He Rounded Up 12 Musicians and One Big Company to Revive a Music Project That Died Young | 100 People With Ideas

"He probably doesn't even realize it himself, but he's already built out the whole upstream of the industry chain."

Xiao He is a folk musician, but not a famous one.

At least, far fewer people know him than know Lao Lang or Ma Di: none of his songs are as popular as Lao Lang's My Deskmate 《同桌的你》 or Ma Di's South Mountain, South 《南山南》. The label usually attached to him is "lead singer of the band Glorious Pharmacy," though people often suspect that this rarely-seen band has quietly broken up. Most of the time he shares livehouse stages with other folk musicians — Zhou Yunpeng, Wan Xiaoli, Zhang Weiwei. They say that when Xiao He makes music he is like "a madman," and they also say, evenly, that he is "a good person."

If you had to name something remarkable that has happened to him, one of those things happened in 2010. Xiao He wrote 12 songs for 12 ordinary people. He picked them out of a pile of letters sent in response to an open call, spent a day living alongside each one, wrote that person a song, and filmed them with the palm-sized DV camera he carried everywhere. The project was called "Twelve Musical Portraits." Had it not run into money trouble when the time came to produce and release the songs, Xiao He might have collected a bit of mainstream fame on his talent and his sincerity.

That bit of fame reached him only five years later. "Musical Portraits" was revived last year, but the story of sincerity had turned into an interesting story about business.

The folk musician somehow solved the project's money problem, and proved along the way that his talent for making friends could be converted into a talent for gathering people. Twelve musicians — Lao Lang, Ma Di, Zhou Yunpeng, Wutiaoren, Wan Fang and Chen Li among them — joined "Musical Portraits" and set about re-composing and singing Xiao He's 12 songs. Zhou Yunpeng put his admiration this way: "If Xiao He used to be with the Sun Moon Holy Cult, by now his kung fu is complete."

In mid-January, Xiao He and the 12 musicians appeared together at a 2,000-square-meter venue in Beijing, with seven or eight hundred people in the audience. Yin Liang, CEO of LeEco Music, was among them. Having found in "Musical Portraits" a "new organizational form" for music, his company put over a million yuan into staging the concert and streamed it live to paying members. In December 2015, the record and the merchandise the project had produced were also crowdfunded on the music service platform Yuetong Music.

"[Xiao He] probably doesn't even realize it himself, but he's already built out the whole upstream of the industry chain," said Guo Xiaohan, co-founder of Yuetong Music.

1

Xiao He was, more or less, aware that this round of collective creation was not the "Musical Portraits" of five years ago.

At the concert he sang Master Hou 《侯师傅》, the sixth of the 12 songs. He looked lost in it, no different from usual. But three days after the show, Xiao He said that what he had worried about most all evening was not how many people came or whether the songs sounded good — it was "whether things would stay in order out there and not turn into a mess! Amitabha."

Nothing went wrong. As Xiao He had hoped, the evening "followed a set process and finished in an orderly way." Zhou Yunpeng went on first and sang Wang Gang 《王刚》. Wang Gang is a village teacher from Yingshang, Anhui; the host called him up onstage too. He and Zhou Yunpeng had never met before, but the two got talking anyway, and the room warmed up.

"Something like this — part concert, part play, part stage production — is complicated," Zhou Yunpeng said. "As far as I can remember, it's the first time China has had a performance like this. It was a success."

Except that at moments it got awkward. Mei Er, bassist of the Shanghai-dialect band Top Floor Circus, watched the whole thing and felt he was shuttling between a black-box theater play, A Date with Luyu, a livehouse gig and a university auditorium. "A lot of the time, the complicated parts had already outgrown the meaning of the music itself," Mei Er said. Shao Qiang, operations director at Maque Washe, a Beijing livehouse, agreed; he said he would rather have heard Xiao He's own version.

Xiao He's own version was funded in 2010 by "The Shop: Sound Theater," a project of Vitamin Creative Space. The plan was for him to close the project at the end of 2010 with an album and a live show. By year's end the money was nearly gone and the two sides still had not worked out an execution plan both were happy with, so the demos and the video footage for all 12 songs were shelved together.

Xie Jiangchuan, founder of the label Door Records, is sure that Xiao He waited all along for a chance to restart it, because he kept hearing Xiao He bring "Musical Portraits" up. The two met after one of Xiao He's shows. Xie Jiangchuan wanted to try fresher ways of working with musicians on projects rather than signing them the way traditional music companies do. In 2013 he produced and released a collection of Xiao He's film scores.

That the project could not come back in its original form was the conclusion Xie Jiangchuan drew from years of releasing independent records. He talked Xiao He around.

Xiao He's original wish was to press the 12 "Musical Portraits" songs as an album. Xie Jiangchuan advised against it: the return on retail was too low. Xiao He then thought the video footage might be cut into a documentary, with a limited run of DVDs sold to art museums — the collector's route. Xie Jiangchuan did not think much of that either.

