From New York to Austin: What Has Modern Sky's 11-Year Business in America Actually Amounted To?

From any angle, breaking into America's music culture is not an easy thing to do.

Barracuda is a bar in Austin, Texas, right next to the city's best-known bar street. Almost everyone in town knows it. The space used to house Red 7, once Austin's most famous live-music venue. After rising rent pushed Red 7 out, a few local activists raised the money to take over the site and turned it into the bar it is now, still used for live shows.

On the night of March 15, as usual, both Barracuda stages — one indoors, one outside — had shows running. In the medium-sized room, 60 or 70 people nodded along under dim lights, which gave the whole scene a retro feel.

Nothing looked very different from any other night, except for one extra line of small print on the show announcement: "Presented by Modern Sky." Worth noting: not one of the musicians playing that night was from China.

The show was small — Barracuda's indoor and outdoor spaces together are about the size of a small-to-medium livehouse in China — but for Modern Sky it was a big deal.

Modern Sky founder Shen Lihui was there that night. Given the reach of South by Southwest, which is not only a music festival but also a place where many tech companies choose to launch new products, Modern Sky treated the appearance as a declaration: "the first time we formally told the American music industry, 'Modern Sky is here' (first kind of here we are)."

For Michael Lojudice, though, it was one more chapter. He has run Modern Sky's U.S. office for 11 years.

Before 2006, Michael had already spent more than a decade in the music business — publicity for an independent record label, management and editing jobs at magazines and radio stations. Then he happened to read an article about Modern Sky in a British newspaper. He found the company's website and emailed to ask if he could come work in Beijing for three months.

"Modern Sky was still in an office in the western part of Haidian District, with a recording studio downstairs. Ten employees, tiny but cool. Back then the whole Houhai area was full of bands — New Pants, Queen Sea Big Shark and so on. They were all really good bands, and I could see their potential," Michael said. "I decided I wanted to be part of Modern Sky."

From Shen Lihui's side, of course, this was not a story about a hot-blooded young man chasing a musical dream. By Shen's account, Michael back then "was drunk every day and kept getting into drunken fights that left him with black eyes."

As for opening the New York office, Shen says he was "talked into it." Only later did he notice that no Asian record label, Japanese and Taiwanese ones included, had an office in New York at the time. "It made no sense at all!" he said in a 2014 interview.

In Modern Sky's official telling, both men looked full of ambition in 2006. They would bring Chinese musicians to America, bring American musicians to China, and push beyond music into art and fashion in the U.S. In fact neither of them was sure of anything. What the New York office was supposed to do was never clear.

Shen told QDaily in an interview two years ago: "Going to America was an emotional decision. Back then we didn't even know why we needed a U.S. office."

By Michael's account, the first thing Modern Sky actually did in America was web design. The company had not yet started holding music festivals; besides putting out records, it took on web-design and marketing jobs. Michael showed Modern Sky's design work to a friend at a design firm and asked what he thought of it. The friend thought it was pretty good. So Michael began pitching the work to other firms.

"At the start, the point was to bring in some income," Michael said. "Then we could start touring musicians in the U.S. and releasing albums here. We were trying to work out what Modern Sky should be doing in America."

In Shen Lihui's view, the U.S. office did not prove useful until the 2007 Modern Sky Festival. It was the first festival Shen had ever staged, and it nearly drained every yuan on the company's books. Three days of shows needed a big-name band to anchor them, and booking one fell to Michael.

Michael contacted a lot of local bands in New York, and it turned out that the New York garage-rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs wanted to expand into the Chinese market. Michael and Shen brought them to China. That year the band, then huge worldwide, closed its set in a downpour — a scene Shen still likes to talk about.

For a long time afterward, Modern Sky's work in the U.S. looked mostly like that: supporting, auxiliary. As the company kept expanding its festival business at home, the U.S. office handled contact with musicians overseas. Michael also used the New York office to find sponsors for the festivals in China; that is how Carlsberg became a Modern Sky sponsor.

Chinese musicians playing in the U.S. were the American office's job too. In March 2007, Re-TROS, a band signed to Modern Sky, toured the U.S. and played South by Southwest. Their album CUT OFF! was later released through Modern Sky's U.S. office as well.

