Cantopop and K-pop

Archil Megrelishvili

In 1980s and 1990s Cantopop was extremely popular all over the world. However, starting from the mid-1990s and in 2000s it drastically lost popularity and is currently forgotten by most parts of the world it was popular in. My research will present possible factors that played major roles in declining the popularity of Cantopop, while analyzing the increasing popularity of K-pop in the light of Cantopop’s fall.

The Golden Era of Cantopop

Success in the entertainment industry always comes down to the income. Especially in the movie and musical industry any kind of success is determined by the sales. Hong Kong became dominant in both of these in 1970s and 1980s all over the world.

“Cantopop had developed into a highly profitable business with a quickly expanding market by the end of the 1970s, but in the 1980s, it developed further, into a multi-media industry. Throughout the 1980s, superstars such as Leslie Cheung, Alan Tam and Anita Mui surpassed their predecessors by developing Cantopop into a cross-media business that also straddled across borders to neighboring regions.” (Chow, 2007)

At this point in time Cantopop played a huge role in the economy of Hong Kong. Advertising, fashion, live concerts, and album sales provided them with enormously large incomes at the time, which in turn gave the artists a great deal of influence to set the standards of music and performance.

“In its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, Cantopop defined the look, feel and—with its lush, ultra-refined production values—even the sound of Chinese cool” (Burpee 1996). According to the Baseline Study on Hong Kong’s Creative Industries conducted by the University of Hong Kong for the Central Policy Unit of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (2003: 114),

“The music industry in Hong Kong is dominated by Cantopop in production and sales. It constitutes a major part of the entertainment business of the territory in terms of employment and contribution to GDP. It is also a major part of the popular cultural phenomenon of Hong Kong, which “has significant influence in the region and also a large market in every community overseas.”(Chow, 2007)

 

 

The “Death” of Cantopop’s Global Popularity

Cantopop’s popularity started diminishing by 1997. This year marks the end of the Golden era of this musical genre, and the beginning of its popularity drop. The reason this period is considered critical for Cantopop is the unprecedented decline in album sales.

“Overall, Cantopop sales plunged from 9.2 million albums in 1996 to 4.9 million in 1998 (Mok 2001), and, according to the statistics of the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (Hong Kong Group), Cantopop sales dropped by more than half, from 1.853 billion Hong Kong dollars in 1995 to 0.916 billion in 1998 (James Wong 2003: 169).”(Chow, 2007)

 

 

On top of this, two of the most famous Cantopop and Hong Kong movie stars, Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung passed away in this period, which caused a significant fan base to switch to Mandapop. Piracy is considered one of the reasons when looking at the decline of Cantopop’s popularity. Since piracy drained the income Cantopop artists were supposed to have from album sales quite drastically, it became less and less valuable for some of them to make the albums. Considering that during the end of 1990s and the first half of 2000s internet started to become more prevalent and spread extremely fast without any copyrights restrictions developed, piracy did not require much effort or knowledge. Internet was not yet at the stage to punish online piracy of music properly. This is officially known as one of the major factors of the “death” of Cantopop.

However, Stephen Yiu-wai Chow argues that these could not have been the main reasons that caused the decline of Cantopop. He thinks the real reason why Cantopop lost its significance and popularity was due to the lack of distinction between Cantopop and Mandapop for the western audiences. Chow theorizes that Cantopop was usually not separated from Chinese pop music, which ultimately resulted in its demise.

The Emergence of K-pop

 

 

In 2012 world got hit by a massively viral music video on YouTube called “Gangnam Style”. This was not just one of the catchy songs, as it soon took over the world and became the first video ever on YouTube to get one billion views. This was the song that brought the world’s attention to K-pop. K-pop has been commercially successful since 2000s, but this success did not become global until Psy’s hit in 2012. Patrick A. Messerlin and Wonkyu Shin talk about the reasons behind the emergence of K-pop in their article “The Success of K-pop”. Much like Hong Kong’s entertainment industry, Korean movies were famous before their music. K-pop has been famous for about 15 years now, while Korean movies have been globally renowned since 1950s. No one can deny that the increased usage of internet and the simplicity it offers when it comes to spreading music and videos has been a huge contributor to K-pop’s popularity. However, there are many other reasons behind it. 

