Behind the Music Festival You're Rushing Off To Is a Very Self-Satisfied Organizer | Four People at the Music Festival

For Shen Lihui and some festival organizers, there is no question that the more fashionable thing to copy now is not Woodstock but South by Southwest (SXSW).

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From April 29 to May 2 we are publishing one article a day about music festivals. Our four subjects are an organizer, a musician, a festival-goer and a business partner. This is the festival as each of them sees it.

The Wuhan Strawberry Music Festival has just wrapped up, and — as usual, by sheer coincidence — it rained on the opening day. The lineup included the local Wuhan band AV Okubo, the two French bands Ko Ko Mo and Le Villejuif Underground, Hu Defu, the father of Taiwanese folk song, the rock bands Secondhand Rose and Tongue, and the folk singers of the moment: Ma Di, Song Dongye and Chen Li. The crowd ran wild in the mud — "diving," "planting rice," "digging lotus root" — and came away caked in it.

Modern Sky, the company behind the Strawberry Music Festival, is 19 years old. In 2007, its tenth year, it held the first Modern Sky Festival on the big lawn of Haidian Park in Beijing.

Founder Shen Lihui booked the American rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then at the peak of their fame, to close the festival. They played for a full hour in a downpour. "Everyone down there went crazy," recalls Hua Dong, singer of Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, who played the slot right before them that year.

In 2009 Modern Sky moved to a new site, Tongzhou Canal Park, and the brand-new Strawberry Music Festival was born there. Afterwards an excited Shen Lihui told reporters: "People are only just starting to understand what a music festival is. There are so many young people, the market potential is enormous. China can support 50 music festivals a year."

No sooner had he said it than he found, the next year, that the estimate had been too cautious. By 2011 China already had 100 festivals. Beyond Beijing and Shanghai, the two biggest markets for festival spending, they were spreading into second- and third-tier cities. The G20 summit has put festivals in Hangzhou on hold this year, but one set of figures shows the city normally hosts about 40 a year.

Organizers are all good at coining the kind of self-contradicting phrase that young people find irresistible, the kind that makes a festival sound like nothing else on earth. The Midi Music Festival, which began in 2000, ran the same catchy line for years: "Life is so dull — thank god for Midi."

Gao Peng, a festival photographer, still remembers a slogan from Strawberry's official promo video in 2015: "What's missing is exactly the good stuff." In the video, indie musicians were asked to say a few words around the line. What they came up with did not really fit, but it had a certain contrarian bite. That year Modern Sky alone put on 16 festivals, four of them in Helsinki, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York.

Shen Lihui's ambition runs further than that. He intends to supply all the "good stuff" he thinks is missing. Asked why Modern Sky keeps taking on more, he said one important reason is that "for us personally, it keeps us feeling like we live in a very exciting era, where we can act on the ideas we want."

Those ideas are showing up, piece by piece, in the company behind the Strawberry Music Festival.

This year, starting in Wuhan, Strawberry will travel to 20 cities across China. Modern Sky also runs a set of smaller festivals: Beijing's Influence: Voice of the City, Xi'an's Zhang Guan Li Dai, and Dali's Wubaili City Music Festival.

Strawberry has now run six editions in Wuhan. The city already had a strong music scene — Dada, Hopscotch and Xiao Juan all came out of Wuhan.

IZ, a band that mixes Kazakh folk music with rock, played this year's Wuhan Strawberry. It is one of the favorite bands of Shao Qiang, operations director of the livehouse Maque Washe, and it rarely performs. Shao watched part of the festival on a Tencent Video livestream produced by Live Now, Modern Sky's own platform.

Livestreaming lets young people in places with no festival of their own see this interesting new thing. In April 2015 Modern Sky set up a subsidiary and launched a Live Now app to do exactly that.

Shen Lihui has also changed his line, fashionably calling Modern Sky an "internet company."

Probably because it sounds cooler. In a 2010 interview with Xiami Music, he said he was thoroughly sick of people forever comparing his festivals to Woodstock. Woodstock is one of the most famous rock festivals in the world. The first one, in 1969, was paid for by four young men who pooled their money. They advertised "a union of music and art," and at the same time a turning away from society and toward a dream. That year they drew a crowd of several hundred thousand.

