He Manages “World Music” Acts — So What Kind of Music Is That, Exactly? | 100 People With Ideas

World music looks rare, precious, and unconventional, and because it blends contemporary musical styles into itself, it can turn popular at any moment. Liu Zhao knows perfectly well that this is also “commercial opportunism” and “what the times demand.”

In early 2016, the HAYA Band appeared on the fourth season of I Am a Singer. When lead singer Daiqing Tana and her bandmates walked out on the show, the audience was a little startled.

This band, built around traditional Mongolian musical elements, rarely came up in conversation. The five members — Daiqing Tana, morin khuur player Zhang Quansheng, guitarist Chen Xibo, throat-singer and drummer Baoyin, and bassist Eric — took the stage in full costume and sang “Land of the Blue Wolf” (《苍狼大地》) and “The Flying Eagle” (《飞翔的鹰》), tradition with a touch of modern pop in it.

The music HAYA plays belongs to what is called world music: what you get when music rooted in a particular land and a particular ethnic tradition fuses with pop. The term first appeared in the United States in the 1960s, used to sort the less familiar kinds of music, including Asian and Latin American music.

After the I Am a Singer appearance, some viewers were sold, saying the performance was vast and ethereal, and that the costumes, the mood, and the sound were all stunning. Others found HAYA's style strange and out of place on the show, and some questioned whether the band was even in tune.

As Liu Zhao sees it, HAYA was never quite like everyone else. Rather than a singing competition, they were better suited to a theater, since a reality show would only expose their weak points: shaky pitch, arrangements that weren't full enough. And after I Am a Singer, “their fee for a show didn't go up by much.”

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Liu Zhao is HAYA's former manager. The band was also once signed to Zhanma Shidai, the agency he founded in 2012. The company now has around 15 acts, most of whom sound a little like HAYA — some hybrid, some fusion.

Liu Zhao sought HAYA out in January 2011. He wanted to be their manager. They had dinner and then went to Minzu University of China, where HAYA had booked a recording studio. The doors were already locked, so they took the emergency stairwell and climbed in through a window, and talked all night.

The talk seems to have gone well. Soon after, HAYA went to France for the Cannes music trade fair, recommended by Xu Xiaofeng, a music-industry figure who had signed Pu Shu, Wang Feng, and Na Ying. When the band got back from France, Liu Zhao took a call from its founder, Zhang Quansheng: they had agreed to let him manage them.

HAYA already had a name before it met Liu Zhao. In 2007 the band released its first album, Wolf Totem (《狼图腾》), and in 2009 its second, Silent Sky (《寂静的天空》). In 2008, Wolf Totem won Best Crossover Music at the Golden Melody Awards. In 2009, HAYA played its first headline show, “Wolf Totem — HAYA World Music Live,” at the Beijing Exhibition Center Theater. In 2010, Silent Sky won them Best Ethnic Music Artist at the Golden Melody Awards.

Those same years went badly for Liu Zhao. His first job was at the Central Music Publishing House, editing audiovisual products for music education. He then moved to another audiovisual company, Pro Art, where he happened to be handed the album Horizon (《天边》) to edit. One of its tracks, “Auspicious Trio” (《吉祥三宝》) — written and composed by the Mongolian singer Burenbayar and sung with his wife and his young niece — swept the country, and it shook Liu Zhao.

He had never listened to that kind of music. He had pushed ethnic music away, listened to rock, and even played in a band. Until then it had not occurred to him that ethnic music could genuinely move people; anyone could feel, after all, that people living modern lives would only grow more international. Liu Zhao took the lesson a little too bluntly, and in 2006 and 2007 brought in three albums by the Mongolian singer Urna. Sales were dismal.

He now regrets not reading Peasant Life in China (《江村经济》) sooner. Written by Fei Xiaotong in 1938, the book draws on his fieldwork in Kaixiangong Village, Wujiang County, Jiangsu Province, and describes the village's economy, its geography, and the ties inside the community. Because he had paid too little attention to how people actually live, his arty, subjective judgment sent him down a few wrong turns. In 2008 he quit his job, moved to Yunnan, and founded the Shangri-La Music Conservation Association, which went almost nowhere.

