important thing is figuring out how to tame this wild boar and turn it into your domestic pig. Don’t make it an adversary; turn it into a tool that works for you. Protesting won’t help. This is how the era is moving, and we all have to learn.”
• But he expects a possible backlash. Who will create the training corpus and the base catalog? “You will keep rummaging through the same 10 million songs forever. Everything will sound alike and washed out because the human spark is missing. At a certain scale there will be a backlash, and people will still need to create copyrighted works to replenish the pool.”

37. Platform plus AI: The industry’s end state is removing intermediaries

• In the scenario he and 李翔 discussed, NetEase Cloud Music already has an AI interface to assist creation. Personalized generation will become “a very important function of an app.” AI exists to eliminate the search and thinking process and give users the answer directly. Once distribution, platform, and production are integrated, “the middle layers—agencies and distributors—disappear, and it goes directly to every end user.”
• His value judgment has 2 sides. “Anything centered on the user is good news.” For creators, however, “you must respond to unpredictable industry change, prepare, and learn.” Twenty years ago, what was Douyin? “An unimaginable thing.”

38. The festival market: From 700 shows to 300, with another 60%-70% canceled

• The numbers tell the story. Before the pandemic, China had “180 or so” festivals a year. At the peak over the past 2 years, there were more than 700—“a sevenfold increase. How could the market be that large?” Last year the count was already half the previous year’s level. This year there will be at most 300, “and 60%-70% of those will still be canceled or postponed.” The market should then bottom, rebound slightly, and stabilize.
• The cause is a two-sided supply-and-demand purge. “Wedding planners started producing festivals too. They thought a few bands were guaranteed money and simply copied and pasted the formula. Even lobster gets sickening if you eat it every day.” On the supply side, China has only so many ticket-selling bands, and fans have seen almost all of them more than once. On the demand side, new-customer acquisition is limited, the pandemic release valve lasted at most 2 or 3 years, and the macro environment no longer leaves enough spare money to see a favorite band 10 times. “Both sides are pushing the market down.”
• Two types will survive: localized events—“you watch whatever exists locally; they are going to book those same people anyway”—and festivals with strong IP, good reputations, and genuine concern for fans. Other small, new, opportunistic players will disappear. He named 春游, 318, 新青年, 斑马, 连岛, and 河流 as excellent, but said the market had already been damaged by excessive repetition: book the same artists again and people call it copy-and-paste. Overseas festivals are relatively stable because the rules at the major brands change less often.

39. Laifu Island: A lifestyle festival without artist or band dependence

• The uncomfortable truth is that “we are moving away from artists and bands.” Artist prices cannot be controlled; “a RMB3M appearance fee may bring only RMB300K in ticket sales, and the organizer simply can’t absorb that.” Laifu Island makes fans the protagonists: water fights, rock-music traditional medicine, scarecrow-making, football, tug-of-war, an islander stage, and a Disney-style opening parade. “If you like the artist, go listen. If not, let it be background music.” The aim is to become a weekend lifestyle for decompression, “a musical utopia for young people.”
• The operating discipline is anti-scale. Each event holds 5,000-8,000 people, and “8,000 is the limit. We will absolutely not go higher. The scale will never get large; we want to preserve the purest state.” Water sells for RMB2 a bottle and cannot be marked up; the team tastes the food first. He says tickets sell out in a second every time, and he has not yet seen anyone complain about the product. “Rock Chronology has negative reviews. Laifu Island currently has zero.” Fans are called islanders, and he co-wrote a song called “Our Island” with 阿伟: “There is litter on the island, and a cleanup group picks it up. This is our home.”

