Internet Helps Liberate, Create Music in China : NPR Music - 0 views
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When America was rocking to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the airwaves in China were dominated by songs with lyrics from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
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Internet Helps Liberate, Create Music in China By Laura Sydell Listen Now [7 min 48 sec] add to playlist Chinese electronic musician B6 B6, a Shanghai-based electronic musician, explored Western music first on pirated CDs and then at music-sharing sites on the Web. Now he collaborates online with other performers. B6's studio equipment -- a jumble of keyboards, etc. Enlarge B6 works out of a home studio in a Shanghai high-rise. Above, some of his musical arsenal. Discover China's Indie Music Neocha Web site image Neocha.com With Sean Leow, B6 co-founded the music-sharing site Neocha.com, an ad-supported service that lets listeners discover music and pays musicians a share of advertising revenue. * Neocha.com * Neocha's "Next" Player Morning Edition, June 25, 2008 - Second in a three-part series. When America was rocking to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the airwaves in China were dominated by songs with lyrics from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. It's more open today, but the Communist government still bans anything that mentions sex or violence, or that has "low class humor" - which bans an awful lot of American music. So the music most likely to come pouring out of the radio in China is syrupy ballads usually produced in Hong Kong or Taiwan. But Chinese musicians and fans are finding a whole new universe of sound on the Internet. And it's helping to create and nourish a new generation of independent artists in China. From Black-Market Discs to Napster and Beyond One of them is B6, a 27-year-old electronic musician. He lives and works on the first floor of a high-rise on the outskirts of Shanghai. He's part of China's burgeoning electronic-music scene. Growing up, the CDs B6 listened to were mostly sold on the black market. "When I was in high school, I used to listen to rock 'n' roll music," he says. "At that time, it was very difficult to get foreign or Western music." And then, in 1999, the Internet came to China - and B6 and his fr
