In Beijing, Can Livehouses Still Do Things Their Own Way? | 100 People With Ideas

Like Old Qian of Maque Washe, the people who built this industry out of sheer love of play can no longer afford to play.

Qian Changkun doesn't expect anyone to like the new Maque Washe. He doesn't much like it himself.

In late November, just after a snowfall in Beijing, Qian Changkun stood inside Maque Washe — the room a warm 30 degrees Celsius — in a down coat that reached his ankles, refusing to sit down. He wore a round felt hat, a look he said he'd taken from Zhang Weiwei of the band Yehaizi. Above his head hung a crystal chandelier a meter across.

Since Qian announced in October that Maque Washe would team up with Meigaomei Bar, the livehouse he helped found in 2009 has been living again inside this bar at Beijing's Workers' Stadium. Maque Washe still books bands for the room, but it comes in as a resident brand and pays no rent. Every weekend evening since, security guards have stood under the neon lights telling the people hesitating at the door: "Yes, Maque Washe is in here."

The ceiling is 7 meters high, enough for a livehouse holding six or seven hundred people, but Meigaomei had a false ceiling put in to set off the chandelier. Along with the chandelier came a marble platform stocked with Martell and more than a dozen leather booths — to sit in one, you have to spend at least 2,000 yuan.

Photographer Gao Peng used to shoot rock shows and musician portraits at the old Maque Washe, a 2,000-square-meter former factory building in Shuangjing.

In 2011, folk musicians Xiao He, Zhang Weiwei and Guo Long rehearse outside Maque Washe. Photo: Gao Peng

Tongue performs at Maque Washe in 2013. Photo: Gao Peng

Yehaizi performs at Maque Washe in 2013. Photo: Gao Peng

The new Maque Washe reminds him of Haoyun Bar. Before livehouses — more professional performance spaces — appeared, Haoyun was the best option for many important bands playing Beijing. It was a place that sold drinks, but it also raised, crudely, a rock culture and the first generation of folk and rock fans. As a result, nobody since has been able to draw a clear line between a Beijing livehouse and a music bar.

But everyone knows by now that these venues are having a hard time. After the venues in Sanlitun South and Wudaokou closed one after another, dozens of others opened across Beijing — Maque Washe, Yugong Yishan, Mao Livehouse, Jianghu, Jiangjinjiu and D-22 among them — propping each other up alongside musicians like Lao Lang, Zhou Yunpeng, Xiao He, Yehaizi, Hanggai, Miserable Faith and Second Hand Rose.

Now they all have to ask the same question: in Beijing, can livehouses still do things their own way?

1.

Four months ago, Maque Washe moved out of the Shuangjing factory and announced it was closing. By the end, rent had climbed from 1 yuan to 5 yuan per square meter per month. Ticket revenue from band shows was limited, the venue had been losing more than 100,000 yuan a month for over half a year, and the two original partners had left long before.

Qian Changkun planned to forget all the old noise and "live a plain, steady life." Guilty but resolute, he announced the closure quietly. His buddy Zhang Jun took him to the theater to see a bad production of The Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers. Right after, a phone call came in.

It was an investor. News of Maque Washe's closing had already blown up on Weibo.

Qian Changkun had never been so busy. He gave interviews, ran all over town, looked at spaces, negotiated terms. At one point two camera crews followed him at once, filming his every move. Even a taxi driver asked him: What, are you some kind of celebrity?

Qian Changkun burst out laughing. "We've turned plenty of people into celebrities," he said, remembering the good he had done and deciding Maque Washe deserved this wave of public mourning. In detail: more than half of the mourners were grateful that Maque had taken them in when they were nobodies and handed them a room that held 1,000 people; the rest missed eating and drinking on Old Qian's tab.

Maque Washe's 1,000-capacity room, packed on the occasional night. Image via Maque Washe

On October 26, Maque Washe reopened at the Meigaomei Club at Workers' Stadium.

Qian Changkun stood on stage. He used to be a crosstalk performer and his tongue had never failed him up there, but that day, with someone in the crowd shouting "Rock and roll never dies," all he could say was: "There are too many people to thank. I can't think of who all at once."

One word to the bands and the good wishes poured in. Maotao of Wu Tiao Ren remembers recording a WeChat voice message at the time, wishing Maque Washe better and better business. Every one of those wishes came true. By late October, the new Maque Washe was booked solid through mid-December.

Qian Changkun told Zhang Jun: "If I'd known closing Maque would work out this well, I'd have closed it years ago."

