He Traveled to 100 Cities and Still Didn't Sell 1,000 Records | 100 People With Ideas

He spent more than a year playing 100 cities across China, sometimes to audiences who weren't listening. He is just one of many independent musicians in China.

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At a bar called Just Play in Jining, Shandong, the musician Xiongxiong finished another stop on his national tour. Last July he drove to Shenyang for the first stop; Jining was number 90.

Xiongxiong is not his real name, of course — it comes from his surname. As he does before every show, he drove from where he was staying to the bar in the late afternoon to get ready. He stepped onto the stage, looked around, and set a few chairs near the middle to hold his guitar, accordion, and jaw harp, so that switching instruments would take less time and the songs would run together more tightly.

A careful check of the sound system left him disappointed: once the stage monitors were fed, Just Play's rig could only put out mono. That annoyed him. "How is this supposed to work? Without stereo the live sound is terrible." He had the engineer cut the monitors, which finally gave him stereo.

Then came the soundcheck. The guitar was easy — he played while telling the engineer which frequencies to lift and which to pull down. The accordion was real trouble: it makes sound on both sides, so it needs two condenser microphones, and the engineer had only one. Xiongxiong found a substitute of decent enough quality. He adjusted, and adjusted again, and by the time the soundcheck was over, an hour and a half had gone.

Xiongxiong Zuoye at the soundcheck

All that tuning did not add up to a good show. More than 40 people were packed into the small bar, and most of them were not listening to Xiongxiong sing. They were on their phones, talking loudly, drinking the bar's 30-yuan bottles of beer, wandering around. Apart from one young woman sitting closest to the stage, no one seemed to be paying him any attention.

Worse, the bar's sound was poor. Even with the monitors cut and stereo restored, the notes still came out squeezed together, as muddy as if a man's snoring had been mixed in.

After the show, Xiongxiong gathered up the instruments and effects pedals scattered across the floor, packed them, and carried them out, his face blank. No frustration, no resignation. For a musician who has played 90 shows around the country, a distracted crowd or a bad sound system is nothing new.

At many earlier stops the gear was so old — and the rooms themselves so awkward — that several of his songs broke into feedback, the shriek that comes out of the speakers when two KTV microphones get too close. At those shows he never got through the set he had planned.

Sometimes a venue canceled on him at the last minute. Two days before Jining, while he was preparing for a show in Tai'an, the organizer called: the city had cut the venue's power, and the show was off.

When that happens, he simply drops the city. He keeps no backup plan, because there is no point in one. He set out to play 100 cities, so the schedule is packed — three to four shows a week on average, each in a different city. He has no time to linger anywhere; he has to get to the next city to keep the tour on schedule.

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Xiongxiong is one of many independent musicians in China. Born in the 1970s, thin, he doesn't look much like the slightly cute name "Xiongxiong." The origin of his full stage name, Xiongxiong Zuoye, is simple: his surname is Xiong, and everyone around him calls him Xiongxiong. Zuoye means "works" — so the name just means the music Xiongxiong makes.

Xiongxiong calls his music "mass pop art-ism," a term he borrowed from painting: a style built out of discarded objects, product posters, film ads, and pictures cut from newspapers and magazines and collaged together, seen most plainly in the work of Andy Warhol.

Pop art's mark on Xiongxiong shows up first in his visual choices. On the cover of his Douban page, for instance, he wears a mask — an idea taken straight from pop art.

Xiongxiong Zuoye's mask

His music borrows pop art's collage as well. For the song The Moment You Squeeze Onto the Bus, he went out and recorded a bus's doors opening and closing and its brakes engaging, then cut and produced the recordings into a rhythm that stands in for the drum kit and keeps time through the song.

Wandering the Streets with the Vendors uses recordings of street vendors calling out prices, accents from every corner of the country spliced together — collage again.

The other theme running through his music is daily life. Both of those songs came out of small everyday things, and most of his songs carry marks of his own life. Music without a life underneath it, he thinks, doesn't hold up.