40. The unfinished rock city: The dream of an industrial ecosystem in Danhe New Town

• Another reason he originally chose Jincheng was that the city planned to make “rock city” a reality. They wanted to turn Danhe New Town into a “new rock city,” complete with a rock park and the full industrial infrastructure. “Wouldn’t that activate everything I know about operating a base, staging shows, and the industry chain? Suppose China has 50 million rock fans. Like Hollywood, when I go to the US to watch a game, I also visit the filming location for Friends. A Chinese rock museum—Jincheng would be an excellent choice.”
• The relative weight of the 2 ambitions says a lot about him. “Staging one show is more like checking an item off my wish list. But putting down roots there and genuinely forming a complete industrial ecosystem might be more interesting.” He jokes that the plan failed because he kept saying his mental state was poor and that he wanted to retire: “They said, then retire quickly—we’re not working with you. But I still felt this project was viable. It really could be done.”

41. How new artists break through: Millions of songs a day and “Why should you be the one who gets famous?”

• The contrast with the past is extreme. When 张学友 released a cassette, everyone knew about it; the whole class passed it around, and a month later everyone could sing “Kiss Goodbye.” There were so few good singers that not listening meant falling behind. Now millions of songs are created every day, and you may not even know that 陈奕迅 released an album last month. The odds may have fallen from 1% to 0.001%, with AI pushing the barrier even lower.
• The routes to exposure, from strongest to weakest, are: variety shows, the fastest route, because every program brings on 1 or 2 new acts and often has a contractual relationship with them; an accidental viral hit on short video, perhaps a song like “Love River”; platform promotion, such as NetEase Cloud Music buying “First Love” and other copyrights to push 回春丹 and then using a program to ignite them; and scattered festival slots or self-funded tours. “A new band’s tour may lose money. There may be 3 or 5 people watching. How do you make money? It is a single-plank bridge crowded with armies.”
• He still encourages people, but with a condition: “When you have no clear odds and no accumulated base, don’t treat it as a profession. Do it outside your 8-hour job, even as a way to pursue a girlfriend. Once it becomes a profession, it gets very heavy. Rejection becomes a huge blow, like a director finishing a film and being ordered to reshoot and recut it.” You must believe that short-term success is luck, not proof of absolute ability. “People in this industry are superstitious because sometimes they do not even know why they became famous.”

42. The band ecosystem: 3 states, and no one earns more from copyrights than shows

• Bands fall into 3 categories: those with so many shows they can pick and choose; those that can make music a profession and support themselves at a modest middle-class level; and those that need other jobs to keep the band alive. The third group looks at the first 2 and believes it can join them. “I believe everyone who starts a band genuinely loves it.” As far as he knows, “there is no band whose copyright income exceeds its performance income. There probably isn’t.”
• The price bubble arose because too many organizers and festivals pushed the prices of well-known bands above RMB1M. But did organizers make money? “Many were destroyed financially, and some were arrested. They came in intending to harvest and ended up being harvested.” He is more cautious when signing new artists, judging their potential through the old record-company lens. “To be honest, we have not mastered the essence of the newer methods. We sign few people; otherwise we waste their time and ours.”

43. Soda Music and The Big Band Theory: Traffic advantages and the built-in tension of the niche

• Soda Music is not a major innovation, but its “inherent advantage is too obvious.” Douyin is an enormous traffic gateway, and music is only one of the fields receiving a windfall; its BGM user base is already there. Under algorithmic recommendation, heavily pushing one functional song gives it a high probability of breaking out. “Going from 1 to 30 is within the technology’s ability. Going from 1 to 100 is not about platform capability; it is about whether the platform wants to do it.” 李翔 sees the interface and recommendation model as “the next generation of music app,” unlike the centralized organization of Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music.
• The Big Band Theory follows the standard variety-show cycle: “The first season gets hot, the second makes money, the third produces people.” China has only so many good bands, so supply is one problem. The deeper issue is motivation. Many bands say, “I don’t want competition or commercialization. I am a niche band; it is enough that some people like me. I don’t need to show my face to the mass market.” That cannot, and need not, be solved. A new band format may become hot later, just as talent shows moved from Super Girl and Happy Boy to The Voice and then Singer. Change the format and new acts can emerge again.