Gao Peng saw a shadow of that festival in the early editions of Midi. To him the early Midi was freer and less formal. People ran naked onto the stage, lit bonfires and sang at night, and the audience looked like a crowd of oddly dressed artists; there was even a piece of performance art that involved walking a cabbage on an iron chain. Festivals since then stopped looking anything like that, and fast. "Young people and kids now are 'a bit prettier.'"

Shen Lihui thinks the comparison is pointless anyway. "Every era has the music festival that belongs to it," he said in an interview six years ago. Besides, Woodstock is not all fond memories. The 1969 festival lasted three days, and in that time it caused the worst traffic jam in New York State's history, forcing highways to close. Afterwards many American states and counties passed laws banning events like it.

For Shen Lihui and most festival organizers, there is no question that the more fashionable thing to copy now is not Woodstock but South by Southwest (SXSW). At SXSW 2016, Samsung showed a VR headset still at the prototype stage and Sony's Future Lab turned Alice in Wonderland into an interactive e-book. Facebook, Twitter, Dove and Gatorade all came to show off their latest work in technology and data. Over 10 days, 150,000 people from around the world crowded in — not only to watch 100 bands, but for more than 800 talks and panels on technology, design, music and art.

In March, while SXSW was in preparation, Li Hongjie, founder of the rock livestreaming platform Wild Horse Live, flew to Los Angeles hoping to meet the SXSW production team. He is planning something similar for August: the MTA Tianmo Music Festival.

In some ways Strawberry does resemble SXSW. Shen Lihui does not want it to stay a purely rowdy affair; he has said on several occasions that for a festival, safety comes first. At the same time, he has brought in a great deal of advertising and sponsorship: Momo, Amap, Dell, JD.com and plenty of other sponsors with nothing to do with music put up booths, and brand advertising is visible everywhere on the site.

People have questioned whether Strawberry has lost its purity, saying it has "started conning money out of the audience." (In practice, commercialization can also loosen a festival's dependence on its relationship with the local government.) Even so, Shen Lihui clearly still wants to do more, within these "rules," that has something to do with young people.

He looks more pleased with himself than at any time before.

He has just teamed up with GMIC, the Global Mobile Internet Conference, to stage GMIC X at the Bird's Nest — GMIC is another event tech companies flock to — and Modern Sky will put on a large outdoor technology concert during it.

"Today, technology is rock and roll," Shen Lihui said. This season's official Strawberry promo video dropped the arty style of previous years and used extremely abstract images to put forward a new slogan: "The world is virtual; only you are real."

Shen Lihui believes this line, which sounds like the philosopher Berkeley, names what young people care about most right now, and that its most direct form is virtual reality, or VR.

The music video company Jishuzhai thinks VR is still immature and sometimes looks worse than plain 2D, but for the 2016 Strawberry festival the Live Now app shipped a VR version that lets fans put on a headset at home and watch the livestream.

Shen Lihui believes he knows what young people want. In an article Modern Sky published in April, he said: "More than 90% of young people are completely uninteresting. Most of them are following something; very few actually change anything. It has nothing to do with whether you were born in the '80s, the '90s or the '00s."

In the 1980s and 1990s, Shen Lihui and his friends counted as part of that small interesting group. They did change some things, to a degree. In 1988 he and a few friends formed the band Sober.

The music critic Aidiren wrote that "before Sober, Chinese rock was like an administrative unit under the planned economy — not perfectly uniform, but all of it kiddie metal, all of it shoulder-length hair, all of it posing as vicious murderers and highwaymen, plus a uniform set of empty slogans about saving humanity" — and that it was not until Sober released Great!? in 1998 that Chinese rock was freed from its one-note nihilistic idealism and sounded human for the first time.

But something else he did mattered more in the long run: 10 years after forming the band, he founded a company called Modern Sky. Interviewed by TechCrunch China at the end of 2015, Shen said he started it because deep down he was "actually pretty well cut out for buying and selling."

Whenever people talk about Shen Lihui or Modern Sky, they end up talking about money, and over the past year more than ever.

Modern Sky's revenue came to nearly 200 million yuan in 2014, and a little more than that in 2015. Shen Lihui predicts it will double in 2016. Festivals account for 40% of the total; the rest comes from licensing video and audio rights, which is growing fast. Content from Live Now will be an important part of building that rights library. The app already has 8 million users.