These are the things he takes pride in, and the reason he considers his music different from traditional folk. "Folk is too fixed, too much the same. But my arrangements, my instrumentation, my way of expressing things — those are all quite distinctive," Xiongxiong says.

The most "distinctive" thing he has done, though, is probably this tour. Since the first stop in Shenyang on August 1, 2014, he has driven from the northeast along the national border, around through Xinjiang and Tibet, then from Yunnan and Guangxi up the coast to Jiangsu and Zhejiang. From there he turned inland, went up the Yangtze and down the Yellow River, and arrived in Shandong.

His final goal is to finish a 100-stop national tour in one year.

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Unlike most musicians who tour the country, Xiongxiong has no team. He plans the trip, books the rooms, promotes the shows, and drives himself, determined to pull off the whole thing alone.

He did some preparation before setting out. He had hoped to find sponsors, but there wasn't time, so he ended up crowdfunding the tour on Yuetong Music instead. It raised about 2,000 yuan, nowhere near enough to matter, which left publicity as its real use — and it wasn't much use there either, since Yuetong Music was still a small platform at the time.

He drew up a rough route, picked the cities he wanted to play, then contacted local organizers one by one, most of them bar owners or small companies that put on independent-music shows.

Some of those contacts came from Douban's local listings, where many bars post that they will book independent musicians. He found part of his venues that way.

The rest came through people he knew. In Shandong, Shao Tao, who runs a livehouse called Old Oak Tree in Linyi, pulled livehouse owners from around the province into a WeChat group with Xiongxiong, and the shows were all arranged there.

These bar owners and promoters helped him in all sorts of ways. In Jining, Shandong, a company called Shamo Media ran advance ticket sales locally and lined up the sound equipment the show needed. They even got him onto a local radio station for a three-hour live program.

Xiongxiong Zuoye recording a radio program

That work made the Jining show reasonably lively. In a city where independent music isn't much of a culture, more than 40 people in the room already left Xiongxiong quite satisfied.

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Plenty of people helped along the way, but this "ultimate journey" through 100 cities, more than a year long, was too long for anyone to stay beside him the whole time. The one thing that stayed with him was a secondhand Jeep SUV he had already had for years.

Xiongxiong Zuoye's Jeep

The lock on the battered Jeep's passenger door is broken and won't open from outside. The front bumper is cracked. The worst scar is in the middle of the steering wheel, where the plastic has broken up so badly that Xiongxiong has wrapped it tight in tape.

Those scars came from an accident. The tour had reached Tibet, and on the road to Shigatse a cold on top of altitude sickness kept him from holding his full attention on the driving. On a downhill stretch the car hit a stone bollard at the roadside hard and rolled over.

He wasn't badly hurt. He crawled out and saw Tibetan locals gathering around his car from a distance. With their help he got the Jeep back on its wheels and called the police, and a kind Tibetan woman took him in. She made him a steaming pot of yak and potato stew, gave him two quilts, and put him in the warmest room of her tent.

At daybreak a tow truck reached the site and hauled Xiongxiong and the car to Shigatse. The repair shops there had no parts for it. Without the car he couldn't go on, so he ordered the parts from Beijing — and waited a month for them.

During that month he took the train to Lhasa and played the show he had scheduled there. The rest of the time he wandered the streets and alleys of Shigatse. A month later the car was fixed, the cold was gone, and they carried the ultimate journey on down the Sichuan-Tibet Highway.

He has plenty of stories like this. In one tunnel he got out to take photos and locked himself out of the car. The window wasn't quite shut, so he found a piece of wire and hooked the door open from inside.

Another time he was driving a provincial road from Tai'an to Jining when a bridge on the way turned out to be closed for structural problems. He spent an hour asking directions in one small village after another, and finally found a track just wide enough for the Jeep, drove up onto a river dike, and crossed there.

