Shanghai’s electronic dance music summit buoyant on genre’s future growth in Asia

Thefourth International Music Summit wrapped up in Shanghai, with 700 EDM leaders from 24 countries around the world buoyed about the genre’s future in the Asian region.

The Summit’s theme for this year was “The Digital Storm”, with 74% of the delegates from China, 18% international and 9% from the rest of Asia.

There were two key studies presented at the summit which seemed to underline the potential for growth.

The Nielsen Dance Music Study, which kicked off the meet, found that EDM was already in the Top 5 of popular genres in all markets except for Japan.

Koreans were most likely to be dance music consumers and to be “dedicated listeners”.

Net Ease Cloud Music’s China Electronic Music Market report, presented on day two, estimated current users of electronic music in China at 2.86 hundred million, and the second most preferred genre in that country.

Speakers spelled out how advances in the digital realm was affecting DJ-ing and production.

In a keynote Dutch DJ Laidback Luke observed, “I started producing with an Atari computer with Cubase in my bedroom, now I mastered a track on the way here on the airplane.”

Scarlett Li, founder of CMC Holdings/Zebra Media, one of the biggest investment companies in the region, in her China, declared in her The Opportunity Is Now keynote,, “Digital music today is a real business, there will be an estimated 2 billion USD market for paid streaming service by 2020.”

Various panels were agreed that one way for Asian EDM artists to grow their influence globally was to collaborate with international names – and to view language barriers “as freedom” when creating.

It works both ways. Swedish DJs Axwell & Ingrosso’s strategy to grow their popularity in Asia is through working with local names. They announced they collaborated with a rising Chinese singer Kiki on the track The Sun Is Shining.

The Summit also finished up with a five-part plan of action.

These were:

• Focus on Korea becomes it is leading the way with electronic music engagement in the Asia-Pacific.
• Streaming provides the biggest opportunity in the region. Net Ease Cloud Music alone has “over 300,000 electronic music downloads each day and more than 620,000 playlists live per day”.
• For festival promoters within Asia-Pacific, the ultimate goal was to find huge drawing Asian talent who could headline their events, and have western names as supports.
• Artists wanting to break into the Asian market had to tailor their approach to each different country rather than see Asia as one mass of similar tastes and consumer behaviour.
• Think local, book local. Foster discovery. Encourage entrepreneurialism. Promote electronic music as an artform.

The Shanghai summit was organised by Ibiza-based International Music Summit with China’s EDM empire A2Live and its flagship event Storm Festival.

Storm is this year expanding in China to eleven cities, and making its first international foray to Sydney.

Storm Shanghai was to stage after the summit and the chance to show how it’s rapidly growing each year.

From 24,000 festivalgoers in its first year in 2013, it drew to a crowd of 180,000 last year.

This year was to be its biggest – with 200,000 people attending, andThe Chemical Brothers headlining an all-star cast.

But unfortunately it was cancelled at the last minute, by the city’s authorities, because a severe storm was passing through the city,

Despite the rain though, many fans still turned up, and expressed their rage on social media that the livestreaming of Axwell and Ingrosso’s set did not take place.