In August 2008 Norman Cheung, father of HK singer Ronald Cheng, acquired the remaining portion of EMI Music Asia when EMI, which had entered China in the early 20th century, withdrew from the Chinese market. It primarily targets consumers in Hong Kong and Macau: some songs require Hong Kong Identity Cards to purchase.
The company survived the dot-com bubble and offered online legal music downloads in February 2005, backed by EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG. In 2000 was founded as the first online C-pop music portal in Hong Kong. As a result, mandopop became the dominant musical genre in Taiwan. The Kuomintang, relocated to Taiwan, discouraged the use of native Taiwanese Hokkien dialect from the 1950s to the late 1980s. The Shanghai pop music industry then took pop music to Hong Kong and in the 1970s developed cantopop. One of its first actions was to label the genre " Yellow Music" (the color is associated with pornography). The Communist Party of China established the People's Republic of China in 1949. After the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II C-pop has been marketed, produced and branded regionally. Īround the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and the Chinese Civil War, pop music was seen as a leftist undisturbed distraction.
It fuses jazz and Chinese folk music – the tune is in the style of a traditional pentatonic folk melody, but the instrumentation is similar to that of an American jazz orchestra. Around 1927, Li Jinhui composed "The Drizzle" ("Chinese: 毛毛雨") sung by his daughter Li Minghui, and this song is generally regarded as the first Chinese pop song. A number of privately run radio stations from the late 1920s to the 1950s played C-pop. Buck Clayton is credited with bringing American jazz influence to China and the music gained popularity in hangout quarters of nightclubs and dancehalls of major cities in the 1920s. Shanghai was the main hub of the Chinese popular music recording industry, and an important name of the period is composer Li Jinhui. The term shidaiqu (meaning "music of the era" or "popular music") is used to describe all different types of music sung in Mandarin and other Chinese dialects recorded in China from 1920 to 1952, then in Hong Kong until the 1960s. Hokkien pop, initially strongly influenced by Japanese enka, has been re-integrating into C-pop and narrowing its trend of development towards Mandopop.Ĭhinese popular music was initially a vehicle for the Cultural Revolution and Maoist ideologies however, during the country's extensive political and cultural changes of the past 50 years, it has lost much political significance and now closely resembles the styles of K-pop and J-pop, from South Korea and Japan, respectively. The gap between Cantopop and Mandopop has been narrowing in the new millennium. There are currently three main subgenres within C-pop: Cantopop, Mandopop and Hokkien pop. C-pop is used as an umbrella term covering not only Chinese pop but also R&B, ballads, Chinese rock, Chinese hip hop and Chinese ambient music, although Chinese rock diverged during the early 1990s. This includes countries where Chinese languages are used by parts of the population, such as Singapore and Malaysia. C-pop is an abbreviation for Chinese popular music, a loosely defined musical genre by artists originating from the Greater China region.