2.

Beijing's MAO Livehouse, called "China's number one rock venue," is closing too.

Brain Failure performs at Beijing Mao Livehouse in 2008. Photo: Gao Peng

To "avoid a sudden death like [Maque] Washe's," founder Li Chi posted an open letter on Weibo on December 15. It read: "Beijing Mao doesn't have much time left. My whole team and I have given it everything for four months. But faced with an astronomical rent negotiation, and though a last effort is still under way, it has essentially fallen apart. There is no saving it."

Xu Zengyun may have been the quickest to accept this. He works at the Daolue Music Industry Research Center, whose figures show that after 2012 livehouses multiplied faster than bands and audiences did, creating a bubble. Through all of 2014, 90 percent of livehouses nationwide put on fewer than one show a week, while rents kept rising.

Because the news about Maque Washe drew so much attention, Daolue Music moved a salon on the future of livehouses up to September. There Xu Zengyun met Li Chi and the operators of six other venues. Li Chi said Mao Livehouse's rent had risen fivefold since it opened, and that they were trying to work out how to offset it.

Even so, someone at the salon was keenly interested in the business. The music crowdfunding site Yuetong Music planned to become a new player in the livehouse industry and had surveyed operators beforehand. At the salon it announced the results: only 25 percent of respondents thought rising costs were the main reason livehouses close; 75 percent said operators should look at themselves — they don't know how to run a livehouse as a business, and build neither chains nor spin-off products.

There were successful examples. Shanghai Mao, which split off from Beijing Mao Livehouse, took in capital over the past few years and opened chain livehouses in Hangzhou, Chongqing and Kunming.

"But the operators in the room thought differently," Xu Zengyun said. They had little appetite for commercial plans; even with things this bad, they still held on to their ideals, hoping to run a livehouse with character, rooted in its own city.

3.

Qian Changkun's buddy Zhang Jun said he could already guess how Old Qian would be written up. "They can write you as the unruly, brilliant, freedom-loving type. Or they can write you as a man who can't live without drink, stuck in Beijing's old ways."

Zhang Jun once ran a crosstalk house, and Qian Changkun was one of his performers — he knew every version of Stripping the Mandarin Jacket and could reel off a stretch of it on demand. In Maque Washe's early days, crosstalk and stage plays took up about as much of the schedule as band shows. Qian Changkun said there were already plenty of livehouses around then, and he meant to open one anyway, simply because he liked watching live music.

Zhang Jun sees it differently. After finishing a large bottle of Niulanshan erguotou, he said: "The way I see it, all he wants is a place where all kinds of friends turn up every day. He just likes that kind of socializing... maybe he likes music too."

The second floor of Maque was once meant for static exhibitions, but in the end Qian Changkun brought in a few cooks and opened a Xinjiang restaurant. Food and drink were bound to be an important source of income, and Old Qian is no fool as a businessman: in 1996 he made 300,000 yuan in three months in Zhongguancun.

But Old Qian, who grew up in a Beijing military compound, spent it all "hosting friends" at Maque. Seventy-five kilograms of 60-percent baijiu kept at Maque would be gone in a week.

This made him rather proud. Warming up, he said Maque was the only livehouse in Beijing that fed bands whole roast lamb — a hundred lambs a year, more than 100,000 yuan. That, Qian Changkun believes, is why musicians minded so much when Maque closed: "musicians don't get that treatment at any other livehouse."

Zhang Jun didn't want to argue right and wrong with Qian Changkun about this, but he swore out loud anyway. While Maque was closing, Qian Changkun turned down 5 million to 7.5 million yuan in investment, insisting on "doing it himself."

"You keep your stake, you run it three to five years, and the brand is still yours. What are you, Old Qian? You'd have taken the money first, right — two million a damn year, maybe more. No!" Zhang Jun screwed up his face and clapped his hands together hard enough to ring through the restaurant. "There's a Beijing expression you probably don't know: a phony show-off."

"It's about principle," Qian Changkun said, tipping the last of the erguotou out of the bottle. "Money you throw at me, you never get back. Why would you invest in me."

4.

Rong Arong, founder of the venue Zajia, has seen livehouse shows in seven or eight countries in Europe and North America. Half the owners, he found, were drunks: they liked the life, so they bought a space on installments and spent most of their time half-drunk, passed out inside it.

The same scene might have played out in Beijing in the mid-2000s — at least in the minds of the men who ran the first livehouses. Other labels went with a love of drink: Gao Feng and Liu Miao, who founded Two Good Friends, had played in rock bands; Li Chi of Mao Livehouse listened to a lot of rock and little folk; Michael Pettis, who owned D-22, simply liked to champion noise art.

