Is there any halfdecent Cantonese pop music or is it all treacle    Jun  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 ie 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 GaafaiWong 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    Ill try to NPOV the article more but I claim no responsbility on contentyou cant get much further from my musical domain than Cantopop    Jun  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 didnt mean that I wouldnt like it  I meant that Ive never heard any and I certainly dont know the history behind it so my editing is limited to grammar and attempts at NPOV     Jun  UTC     Tones   I heard that Cantonese music differs from Mandarin in that Mandarin respects the language tones in the melody but Cantonese doesnt Is it true     Good Cantopops do respect the language tones in the melody as all Chinese dialects are tonesensitive 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  tones for each pronunciation but Cantonese has at least  tones according to most dictionaries  Some author even claims there are  tones in Cantonese  Even though written Chinese can be pronunced in Cantonese or Mandarin but the sound differs so much that you cannot 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     Yes but Mandarin has a more pleasant rhythm when spoken with natural darkness and light and this translates into songs pleasnter on the earIve 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 ie 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    Jun  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 dirtcheap pirated media there but I dont find it I though tit was common knowledge    You have some of the most popular cantopop stars eg Joey Yung and Twins going on TV and saying how poor they are and asking their fans not to steal their livlihoodsAnd yes they do resort to corporate patronage of a sortIn 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 concertsFor example Jade Kwan has recently been booked by a chain of bars in the mainland for a dozen or so  minute miniconcertsFurthermore if you are popular enough you can make money through endorsmentsThere isnt a single reasonably attractive female cantopop singer who isnt e