44. 周杰伦 cannot be replicated: “There will be era-defining idols, but none will be that famous”

• His view combines certainty with a limit: “Someone like 周杰伦 will definitely emerge, and there will definitely be era-defining idols, but none will be that famous. The market may be split among several people.” 周杰伦 lifted R&B in Chinese-language music to a new level through the right time, place, and people. “Even if you had 周杰伦’s talent, putting it in the next era would not produce 周杰伦’s achievements.” 毛不易 writes songs beyond what his age would suggest in experience and talent, but “has he reached 周杰伦? No. 周杰伦 developed across the board and became a symbol of an era—not just through songs, but through directing and film and television talent.”
• The medium sets the ceiling. 周杰伦 emerged at “the tail end of the CD-and-cassette era.” The internet produced platform artists such as 许嵩, 汪苏泷, 花粥, and 隔壁老樊, “but artists who emerge through the internet face a ceiling.” No one can imagine another superstar king emerging from a music-app medium. “The farther you go, the harder it becomes. Going from 1 to 10 is difficult; going from 1 to 100 is even harder.”

45. 高晓松’s proposition: Right technically, wrong emotionally

• 高晓松 said there is no music AI cannot write, including jazz that depends on live improvisation. 马智勇’s response: “Technically, he is right. AI can write any musical style. Emotionally, he is wrong. Under my test, AI cannot write a song that makes me cry.” His evidence is practical: he ran a global AI composition competition last year and “did not hear a single song that brought tears to my eyes or made my hair stand on end.”
• He still leaves room for change. “If AI searched through the television shows I like, my life experiences, and every article and post I have written to find my pain points and memories, perhaps it could do it.” To move someone, the song must be personalized; unlike traditional songwriting, it need not move millions, only you. He already uses AI as a creative assistant: he feeds in a company’s culture and slogans as raw material, then organizes the grammar and structure himself. “But if you ask whether I should have it write a song first and then revise it, that is not much different from writing a new one myself.”

46. Pessimism is the factory setting: Anxiety comes from losing control

• His self-diagnosis is innate pessimism: “I feel unhappy when it rains, low when it is overcast, and inexplicably afraid before bed, as if something bad will happen tomorrow.” Success and money do not cure it. “Whether it is 100 jin of cotton or 100 jin of iron, a pessimistic person can always find the pessimistic angle. If my eye is injured, I think I am unlucky; a happy person thinks, at least I wasn’t blinded. I will never consider things the way a happy person does. I don’t even have that instinct.” 李翔 noted that many rock musicians grow less angry and more gentle with age—“they have all started meditation and qigong.” He says he has made some peace too, just slowly.
• People called his office-smashing episode “super-masculine,” and he agrees it was “a very bad performance,” but says he could not control it. “The fundamental reason I have anxiety is loss of control. After you have given endless reminders and another mistake occurs, in that moment you don’t think of the person as merely an employee or ask whether their salary justifies that level of pressure. You only learn to put yourself in their shoes afterward.” 李翔 cited Steve Jobs’s harshness and greatness. 马智勇 joked, “That is a great legend. I am only a musician. Every time I stage Rock Chronology, several people leave the team. Those who don’t understand leave; those who do understand stay.” Since starting medication, he says, “my emotions are no longer pronounced. Even when something very happy or very sad happens, there is no great happiness or great sadness.”

47. Once certain, now doubtful: “When I was young, I believed I could do anything. Now I believe that was just luck”

• His answer to the final question was direct: “When I was young, I believed I could do anything. Now I believe that was just luck.” Things had gone relatively smoothly when he was younger; projects he wanted to do eventually succeeded, so he thought effort would always get him there. After enough experience, “you realize you are an ordinary person. The achievements you felt proud of were just luck. Someone else with the same luck might have done it too.” His pessimism even in good times comes from holding 2 thoughts at once: maybe he can do anything, but maybe an accident will arrive before the good fortune. “I know that, but I can’t overcome it or change it.”
• The final source of satisfaction, and the footnote to the entire conversation, is this: “I think I have left some things behind in this world. One day, when I am gone, some people may still have heard songs I wrote, may go see concerts I staged, and may read books I wrote. I think that makes it worthwhile.”