"The music industry has never had anyone like this," Shen Lihui said.

Around the time Live Now was set up, Modern Sky announced it had signed the band Miserable Faith for a sum in the tens of millions of yuan. For nearly 10 years Miserable Faith had kept its standing as an independent rock band and had never committed to any music company.

At the end of 2015 Modern Sky closed another deal. Fuyu Culture, part of Fosun, invested 130 million yuan, and the two sides also agreed on a further 3 billion yuan of investment cooperation for overseas acquisitions. Shen Lihui said: "The music industry has never taken money this big."

Then he described the scene at Modern Sky's staff trip to Phuket this year. They threw a pool party; everyone got loud and rowdy, and in the end the crowd forced Shen Lihui into the water.

He was not modest about it at all: he thinks it is precisely this loud, rowdy crowd that has built the best music team in China. "We are obviously the best production team in China. Operations, production, artists, design, video — the best team in every one of them, and I'm proud of that. They're the most badass people around."

This badass crowd has been frightened too. Six years ago, at the second Strawberry festival, Shen Lihui told reporters that "Modern Sky ought to be leading this trend," and that "the main difficulty is no experience, and fear."

Now, though, no company looks more like it has the thing down than Modern Sky and its team of 200.

This year Beijing's Super Strawberry Music Festival has a new site: CITIC Guoan First City in Xianghe County, Hebei. Fans from all over the country will gather on 450,000 square meters of ground to watch. A three-day pass costs 600 yuan; last year the Beijing ticket was still 400. For comparison, when Zhang Fan, founder of the Midi School of Music in Beijing, set the ticket price for the first Midi festival in 2000, three days cost 100 yuan — one-tenth of a young person's average monthly wage at the time.

More than 150 acts will play, among them Secondhand Rose, Omnipotent Youth Society, Tongue, Xiao He and Zuoxiao Zuzhou, plus the big names Modern Sky spent heavily to book: Disclosure and The Prodigy. Apart from those two, though, as fans complain, most of the lineup overlaps heavily with previous years, and with other festivals. And getting to see them takes a while: the new Beijing Strawberry site is 52 kilometers from Jianguomen, nearly an hour by car.

That still does not stop young people from pouring in. The organizers have laid on more than 6,000 parking spaces and 10,000 square meters of camping ground. Over three days the fans join the party, and once they are inside, on top of the ticket money there is a great deal of eating, drinking and entertainment to spend on.

Below, Q = QDaily, S = Shen Lihui, founder of Modern Sky

Q: You were interviewed by QDaily in June 2015. In the year or so since, what has changed most for you?

S: My time keeps running short. I have no life, only work. But it's fine — even without much more money, you get busier and busier.

For me, my field of view has probably changed. More money and more going on put you at a higher vantage point to look back at what you used to do, and it makes those things look smaller and smaller.

A year ago, investing in a European company, a British company, felt very far away from us. Now that we invest in a British company, the world is more connected to China, and Modern Sky is a more international company.

We actually had these ideas back in 2007. We opened the New York office in 2006 and 2007. Then, the year before last, in 2014, we launched Modern Sky Festival New York; last year was the second edition, and this year is already the third.

This year we invested overseas again, mixing and merging further with the rest of the world. We can do more crossover with fashion and technology. The biggest change, really, is that all of it has got more and more interesting.

These things may look unconnected, but in the space of a year we made them possible. The resources and opportunities we have now let us imagine more happening in the future. It's going to get more thrilling.

Q: Why does investing overseas matter so much?

S: First, music has no borders, and I'm very interested in the global market, the UK and the US included. So we need to export good Chinese music and bring good foreign music in. Investing in companies and taking equity stakes puts down deeper roots, makes it more concrete, and connects us to the world.

Q: For an actual fan, what will they see from this kind of overseas investment?

S: In the new year Live Now will stream a lot of festivals from around the world. Not just festivals — record labels too, and management companies. We'll plug into every link in the music business, upstream, midstream and downstream; we'll look at all of it. More artists will be able to come into China.