“You protect it because you think it's good, but other people — the locals — think it's nothing special.” At the end of 2009, back in Beijing, Liu Zhao worked something out: if he was going to keep spending his time on ethnic music, he should spend it on a person — he should build a successful music idol.

In the end he settled on HAYA. Their music was distinctive, even a little mysterious, and to most people they had more of an idol's aura.

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Liu Zhao likes world music, and he is also clear that it is “commercial opportunism” and “what the times demand.” The term came out of the United States: in the 1960s the American market filled up with kinds of music that had not been there before, Asian music, Latin American music, and the category was invented to make them easier to file. But when people talk about world music now, for a mix of social and cultural reasons it reads as rare, precious, unconventional — and because it takes contemporary musical styles into itself, it can turn popular at any moment.

The first ethnic music Liu Zhao ran into was Tibetan, yet Zhanma Shidai has never signed a single Tibetan singer. Liu Zhao made a judgment: Tibetan singers, he felt, did not have that small-band setup. Usually it was one loop, one backing track, one person singing the same way every time. As for breaking new musical ground, they were held back by religion, which “slowed them down too much.”

The thing that matters most to Liu Zhao in the world music he champions — “creativity” — shows up as a link formed between the traditional and the contemporary. It needs some character, in timbre or in form, something that sets it apart from the ethnic folk songs people have heard before, something even young people find a little interesting.

The Harridans is a band Liu Zhao particularly likes. Most of the time he manages to strip off his arty-young-man habits and treat a band as one piece of a product lineup, but he signed this British band, long resident in Beijing, on “impulse.” The Harridans doesn't quite match what people usually picture as world music: there is something ethnic in it, but also something of disco.

Finding a band like this and then making it popular, though, is no easy job.

In 1982, the British musician Peter Gabriel started WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance). WOMAD has since become world music's yearly gathering, held in a different place each time, where companies and artists come to do business and where well-known musicians play.

In China there is no such professional showcase; the platforms these non-mainstream ethnic musicians have relied on are CCTV's Young Singers Competition and local gala evenings. So many ethnic-music singers took another route: perform abroad first, get recognized and build a name there, work out some cross-genre fusion, and then come back to China.

A few of them were not unknown to begin with — Zhu Zheqin's Sister Drum (《阿姐鼓》) in 1995, Urna's Tal Nutag the same year, Sa Dingding's Alive (《万物生》) in 2007, Gong Linna's Uneasy (《忐忑》) in 2010. Listening to these songs, people wanted extravagant staging, religious mystery, and raw, folk-rooted singing.

Gong Linna is the most recent success. She released Uneasy in 2010; her husband, the music producer Robert Zollitsch, known in China as Lao Luo, had designed a completely different musical style for her, and people noticed the song for its novel form and its exaggerated stage performance. At first they treated it as a joke, a thing to riff on. Later Gong Linna and Lao Luo explained in interviews where the music came from, and people realized it was a new musical form nobody had opened up yet.

What Zhanma Shidai does is, like Lao Luo with Gong Linna, artist management and music production at once. Take HAYA: Liu Zhao's plan for them was that they must play theaters, because that would carry their sound across more completely.

Before signing with Liu Zhao the band played a handful of shows a year. In their first year with him they played Peking University's Centennial Auditorium and Minzu University of China, and went to Taiwan — 30 shows that year, several times their old rate. HAYA's earliest fee, at the Changyang Music Festival, was 3,000 yuan a show; afterward their fees rose more than tenfold.

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Of everything Liu Zhao does in music, what stands out most is that he is good at arranging shows: in an era of falling record sales, he showed strong faith in the value of live performance. While he managed HAYA, the band put out an album not to sell records but to refresh the touring set list. Those albums never repeated the impact of Silent Sky, though it is hard to say whether to blame the record industry's decline or something wrong in how Zhanma Shidai packaged its artists.

Liu Zhao's reckoning was that live income is steadier and cheaper to produce, and that measured against the overseas market, what the domestic market pays performers is genuinely not small money. “We have to consider what suits this platform's ability. The bigger name isn't necessarily better.” Count up the volume of shows and these small bands in new styles were not earning little either.

Huun-Huur-Tu, a band from the Republic of Tuva that Liu Zhao signed in 2015, is home roughly two months a year and plays more than 200 shows.