 

The article also talks about the general fast pace of K-pop, which is something Cantopop lacked. The production rates are very fast and prices online get lower as the time progresses, which makes it more available and accessible to masses. There is one strange part of the article that caught my attention more than others. There is a section which talks about two factors in the popularity of K-pop, the Korean government and K-pop firms. These firms planned out and worked hard to find ways to make appropriate and successful content for the large audiences. In the end they succeeded and found a perfect product that would be popular throughout the world, but this process was way more structured than the usual music industry has known. 

“To sum up, -pop idol firms have produced the type of entertainment that uses intensively the visual inputs that are relatively abundant in Korea—precisely the product selection that would ensure -pop’s sustainable success in international competition, according to the Heckscher-Ohlin trade model. This conclusion deserves one final remark. This adequacy has not been achieved rapidly and without serious effort. It has required a long and costly process of trial-and-error for -pop firms.”(Messerlin, Shin, 2017)

This ensures that when a viewer looks at a K-pop music video or listens to one of the songs, they will instantly know without a mistake that this is in fact a K-pop song. They are easy to distinguish even if a viewer does not speak or understand a word in Korean. This is exactly a factor Cantopop was missing, which in turn led to its decline as K-pop was starting to emerge.

 

Cantopop Today

 

 

 

References

  1. C. Victor Fung, Ming Lee and Shun-Wai Esther Chung. “Music Style Preferences of Young Students in Hong Kong”, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, No. 143 (Winter, 1999/2000), pp. 50-64.
  2. Chan, Brian Hok-Shing. “English in Hong Kong Cantopop: Language Choice, Code-Switching and Genre.” World Englishes, vol. 28, no. 1, 2009, pp. 107–129., doi:10.1111/j.1467-971x.2008.01572.x.
  3. “Chase.” Performance by Leslie Cheung, YouTube, ROCK RECORDS, 13 Mar. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcSE3cQH-Ic&list=PLTvhYWzEQJHmp91TC3Ld6Vs7JfjWyrn8q.
  4. Chik, Alice. “Creative Multilingualism in Hong Kong Popular Music.” World Englishes, vol. 29, no. 4, 2010, pp. 508–522., doi:10.1111/j.1467-971x.2010.01678.x.
  5. “GANGNAM STYLE(강남스타일).” Performance by PSY, YouTube, officialpsy, 15 July 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0.
  6. Jeroen de Kloet. Sonic Sturdiness: The Globalization of “Chinese” Rock and Pop, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2006 22:4, 321-338, DOI: 10.1080/07393180500288444
  7. Messerlin, Patrick A., and Wonkyu Shin. “The Success of K-Pop.” Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 45, no. 4-5, 2017, pp. 409–439., doi:10.1163/15685314-04504003.
  8. “’MIC Drop (Steve Aoki Remix)’.” Performance by BTS, YouTube, BigHit Entertainment., 24 Nov. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTlv5_Bs8aw.
  9. Zhu, Yiu-wai. Before and after the Fall: Mapping Hong Kong Cantopop in the Global Era. David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), Hong Kong Baptist Univ., 2007.
  10. “梅艷芳 – 親密愛人 / Intimate Lover.” Performance by Anita Mui, YouTube, 27 Jan. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hym5TVIovHw.
  11. “眼淚極黑 Hold My Tears.” Performance by Ella Koon, YouTube, Warner Music Hong Kong , 27 May 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU8_u31xvf0.
  12. “’휘파람'(WHISTLE).” Performance by BLACKPINK, YouTube, BLACKPINK, 8 Aug. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dISNgvVpWlo.