In the past we would think an artist was too big a name, that they could only be booked into Beijing and Shanghai, or that if they set an Asian itinerary they would skip China. Overseas investment concentrates the channels, so we buy artists in bulk and make China one of the stops. That way more and bigger artists can enter the Chinese market. And Chinese artists have a better chance of getting out.

Q: It feels like Modern Sky keeps taking on more.

S: When Modern Sky started, we were only a record label. Later we started a music magazine and opened a livehouse. The livehouse closed, the magazine closed too — so the most important thing is that all of it was fun. Everything new we make is about hunting for a new thrill; we take on new things to amuse ourselves, to be a bit happier, to make the work more exciting.

So we're making films, and games in the future would be a very interesting subject. We had also genuinely wanted to run a radio station, and last year we actually opened one, with Hunan Broadcasting. Because traditional radio is cooler, an FM station is cooler — the same way we now think vinyl is cooler and digital music isn't as cool, so we press vinyl too, and make traditional print magazines. The point of all of it is to make the world a bit more interesting.

For us personally, it keeps us feeling like we live in a very exciting era, where we can act on the ideas we want. So we hold on to that passion. That passion still matters a lot to us.

Q: Modern Sky is making films?

S: The first film we've invested in is Miss Dong. The registered project name was fake and so was the plot, but the filing is done, we've started working with a film company on a joint investment, and Song Dongye is involved, in something like an art director role.

Modern Sky's films will also be tied to youth culture — more urban culture, more about young people, or what I'm personally interested in, which is science fiction.

The film industry is missing a company like Modern Sky.

Because they don't know themselves. A lot of film companies shoot whatever makes money. We make what we're interested in. Of course we want both fame and fortune, like the Strawberry festival — it's the biggest festival in China and the highest-grossing one. We want a commercial hit, but the content should still have more to do with our own users.

Q: The film industry is missing a company like Modern Sky. Are other industries missing one too?

S: Games, for instance. All of entertainment is. Look around the country and you still only see Huayi Brothers and Enlight Media. Modern Sky might really be an internet company, a youth-culture company. We're tied to what young people spend on and how they live, and at the same time we're in every part of entertainment. Music, film, games — we're very different from them, maybe not even comparable. I think that's exactly what makes it interesting.

Q: We can see now that Modern Sky has a lot going on. When did you realize you had so much to do?

S: In middle school. I once had a notebook, and I'd forgotten those were ideas from middle school. I thought this way of thinking came after I started the company. Then I dug up an old notebook of mine, and in it I'd written that in the future I'd start many companies, among them a record label, a magazine and a film company. I still haven't finished the dream I had in middle school. I found that notebook about two years ago.

So we keep breaking things down. Nobody rules on what you can and can't do. Nobody makes that rule. So for our own sake we keep breaking down these boundaries in our work.

Q: Why is Strawberry doing a VR livestream?

S: Everyone probably thinks it has nothing to do with music, that it's a tech company's business. If a tech company came to us we'd talk about whether to bring the technology in. But Modern Sky is itself an internet company, a tech company, a maker of content. We want to try for ourselves how new things get made.

So other internet companies didn't do it and we did. We're doing more crossover too: this year we'll work with GMIC, the Global Mobile Internet Conference, on GMIC X at the Bird's Nest, with a big technology-and-entertainment awards ceremony and a large outdoor technology concert.

Personally, I think technology today is rock and roll. Technological innovation changes the world the way rock and roll changes the world. Modern Sky wants to be a lifestyle company, and technology is a very important part of that. Blend technology into rock and roll and alcohol.

Technology in China is boring, like a bunch of IT guys. So tech expos will get more rock and roll. We knock the walls down and make chaos, and out of the chaos we make what Modern Sky wants.

Q: You signed some podcasters at the end of last year. What do you plan to do with them?

S: These podcasters fit Modern Sky's crowd well — they're friends we've known for years — and we also want to pull them together into something cooler. Some celebrity podcasts can be turned into video, with new ideas for the hosts.

We also announced today that our ticketing platform, pogo, is merging with Live Now. We want to build the whole of youth culture, and these podcasts are obviously good content for it. That includes our first user-generated project, Dorm Room Concert, which has already launched. Live Now will become a single platform combining audio, video, social, ticketing and e-commerce.