For Xiongxiong, these small things have become the most valuable memories of the trip. He carries very little day to day — sometimes not even his phone or wallet — but he always keeps his camera with him, to record whatever is interesting around him. He treats the dash cam in the car as a camcorder for the same purpose.

His one regret: "The dash cam's storage is too small, and sometimes I forget to turn it on, so a lot of the hair-raising moments never got recorded."

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From outside, a tour like this gathers up everything arty young people are drawn to: travel, music, adventure, driving, thinking about life. It is easy for an onlooker to read Xiongxiong's 100 cities as a romantic act. His own thinking about it is much more practical.

For most independent musicians in China, touring is an essential tool. It is a form of promotion in itself: after a new album comes out, a few shows in your own city and the towns around it are the best marketing platform available to musicians who have few other channels.

It is also income. Selling albums, in this era, no longer covers a musician's basic living.

For Xiongxiong the main point of this tour was to promote his new album, If Tomorrow Comes. "Touring is already a standard way to promote a record. I just wanted to do something nobody else had done, so I made the tour bigger — a 100-show 'ultimate journey' across the whole country," he says.

Xiongxiong Zuoye's album

Because the scale grew, making money mattered less. Xiongxiong knew perfectly well that not every one of the 100 cities has much of an independent-music scene, so even where he played there was no guarantee of a crowd, let alone a profit.

"Averaged out, the shows I've played so far have drawn about 20 people," Xiongxiong says.

At the industry's standard 30/70 box-office split, each show brought him 700 to 1,000 yuan. That is not much: over more than a year, 100 shows come to somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 yuan, barely enough to cover what the tour costs. The Jeep burns 13 to 14 liters per 100 kilometers, well above an ordinary family car, and the tolls for driving across the country add up on their own. Add food and lodging, and the trip's expenses are far from small.

"I lost money the whole way until Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and started making a little after that. By the time the whole trip is finished, I figure it'll come out about even," Xiongxiong says.

But over the course of it, he feels he has more or less left his old life behind.

He hardly drinks now. He used to have a little before a show to lift his playing. Then once, after only a small amount, he found himself on stage in something like a sleepwalking daze. To protect the shows, he mostly stopped.

His hours have changed too. In the first months of the tour he could still be asleep before midnight; now three or four in the morning is normal. Melatonin has become a necessity.

He also feels he has gone numb. Not long ago he wrote on Weibo: "After more than 80 cities, the shows lately have gone completely numb. It feels like going to a job — I've sung every song almost 100 times now, and honestly, enough! Turns out a singer is the same as a circus performer, doing the same act over and over. Looks like it's about time to end this."

Xiongxiong came to Beijing in 2002 carrying his musical ambitions. Like most musicians who move there for that, he had to take a regular job outside music to support himself. In 2005 he took a music-production course, and began making his own music alone on a computer.

Between 2005 and 2009 he wrote his first album, The Sun at Eight or Nine in the Morning, and recorded it at home. Its release slipped to 2012, when he paid out of his own pocket to press more than 1,000 copies and sold them on Taobao and at a friend's record store.

In 2012 he quit his job and started making music full time in an apartment in Yanjiao. Two years later he finished his second album, If Tomorrow Comes.

He had begun to feel some dissatisfaction with that life. "You can't make music without a settled life," he believes. That thought gave this 100-city tour the weight of a ritual, and when the ritual ends, a new life is supposed to start.

"In the future, I might want to do something more concrete — open a youth hostel, or run a few small shops." He laughed as he said it. "I still haven't worked out what exactly. But it will change."

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In a little over two months, Xiongxiong will finish the last stop of the tour in Beijing. After that, he plans to settle his life first. "I hope music can still take up half the weight of my life. I hope the things that let me settle down don't eat too much of my time."

He hasn't worked out how he will do that.

"We have only one way out, and that is victory." The line is from the film Lenin in 1918. On the Jining People's Radio program, it is the line Xiongxiong chose to close with.