Anda Union, the Mongolian band that signed with Zhanma Shidai in January 2015, could fit 23 shows into a single month in the UK, playing straight through from London across England, Wales, and Scotland. Liu Zhao's view is that if you simply keep the shows coming, by the hundredth one people will like you of their own accord. “A crowd of fans who like world music, and the name and word of mouth that pile up show after show.”

Liu Zhao expects of Anda Union something like what happened with Hanggai. Before Hanggai won Sing My Song they were a Zhanma Shidai act, and back then they turned down almost no domestic show; they had also played more than 700 shows abroad. By the time they turned up on that talent show, their reach was no longer that of newcomers.

It was Liu Zhao who sent Hanggai to Sing My Song. “A talent show makes them famous faster. If spreading the music is the point, why not have them do the more efficient thing?” After the show, Tianhao Shengshi signed Hanggai away. Tianhao Shengshi's roster includes Jike Junyi and Tan Weiwei, and besides artist management and record production the company invests in film and television. It has far more capital than Zhanma Shidai, and is far bigger.

In 2014, while Hanggai were still with Zhanma Shidai, most of their touring was at theater scale. After the move to Tianhao Shengshi, Hanggai played their first solo concert for an audience of 5,000. Their 2016 album, Spotted Horse (《花斑马》), also carried a much larger budget than before: the production team alone ran to 27 people, and Bob Ezrin, who had made three albums with Pink Floyd, joined the sessions.

Liu Zhao doesn't think it was a waste. He calls Zhanma Shidai “an incubator.” That is a fairly grand word — even David Geffen only called his record label “Asylum.”

But the incubator may not quite earn the name. Zhanma Shidai has its limits. Lao Luo had formal training in composition and had produced albums for Tibetan and Mongolian singers; Liu Zhao had neither. What his company is better at is booking live shows, which at the start was its only business; only once it had grown to a certain point did it take on music work beyond management. The company now has four departments: artist management, planning, PR, and new media.

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Liu Zhao still has to solve the problem that bands content with a small audience lack ambition.

Zhanma Shidai signed Dafei, who used to play music for the love of it — he could write and play guitar, but he was not a singer. Signing him, Liu Zhao says, was another impulse buy. “I liked him. I was confident at the time that I could change some things about him. Zhanma Shidai still positioned him as a pop artist, so in the first year we put him on Sing My Song.”

The change he hoped for never came. As Liu Zhao sees it, Dafei's biggest bottleneck is still how to become popular. “To be popular you have to entertain — not just entertain the public, but know how to market yourself as entertainment.”

On the other side, although Liu Zhao insists Zhanma Shidai's understanding of world music is not that narrow, the fact is that artists who fit the world-music mold are hard to find, especially in China. HAYA and Hanggai, both of whom had made a modest name, have signed with other agencies. Of the 10 acts now under management contracts with Zhanma Shidai, three come from abroad. Of the remaining seven acts it works with on a per-show basis, one is also from abroad.

Zhanma Shidai has taken on new business, making records for artists. At the same time, people with government connections came to the company hoping it would put together a band with official backing and manage it. Liu Zhao turned them down; his aim, after all, is to make world music more creative, not to go back down the old road of warm, feel-good tribute songs. Even so, the company has worked on recruitment-project planning in places such as Delingha and Haixi Prefecture, helping organize performances, publish promotional material, and even train local ethnic-minority performing troupes.

About these government projects Liu Zhao is open enough: “I'm not looking for them, but they come to us anyway. We can do it, it makes money, and it helps them too, so I think that counts as a good project. Our direction is clear — we do this traditional, contemporary, cross-genre music culture.”

It still discounts Liu Zhao's ideas about musical form. Talking about how he chooses artists, he brought up one word: contemporary. Asked whether “contemporary” meant something avant-garde, he said no. As he understands it, the word mostly means keeping a connection to people living now, to ordinary people.

Closer to what people imagine when they picture someone championing world music is another idea Liu Zhao stresses: “fun,” and “hybridity.” “This kind of fusion — take The Harridans. That he chose to come and live and make music in Beijing is already a pretty fun thing,” Liu Zhao says.

Images from promotional photos of the artists and their performances.