The pied piper of planet pop has a dream that echoes those of
many of its artists: MTV wants to become a superstar in the
expanding universe of Chinese youth culture.
To orchestrate that dream, it is creating a web of alliances
with China Central Television (CCTV), local broadcasters, cable TV
stations, one of the fastest growing Chinese Web portals and the
country's twin mobile phone carriers. If the music network's
new-millennium dream plays out , it could be broadcasting music
videos to nearly half a billion television sets, laptops and mobile
TV receivers across urban China by the end of the decade.
A match made in the airwaves
The music television network entered Chinese pop culture by
teaming up with CCTV nearly a decade ago to jointly produce the
annual CCTV-MTV Music Honours show. According to Wang Xiaoming, who
heads CCTV's National Filming Department, the programme is now one
of the most widely watched entertainment shows on Chinese
television.
This year's show, which was broadcast in early November, was so
effective in capturing youth audience ratings that it was likely to
be re-broadcast several times by the end of the year, said Wang,
who personally supervised the filming.
The popular music programme, which features young icons of
new-century culture across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and
Taiwan, reaches more than 300 million television households in
Asia.
MTV China executive Anna Kang said her company started
collaborating with CCTV in 1999 to create the awards show and "the
programme has been a huge hit every year since then."
MTV works with Chinese pop singers and actors, along with CCTV,
Beijing Television and the Shanghai Media Group to turn out an
array of original programming to quench the country's growing
thirst for pop culture.
MTV affiliate Nickelodeon works with the Shanghai Media Group to
produce shows for the east coast station Oriental Children's
Channel and MTV's Chinese-language website, www.mtvchina.com.
While MTV China's 24-hour music channel now reaches 13 million
cable-connected television sets in South China's Guangdong Province
and Hong Kong, the visionary who heads MTV's musical march across
the globe hopes to capture China's entire youth market by air, land
and cyberspace.
Music online
To reach that goal, MTV Networks International President Bill
Roedy touched down in Beijing recently to personally christen a
partnership with the Beijing-based Internet giant Baidu to provide
more than 10,000 hours of MTV China programming for online viewing
and downloading on the website www.baidu.com.
"This alliance will give tens of millions of Chinese youths
around-the-clock access via the Web to MTV programming," said
Roedy.
Roedy has navigated MTV's rise across the Americas, Asia,
Africa, Europe and other points East and West; the icon of a global
youth culture now transmits its music and messages through a
broadcasting matrix that spans more than 100 satellite, terrestrial
and cable channels and connects with a potential audience of 1.5
billion fans planet-wide.
Yet MTV China, rather than being a channel to fast-forward the
import of Western music and culture, instead focuses on, and even
creates, Chinese pop stars. It is helping the nation position its
most talented musicians and record companies to dance on to the
global stage.
Music executives in China and worldwide predict it is just a
matter of time before the first Chinese band recording in English
follows filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and actresses including Gong Li
into the pantheon of planet pop gods.
MTV's new alliance with Baidu, meanwhile, includes a partnership
with independent Chinese music labels like Modern Sky (www.modernsky.com) that gives
higher levels of exposure to alternative Chinese groups, such as
Supermarket, Sober and New Pants, said Modern Sky founder Shen
Lihui.
Baidu CFO Shawn Wang said the cultural coalition Beijing created
with MTV China was also speeding up Baidu's evolution from China's
top Internet search engine into a global multimedia group.
The new MTV-Baidu set-up for Web-based video viewing also
establishes a model for legal music downloads across the
pirate-saturated waves of the World Wide Web. "Most downloads are
free after viewers first watch a commercial," Wang said.
New partnerships
Although the Baidu alliance will add about 125 million
e-generation Chinese to MTV's potential audience, Roedy and other
strategists say they want to reach a much wider swath of the
populace in the world's fastest growing economy.
Since 2005, MTV has forged new partnerships with mobile
telecommunications titans China Mobile and China Unicom to provide
music channel data to a combined user base of nearly 440 million
subscribers.
Yet even that is not enough: MTV hopes to begin transmitting its
music videos to nearly 500 million upwardly mobile urbanites in
China, Kang said.
Some optimists hope the next CCTV-MTV Music Honours show might
be broadcast to TV-cellphone users across urban China before
Beijing stages the Olympic Games in mid-2008.
(China Daily November 25, 2006)