In March 2015 the two agreed: this time "Musical Portraits" would not be Xiao He's one-man show. It would be an arts and culture project combining music, music videos, a documentary, curation and live performance, and they would use more commercial methods to push it into the market.

Xiao He started a company for it, Anpan Culture, with Xie Jiangchuan and a few other friends on the team. Xie Jiangchuan proposed the division of labor: Xiao He would handle overall coordination of the startup and publicity for the project, and he himself would do the planning and execution he was good at.

2

Last May, Xiao He opened a Weibo account to promote the project. It was Luo Yonghao's idea.

Luo Yonghao had seen Xiao He play, became a "fan" fast, and kept looking for a way to work with him. While "Musical Portraits" was still being planned, this marketing expert suggested that Xiao He write a song for a washed-up rock star — guaranteed to go over big. Xiao He said no; that sounded to him like work for gossip reporters.

But he took another of Luo Yonghao's suggestions: build a personal "self-media" outpost for publicity. Xiao He had refused all of this before. His only presence online was a musician's page on Douban, and the tools he used most day to day were text messages and email. He held the biases that experimental musicians often hold about the market: "I don't think making music requires being all warm and chummy with your fans on the surface. Marketing, getting the word out — none of that matters."

In 2015, Xiao He "walked out of his biases." Besides Weibo, he opened a WeChat official account called "Musical Portraits" and signed up with Xiami's musician program; Xiami released the 12 "Musical Portraits" songs exclusively. Compared with five years earlier, people really had grown more willing to be sociable on every kind of social network, and the people who care about independent and folk music no longer hung around only on Douban — they published and found information through streaming services, video sites and social networks.

Newer musicians understand these platforms better. Chen Li, a singer who had recently become famous, had 610,000 followers on Weibo. She was invited into "Musical Portraits" too. While the music video for her song was being shot, Xiao He posted a photo of her, and the repost count passed 100 in short order — Xiao He's own posts usually got reposted in the single digits, and dozens or hundreds of reposts were the exception.

Xiao He says that in restarting the project he thought about the songs first, pairing subjects and musicians who shared something. The members of Wutiaoren and the person they wrote about, a cleaner named Chen Mulian, have all lived in Guangzhou for years, so they know exactly what the "urban village" in the lyrics means. The singer Lao Lang and the art collector he sang about, Guan Yi, were both born in the 1960s; the singer Ma Di and the animator Wang Ruoshan were both born in the 1990s.

But it was also perfectly obvious that "popular singers" had been invited on purpose. Wang Ruoshan was startled to find that Xiao He, who had once written her a song, had been replaced by Ma Di. Interviewed by a reporter from Noon, she made no secret of her delight: Ma Di was her favorite singer at the moment.

The pairing of the 12 finally showed a rare amount of calculation. Zhou Yunpeng called it "a gathering of heroes from every school — across ages, styles and genres." It included the Taiwanese singer Wan Fang, whom he had recommended, and the folk singer Luo Sirong. The full "Musical Portraits" collection also takes in Cheng Bi, Chet Lam, Omnipotent Youth Society, Xiao Laohu, Kang Mao and Glow Curve.

As planned from the start, Xiao He the singer stepped back behind the scenes and barely interfered with the new members' freedom to create. The one thing he had to do was keep the whole project on schedule, pushing the musicians to turn in their work within a month. After that he still had a documentary to edit, and music videos to shoot, and a showcase to put on.

3

Xiao He also had to work out the money.

By Xie Jiangchuan's estimate, the team spent about 100,000 yuan making the album between June and December, and 900,000 yuan in all once video shooting, editing and the team's own labor were counted. That was nearly the whole of the new company's startup capital, just under 1 million yuan, which included more than 100,000 yuan Yuetong Music had advanced as "pre-crowdfunding money."

Yuetong Music is an online music crowdfunding platform, but it is widening its range of services, planning to presell and release albums for musicians, help them prepare performances and sell merchandise. Founder Guo Xiaohan is a fan of Xiao He's; last summer she ran into him and Xie Jiangchuan at a show, heard about the "Musical Portraits" plan for the first time, and liked the sound of it.

"The scene has its own way of playing, and the industry has its own way of playing," Guo Xiaohan said. When she got ready to work with this odd, mischievous idol of hers, she already knew "Musical Portraits" would probably lean toward the industry. Xiao He had prepared a PowerPoint deck that looked to be forty or fifty pages long. In it he talked about new forms of musical creation, about how people connect with one another, and about "tai chi."

Then Xiao He wanted to know what "crowdfunding" was, exactly. "Isn't it supposed to be money in one hand, goods in the other?"