Xiao He performs at D-22 in 2009, a plaster cast of his own face hanging on the wall. Photo: Gao Peng

But costs across the whole city never stopped rising, and that changed things.

Two years ago Rong Arong published an open letter setting terms for bands: they would have to pay a fixed guarantee toward the venue's running costs. He knows plenty of people cursed him for it behind his back. He admits he failed — that this group of people, who had built the industry out of sheer love of play, could no longer afford to play, because costs had grown too high.

After this round of closures, livehouses have "lost their character and turned into institutions," Rong Arong said. "Nobody will talk about who owns a place anymore."

The individual, and the character of the room along with him, will stop mattering. Standardized, institutional livehouses may end up closer to Japan's. Liu Fei, who runs School Bar, told Daolue Music's September salon that Japanese livehouses look "as if they came out of the same mold" — the same ceiling height, stage width, layout, lighting and sound system.

But that mold also includes this: bands pay the livehouse a sizable venue fee; they pay more if a show needs tables; and if they want a CD recorded of the performance, the livehouse takes another cut.

In 2005 Li Chi went to Japan to see it for himself. In 2007 he brought the thing called a livehouse back to Beijing. The hardware roughly followed Japanese standards, but he adjusted the revenue model, splitting ticket sales with the bands and keeping the larger share for the venue. Mao Livehouse took off fast.

5.

Wu Tiao Ren, a band now signed to the agency Modern Sky, played Maque Washe for the first time in 2010, and two things stuck with band members Renke and Maotao.

One: Qian Changkun was generous — at his table they drank Niulanshan erguotou for the first time. Two: the sound system and the engineer were startlingly professional by the standards of the day. Maque Washe had even brought in a former photographer from the magazine Image Vision, who set up four or five camera positions around the room. Renke said the video Maque Washe gave them free that night was better than anything they got at later shows.

It was Maque Washe's performance director, Shao Qiang, who brought that photographer in. Before joining Maque Washe in 2011, Shao Qiang ran show programming at D-22, and he understood how to keep a livehouse running better than Qian Changkun did. Unlike others, Shao Qiang thinks that when Qian Changkun first opened Maque Washe he was 100 percent sure it was a good, profitable business — he had been to Star Live, the biggest livehouse at the time, and the packed, roaring room had bowled him over.

There was a real logic to it at first. Drawing on his contacts in the industry, Shao Qiang brought in Zhang Weiwei and Wu Tun of the band Tongue — both already well regarded in folk circles — as guests for Wu Tiao Ren. People were still cautious about this dialect-singing band from Haifeng, Guangdong, and the "established band brings up a new one" model worked well against that. For a while it was also one of the ways livehouses kept renewing themselves and widening their reach.

In the past few years the method has stopped working. Agencies have signed well-known bands in bulk, deliberately limiting how often they play and steering their shows to big rooms — festivals, theaters, arenas. The new bands left behind draw, predictably, almost no box office.

Rong Arong thinks livehouses now have to be colder about their relationships with bands: "A show with only 100 people in it, 80 people below the stage — you can't do that every day. Back then everyone was at an idealistic stage; there was feeling, there were relationships. But for newcomers, I think that kind of chance may already be gone."

For Qian Changkun, chance and the individual still hold on stubbornly. He says he is set on giving these new bands somewhere to play, even when a few dozen people sit scattered in the room — ticket sales cannot possibly cover the cost of a hall built for more than 1,000, and the bands can't put up even a basic guarantee. The result, he says, is "not even enough to cover the losses."

Mayouye was once the example that made Qian Changkun feel it was worth it. Its members Song Dongye and Ma Di are among the few folk musicians of recent years who can honestly be called famous. Over the past three years Mayouye played three anniversary shows at Maque Washe. Qian Changkun watched them go from selling 60 tickets to filling a room of more than 1,000.

Mayouye performs at Maque Washe in 2011. Image via Mayouye

Mayouye's third-anniversary show at Maque Washe, 2014

As Qian Changkun expected, Mayouye signed with Modern Sky this year. But the agency, riding high, moved Mayouye's 2016 anniversary show out of Maque Washe and into Workers' Gymnasium; on December 31, 5,000 fans will pay between 280 and 680 yuan to get in. Back when they were still a small outfit, about 100 yuan bought you a Mayouye show at Maque Washe.

6.

