Is there any half decent Cantonese pop music or is it all treacle 04 41 25 Jun 2003 UTC Is there really westerners listening to Cantopop I doubt the sentence To western ears is NPOV The article fails to mention the composer singer and their song which overturned the preception that Cantopop as a second grade Music i e for old uneducated person only And it was Sammy Hui who finally pushed Cantopop to overtake Mandarin pop as the music of choice for HK youths Yes no mention at all of the Gu Gaa fai Wong Jim collaboration No mention at all of the popularity of TVB TV theme songs while everbody else was sticking their own lyrics onto somebody elses music these two seemed to be the only people producing original material I ll try to NPOV the article more but I claim no responsbility on contentyou can t get much further from my musical domain than Cantopop 05 06 25 Jun 2003 UTC No problem I bet you have the chance to listen to the most popular Cantopop songs but not the best I will get the same preception if I listen only to Madonna or Britney Spears I didn t mean that I wouldn t like it I meant that I ve never heard any and I certainly don t know the history behind it so my editing is limited to grammar and attempts at NPOV 05 23 25 Jun 2003 UTC Tones I heard that Cantonese music differs from Mandarin in that Mandarin respects the language tones in the melody but Cantonese doesn t Is it true Good Cantopops do respect the language tones in the melody as all Chinese dialects are tone sensitive What you heard is a recent disaster in HK music beautiful face is more important than singing skills and so songs become less important But there are still many real musicians care about the tones and the melody Cantonese is more tonal than Mandarin Mandarin only has 4 tones for each pronunciation but Cantonese has at least 6 tones according to most dictionaries Some author even claims there are 9 tones in Cantonese Even though written Chinese can be pronunced in Cantonese or Mandarin but the sound differs so much that you can not sing a Cantonese song in Mardarin nor vice versa Many popular tunes get both Cantonese and Mandarin lyrics which are totally rewritten and sometimes with unrelated subjects 20 31 25 Oct 2004 UTC Yes but Mandarin has a more pleasant rhythm when spoken with natural darkness and light and this translates into songs pleasnter on the ear I ve heard people talk about Cantonese as sounding like a machine gun on the ear And how do Cantopop artists deal with music piracy Cantopop artists deal with piracy using the same technique as European or American artists i e virtually nothing they can do But I was under the impression that in HK and Canton media piracy was much much higher than in Europe or America But there still are Cantopop artists Are the economic models different Do they resort to corporate patronage Curious How did you hear that height in Cantonese areas 00 40 30 Jun 2003 UTC I meant South China in general but it should affect Cantopop My source is Slashdot Ehem I think I read something in Wired of Bruce Sterling finding dirt cheap pirated media there but I don t find it I though tit was common knowledge You have some of the most popular cantopop stars e g Joey Yung and Twins going on TV and saying how poor they are and asking their fans not to steal their livlihoods And yes they do resort to corporate patronage of a sort In the Joey Yung interview I was referring to she claimed that she was making no money on her albums but that she still had to produce albums to keep herself in the public eye and maintain her fanbase With a large enough fanbase she can make money on personal appearances and concerts For example Jade Kwan has recently been booked by a chain of bars in the mainland for a dozen or so 20 minute mini concerts Furthermore if you are popular enough you can make money through endorsments There isn t a single reasonably attractive female cantopop singer who isn t e