What they talk about doesn't have to be music, just whatever they're interested in, as long as it sits inside youth culture. So we're more like makers of trends, makers of a way of living. Music is really the base that connects it all.

Q: What kind of artists will Modern Sky sign from here?

S: We'll certainly get more diverse — electronic musicians, DJs, and we'll sign very experimental musicians too. That has nothing to do with revenue, but we think it's cool. We'll keep signing folk artists and rock bands, and artists from abroad. We'll even sign local artists in the US and the UK.

Q: Can you really handle all of this?

S: Modern Sky isn't a small team. You almost never see a company of more than 200 people in the music business. First, there's that scale. Second, we have to keep the excitement up.

Take film investment: we invest small. But off the back of that film we're thinking about whether to invest in a musical, or in a concert built around the film. All of it can be done, using the film to drive the resources we already have. The projects we put money into are the ones strongly connected to us.

Q: Which part of all this costs the most?

S: Modern Sky is profitable, so we don't need to burn cash on anything. In theory we don't need much cash to cover losses; we can run a positive cycle instead. If we had to burn cash, that would be dangerous.

Live Now is still burning cash, but it's all right, it's acceptable. It's fine, it's fine — the share of the total is still low for us. New things may be a gamble, but it stays within a range we control. The overseas investment uses our investors' money; we haven't touched our own yet.

Q: Of all these things, which are you looking forward to most?

S: Design. I studied fine art, so I'm more interested in visual things.

Q: Modern Sky's revenue in 2014 was close to 200 million yuan. How was 2015?

S: 2015 was up a bit, but 2016 will double it. Festival revenue actually only accounts for 40% now. Modern Sky is 18 years old, and the video and audio rights it has accumulated over those years — the licensing side — is starting to grow very fast.

Q: What is the biggest difficulty the company has run into recently?

S: Management. I've never managed 200 people. When a company grows this fast, management gets messy. I hate managing, but as headcount grows we need more executives. And while managing, we can't drown out Modern Sky's scruffy side. That's exactly what we've had to work on lately, and we're building up experience.

One example: Modern Sky has never had a clock-in, never tracked attendance; work has always run on self-discipline. Does that have to change now? The answer is no. We reform by other means. People used to run more on enthusiasm; now the incentive system is a bit more detailed.

Q: How are the 200 people spread across departments?

S: The biggest is artist management — we have 60-70 acts, with 20-odd staff on them. Then the festival production team. Operations has a dozen or so people, the tech team several dozen. The internet side has 70-80. After that comes BD: business development, rights, technical operations, finance, admin, legal, the offline stores. The New York office has 3 people, Yunnan a dozen or so, and there are people scattered in Xi'an and Shanghai. We may open a UK office this year. Not counting the joint ventures, it adds up to 200.

Q: You said doing new things makes you happier. Are there unhappy times too?

S: Very early on, when you couldn't make payroll, couldn't pay the rent. And then a crowd of people chasing you for their money — that is certainly not happy.

There still are now, of course. I get flustered, I get cocky, I get restless. All of it. I don't think I've reached that kind of calm, though it's obviously my goal. We're much calmer than we were. With this festival we often run into something that doesn't get approved. Someone is supposed to come and then can't. We want to put on a music event somewhere and the application won't clear, and we're told we can't.

Around 2008 and 2009, when that happened our moods swung wildly. After doing this for so many years, when we run into it now we just think, fine, and switch to a backup plan.

Really, our tolerance has got stronger — or you could say a dead pig has no fear of boiling water. Right: what more can happen, bring it on. That kind of pressure regulates itself now. It didn't before; you'd think the world was ending.

Q: Does raising more money bring more calm? Is there any connection?

S: I think raising more money makes calm harder, because you're doing something bigger, which means bigger possibilities, bigger risks, bigger goals.

So it gets less and less calm. And to reach the same level of calm — if calm had a number — you need a much larger capacity to bear pressure to hit that number. So I think it's a bigger challenge. Raising bigger money is a double-edged sword. But we've chosen it: living out our lives in a more thrilling way.

So as far as I'm concerned, bring it on. Life is a game — why not make it more thrilling?

Images from: MASK9, asainmusic2009.pixnet and other sites

Cover image: Visual China Group