Photographer Gao Peng doesn't think anything is actually wrong with Beijing's livehouse business — venues open and close, that is normal. It is simply that the business has matured and produced a much larger market for music, and a shift is under way: audiences are leaving for the growing number of festivals and theaters, after a "more respectable" way to watch a show.

When audiences raised in livehouses reach these bigger, more established venues, they are no longer allowed to lie down wherever they like. At a festival in 2008, Gao Peng photographed a girl lying on the ground listening to Carsick Cars; security soon hauled her back up.

A girl lies on the ground listening to music at a 2008 music festival. Photo: Gao Peng

A fan and a security guard at a 2008 music festival. Photo: Gao Peng

Among the real problems livehouse operators face, the conflict between "underground music" and the regulatory system may be one of the biggest.

If a show isn't properly licensed, Li Chi said, they don't dare promote it widely and have to find less mainstream ways to sell tickets. Even Damai, the main ticketing site for festivals, is out — these increasingly mainstream platforms always ask, knowingly, "Did you file for approval?"

That is how Qian Changkun came to sit in a police station. It was a Second Hand Rose show in March 2014. Qian Changkun remembers that Maque Washe crammed in 2,000 people that night. The police had not been told in advance, and by the time they arrived the entrance was jammed solid. "You can't hold this. It has to stop," they said, leaving no room to argue.

"I said, if the band stops, this crowd will go crazy and something will definitely happen. You can't push your way in anyway, so here's what we'll do — I'll come with you. I'll go sit at the station, and the moment anything happens here, you arrest me on the spot," Qian Changkun said.

It is hard to say how many shows at Beijing livehouses get shut down each year, but the operators all agree it is not a small number. Rong Arong finds it dispiriting; it also eats at the free atmosphere new bands try to build at a livehouse show, and in the end makes it less special:

"You can curse from the stage, but you know there are police outside keeping order, keeping people's feelings in check, making sure nobody gets carried away. Afterwards it's back to a bottle of Tsingtao, and the talk turns straight to 'where are we going next,' as if none of it had happened."

7.

At Meigaomei Bar in late November, Gao Feng, founder of Two Good Friends, and Rong Arong, founder of Zajia, traded a few words during a set by the psychedelic rock band Anhu. They have known each other for years. Arong had heard that Gao Feng was Maque Washe's new partner.

Gao Feng and Qian Changkun are already talking about moving Maque Washe somewhere else again. Their ideal new Maque Washe is easy to reach, not too far out, with high ceilings and plenty of room, and no neighbors to disturb.

Shao Qiang thinks the new Maque Washe should hold 300 to 500. The old one paid dearly for its size: when a new band's show drew fewer than 100 people — which happened almost daily — Maque Washe's costs ran far above those of a small or mid-size livehouse. But Qian Changkun still wants to build the new Maque the old way, with room for at least 1,000. Over the years he picked up an instinct like a talent scout's: when 1,000 people fill the whole room, the band has made it, and an agency will soon come and sign them. He wants to be there for that moment.

In the whole industry only a few companies, LeTV among them, are still thinking about opening large livehouses. Even Modern Sky, the agency that has signed a great many folk and rock bands, is opening new rooms with a capacity of only 300 to 500, which will double as space for static exhibitions.

How far are these livehouses from becoming a Modern Sky? Almost an unanswerable question. Mao Livehouse signed Escape Plan, the only act it has ever signed. People once suggested Qian Changkun move into artist management, but he knows his own operating skill and his ear for bands count for nothing in this industry. He simply likes live music, and started Maque "on a whim." As established bands drift away from livehouses, Shao Qiang thinks, his only option is to "settle for second best" — to be an incubator for new bands, and nothing more.

That night Qian Changkun sat drinking in a restaurant on Beijing's South Third Ring Road and sang Sister, released in 1991 by Zhang Chu, one of the "Three Prodigies of Magic Stone." The eighties and nineties were their musical era. When Cui Jian rolled up his trouser leg on the huge stage of Workers' Stadium, Qian Changkun was in the crowd, still in his twenties, with long hair dyed yellow. Even then, one idea was already becoming clear: people believed the coolest thing was that the cooler the music, the more likely it was to succeed. And success meant popularity and scale.

Outside the restaurant, Beijing lay under a heavy fog. Qian Changkun said that because livehouses can no longer do what they are supposed to do, that coolest thing hasn't happened in years.

• Zhang Jun is a pseudonym. The cover image and some images in this article are used with permission from photographer Gao Peng.