Guo Xiaohan wanted to take some of the scene's freewheeling air out of the thing. She explained that doing it this way would let the audience hear about the project sooner, and would double as publicity. Xiao He accepted in the end, happily, and the annual "Musical Portraits" album, the documentary and a set of themed postcards each went on presale or sale through Yuetong Music. Over the past month, these records and goods have sold more than 80,000 yuan's worth.

That winter, Xiao He and Xie Jiangchuan ran into a new problem. The complete "cultural and arts project" they had imagined was still missing two large pieces — an exhibition and a live show — and without new money they could not build them.

A curating team called Rou took over the whole plan for the "Musical Portraits" exhibition at this point. Yin Liang had heard about "Musical Portraits" back in June, when the project had barely started and much of the work was still on the drawing board. In December, LeEco Music decided to step in. It provided a three-story, 2,000-square-meter exhibition and performance space in Beijing, the Dongqu Story D-LIVE Live Hall, whose naming rights LeEco Music had acquired not long before. The company planned to put over a million yuan into it.

Some of that came back directly: on top of ticket revenue from the two-day show, the performances were streamed to paying LeEco Music users, bringing in roughly 300,000 to 400,000 yuan.

4

"Musical Portraits" could have made more. With more time to prepare, the crowdfunding platform alone might have sold another 10,000 or 20,000 yuan's worth.

"The biggest problem was that the crowdfunding video came out late — we didn't get it done until the day before the show," Xie Jiangchuan said. It was late because they hit a difficulty they had half expected: "when creativity and commerce collided, they didn't blend well."

As Xie Jiangchuan saw it, the video was a simple thing that had to say three things: we're making Musical Portraits, and here roughly is what it is; if you like it, come support it, and there are gifts; here's how to take part. He spent three days writing a script, and in the end Xiao He did not shoot it. "He was still coming at it as a creator, making his own artistic statement."

Guo Xiaohan thinks this had a lot to do with Xiao He's character. He wanted to stress what music connects, the relationship between the one who creates and the one who is written about, the effect that making music has on people. "He was afraid that if it wasn't described precisely, the film would come across as too mercenary, and that wouldn't be good. But ordinary fans probably care more about what the work is like and who he made it with."

Guo Xiaohan had expected a higher crowdfunding total than they got. Yuetong Music had crowdfunded new albums for the folk musicians Wan Xiaoli and Zhou Yunpeng before, each raising several hundred thousand yuan. Xiao He is on their level, and besides, "this was a crossover project with the strongest, most golden lineup." Yuetong Music had also meant to look, from the very start of the project, for planning partners and partners arriving with large sums to invest, but that never happened.

Xiao He's friend Zhou Yunpeng thinks this is because Xiao He knows where the limit is. He "hasn't turned into a networker; he's still a musician. Onstage he's still himself." That alone, Zhou Yunpeng said, is remarkable. In 2009, when he gathered singers to record Red Bulldozer 《红色推土机》, an album of children's songs for poor blind children, he had not given half as much thought to making an impact as Xiao He has.

5

Five years ago, Xiao He had not imagined that the way music gets made and released would change this much.

In 2010, in an open letter calling for people to sign up for "Musical Portraits," he wrote: "As for what this whole thing means, I'm honestly still thinking about it. Maybe after the 12 months are done I still won't have come up with a tidy meaning for it."

The turn may have come that same year. Xiao He had written only a few of the "Musical Portraits" songs when he leapt too high during a show and broke his leg. For three months he lay in a hospital bed and could not go anywhere. Looking back at that stretch, Xiao He said: "Your one ideal at a time like that isn't to become a great experimental musician. What I wanted then was just to know when I could stand up again and walk out of that bed."

Xiao He decided to keep his feet on the ground. As Zhou Yunpeng sees it, Xiao He learned in the end to climb the stairs — and he found the "elevator" as well. "[Commercialization] is like an elevator. Some people say the stairs are better exercise, but everyone takes the elevator because it's easier. What matters is where it can take you."

The big concert carried Xiao He somewhere successful — so he has heard. In his own head he drew a conclusion and settled one thing: that the project's failure to come together five years ago was, in fact, a good thing. "The point of Musical Portraits from the start was to show off the most fun part of the idea: you can see how the different musicians in it perform differently, and the people who were written about, and the people who come to the show and the exhibition, all feel different things and react differently. Through the many sides this project shows, people can catch a glimpse of what music does between people, and what happens because of it."

Distribution online, and the music business's new players, have changed what music does, too. LeEco Music, the partner, bought the rights to "Musical Portraits" and plans to run it as an IP project. Yin Liang says LeEco will operate it, and that Xiao He's team will keep taking part in creating the content.

Besides the music videos and the documentary in the original plan, Xiao He has more plans waiting. The team has started something called "Interactive Valley," inviting any young person with a talent for creating to come and write songs for strangers. They once meant to build an app for it, but since Xiao He started using WeChat, he has decided an official account can handle it fine.

Cover image credit:

weixinquanquan, weixinquanquan