To Americans, though, Modern Sky's formal debut in the U.S. was the Modern Sky Festival it held in New York's Central Park in 2014. Report after report reached for the word "first" to describe where the company stood.

Michael had proposed a Modern Sky Festival in New York back in 2010, but the company was busy fighting for the festival market in China and had no attention to spare for New York. Only a few years later, once Modern Sky had grown into a company with annual revenue over 100 million yuan, did a New York festival make it onto the agenda.

There were plenty of reasons to do it. Commercially, a festival is a good business, and it could make Modern Sky some money in America. Beyond that, bringing Chinese musicians over for U.S. tours called for something like a base: play New York first, then spread out into the region around it.

"Shen Lihui went from a small record label to putting on a festival in Central Park, so if there's anything to say, it's that we wanted to overdo it. We probably overspent on a lot of the artists and on the production. We didn't want anything to go wrong," Michael said. "We wanted to make a statement — that we do business outside China, and that our bands are good enough to play in any city."

Shen's own version is far more sentimental: "What we mainly wanted was to present Chinese art, design and creativity, and only a festival can give those forms a louder voice. When Omnipotent Youth Society's 'Qinhuangdao' rang out in New York, I knew we had become part of this city."

His wish never came true. The crowd was still mostly Chinese, students above all. They showed huge enthusiasm for Deserts Chang, Secondhand Rose and Queen Sea Big Shark. When the Chinese bands finished, the Chinese audience left with them. By the time the local musicians came on, Central Park had turned back into foreign ground.

That made the New York festival look like a remake of the Times Square billboards: Chinese companies buy the ad space and run Chinese-language spots there, for Chinese people in America and Chinese people back home to watch. As one Chinese festivalgoer told The New York Times, she was deeply moved to see these Chinese bands come all that way to play in America. The day, for her, felt like one enormous Chinese party.

New Pants played the New York Modern Sky Festival in 2015. In the spirit of when in Rome, frontman Peng Lei tried to greet the crowd with a few words of English. The crowd broke into a commotion and demanded he stop, so Peng switched back to Mandarin.

That was not quite the plan. In putting the lineup together, Modern Sky had booked half Chinese musicians and half musicians from Europe and America, hoping the audience would split the same way. But clearly, as the face of Chinese independent music, the company's artists mean something unusual to Chinese students abroad: they stand for cool, young and current, and they also carry the students' longing and imagination of home.

Michael says they keep improving, that every festival shows them something to fix. Between 2014 and 2015, Modern Sky took the lesson and built its running order by alternating a set of Chinese musicians with a set of local ones, hoping the Chinese audience would not walk out as soon as their favorites were done.

In 2015 Modern Sky extended the festival to Seattle and brought in the famous Gang of Four, strengthening the Western half of the bill to make the East-West mix work. "Of course we'd like to introduce Chinese music to Americans," Michael said, "but we don't expect to change the world."

The Modern Sky Festival is still a business, of course. Sentiment alone cannot keep a company staging festivals around the world. The U.S. office has pushed into other music-related lines as well. It started signing local artists and putting out their records, and started handling U.S. bookings for artists such as Navy Gangs and Calvin Love.

At this year's South by Southwest, the showcase Modern Sky put on was built around local musicians signed to Modern Sky USA, with not a single musician from China. As Michael explains it, flying a Chinese musician to America without extra tour dates on the ground simply does not pay.

In a way, Modern Sky in America is repeating the road it once walked in China: sign musicians, hold festivals. Michael, naturally, has ambitions of his own. "This may be a terrible comparison. Sony used to be a company that sold cheap, low-quality goods to Americans, and it ended up the record label that signed Mariah Carey. I don't see why a homegrown Chinese music company can't become a major player in the American music industry."

It is indeed a terrible comparison. Sony was a company many times the size of Modern Sky, and it got into the American music market by buying Columbia Records.

And as Michael sees it, America's independent music and festival market is already mature. The room it leaves is nothing like the room Modern Sky found in China in 2007.

Either way, this will not be easy. Michael thinks this year's South by Southwest was Modern Sky telling Americans it had arrived. But as most of the people in the room told QDaily, they had never heard of Modern Sky before that night.

Cover image from Modern Sky USA's Instagram account