By Fan Zhihui Liying

On April 22, Maitian Music Festival officially released its full lineup of performances, with Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai playing the "Double J" finale. In addition, there are The Jesus And Mary Chain, Togawa Jun, Kusatsu No Party, Eggplant Eggs, Yang Naiwen and many other outstanding musicians, the lineup is luxurious.

Of course, this is Jay's first time at the festival. As expected, this heavy bomb immediately brushed the circle of friends, the microblogging topic # Maitian Music Festival lineup # successfully on the hot search. The content of the relevant microblogging, almost all related to Jay Chou, the topic of the current reading volume has more than 21.7 million, this lineup is also known as the netizens of the "life series".

From the ticketing information, in addition to the blind bird tickets and pre-sale tickets have long been sold out, on April 23rd at 4:30 p.m. to sell single-day full-price tickets, single-day Plus tickets and double-day full-price tickets, there is only left on May 25th single-day Plus tickets are still in the ticket (Jay Chou performs on May 26th), there is a hard to find trend.

For a festival that's still a month away from its official performance, it's been a hot one, needless to say. So much so that some netizens even commented, "Maitian counted the conscience, the first lineup does not put nuclear bombs, take care of the real independent music fans first grab tickets, and only now zoomed in."

Behind Jay Chou's first participation in the festival, there are actually some quite worthwhile topics to explore.

Without realizing it, local music festivals have been around for 20 years.

According to the information, the first local music festival in China was the first "Heineken Beat 99 Summer Music Festival" held in Beijing Ritan Park in July 1999, which also started the development of local music festivals. The first Modern Sky Music Festival was held at Haidian Park in Beijing on October 2-4, 2007. Until 2010, domestic music festivals exploded, with 31 festivals across the country in this year***, counting the famous ones such as the MIDI Music Festival, Strawberry Music Festival, Zhang Bei Music Festival, and Yangtze River Music Festival, etc.

With the growing popularity of music festivals in China, it has become more and more difficult to find a place for music festivals.

As more and more music festivals emerge, music festivals are becoming better known to the public as a way of life. For the younger generation, going to music festivals is not just about listening to music, it is also a new social scene, and has even become a way of self-identification.

While music festivals have blossomed, problems such as the convergence of artist lineups, lack of on-site support, and monotonous performances have begun to be exposed, and music festivals themselves are in dire need of iterative upgrading.

First of all, the content of the vertical segmentation and mode of exploration. The big data from the Hornet's Nest tour shows that most of the music festivals nowadays have electronic, rock, folk, and pop as their themes, and classical music is also surprisingly popular among young people. In addition to the transformation of music styles, the famous Zhangbei Grassland Music Festival is seeking to transform into a music season in 2018, by increasing the length of the performance, the number of venues, to enhance the visitor experience, drive the development of the tourism industry.

In addition to the adjustment of content positioning, music festivals are constantly upgrading technically. 2016, the Strawberry Music Festival for the first time to use VR live broadcast technology on the festival live, it is also the first time in China to use VR technology to live broadcast of large-scale outdoor music festivals; in the same year, the Yangtze River Music Festival in the lighting choreography and acoustics and other aspects of the search for technological upgrades, the specifications can even be compared with the international standard of concerts.

Now, the local music festival into the 20th year, from the number of venues, scale, type, continuity and profitability point of view, the overall is still in the fumbling adjustment period. According to the statistics of Little Antlers Think Tank, after the rapid development of the first few years, the growth rate of the overall market scale of music festivals began to slow down from 2017.In 2018, there are 263 music festivals in the domestic market***, which is a slight decline from the 269 venues in 2017.

Among them, 140 new music festival brands emerged in 2018, accounting for 52% of the whole. In other words, the survival rate of 2017 festival brands in 2018 still did not reach 50%, and more than half of the festivals were postponed or canceled in the second year, so the situation is not optimistic. Among them, music festivals that can land for three consecutive years and have a certain degree of branding only occupy about 15% of the market as a whole.

Over the past 20 years, new festivals have been born and old ones have fallen by the wayside. But on the whole, compared to the slow recovery of the recorded music industry, and especially compared to the prosperity of the music festival market in Europe and the US, live music represented by music festivals still has a lot of room for development under the impetus of consumer upgrading.

Against this backdrop, let's talk about why Jay Chou chose to participate in music festivals and the potential significance behind it.

There is no doubt that domestic music festivals have reached a point of transformational demand. On the one hand, the head of independent musicians represented by rock and folk music, as a scarce resource, has long dominated the stage of major music festivals, and the homogenization of the performance lineup has been criticized by music fans for many years. From the content supply side, there is an urgent need for a breakthrough in the range of artists to choose from.

The data shows that in 2018, the number of domestic musicians who can play five music festivals in a year has reached 130, of which the number of music festivals in which the "landlord's cat" played in 2018 reached 31, far exceeding the number of music festival performances of the headliners in the previous two years, followed by Park Shu (24) and Chen Hongyu (22 shows). After excluding vertical festivals such as electronic and rap festivals, 66% (173 shows) of comprehensive festivals had to share these headliners, and the lineup inevitably felt like déjà vu.

The addition of popular headliners like Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai will definitely bring more freshness and viewability to the festival performances, and attract more people from outside the festival circuit.

On the other hand, Jay Chou's presence at the festival can be seen as a sort of "market sinking" strategy for the headliners. As we know, in the last decade, the music market at home and abroad has been in the doldrums under the impact of digital music, and the contribution of copyright revenue to musicians has been very limited, so the live music market, represented by tours and festivals, has basically become the main source of income for musicians.

Music festivals themselves serve as an excellent means of publicity, and for Jay Chou, participating in music festivals can also be a way of communication to further open up the youth market.

Take the recently-concluded Coachella music festival as an example. In terms of lineup, there are not only top stars like Childish Gambino, Tame Impala and Ariana Grande as the lead performers, but also Billie Eilish, Diplo, DJ Snake, Gucci Gang, Khalid, BLACKPINK, and HYUKOH, and many other big names. The band will be joined by Billie Eilish, Diplo, DJ Snake, Gucci Gang, Khalid, BLACKPINK, HYUKOH and a host of other big names in pop, rap, electro, folk and rock.

So, for the folk and rock musicians who dominate the festival, the addition of pop musicians to the lineup will inevitably take a bite out of the pie and create some kind of competition.

Of course, the greater significance of Jay's festival debut to the market is that it has, to some extent, raised the threshold of competition for domestic music festivals, and even accelerated the process of popularization of domestic music festivals.

When the brand positioning and on-site experience is gradually optimized, the scarce artist lineup with strong appeal will increasingly become the core of the major organizers' competition, and the head effect of the future music festival will be more obvious.