re:spect: How a magazine is changing Hong Kong's music industry
This video was made to celebrate re:spect magazine's third anniversary this year.
The publication's Chinese name 紙談音樂 can be literally translated to “discussing music on paper” and 40 people were invited to make music with the pages of re:spect magazine, including friends, readers, clients, musicians and non-musicians.
Nobody was optimistic about re:spect music magazine when it was launched amidst a floundering Hong Kong music industry in 2007. But nearly three years later, Gary Chan, Jesper Chan and Sean Chan have proved everyone wrong by molding re:spect into Hong Kong's most profitable music magazine.
According to the trio of founders, the secret to their success is that they never saw it as just a publication.
“We want to see change in the local music industry,” says Gary Chan. “We planned beyond just a music magazine from the beginning.”
The re:spect media group publishes and distributes re:spect magazine for free. Within it they can plug their upcoming gigs produced by concert production house re:spect live. Artists signed to their sister company, the music label Redline Music, are often showcased in re:spect live shows.
Sean ChanSustainable sounds
The group is a microcosm of the Hong Kong music industry, underlined by their philosophy of promoting sustainability and diversity in the music business. It's a concept that is not fully embraced by shortsighted investors in the local industry.
"Take a look at what [entertainment group] Avex is doing in Japan," says Sean Chan. "They are not just printing money off the most popular artists and their merchandise. They actually feed resources back into the system.
"The group continuously invests in training new artists and exploring markets for alternative music styles. Only this can make the whole industry sustainable. It is time for Hong Kong to seriously think about this sustainability issue."
The trio favor a soft approach to preaching their revolutionary ideas, especially for Hong Kong record companies with a long history and complicated organization structures. The idea is for the magazine be perceived as a mainstream publication with a hidden alternative agenda.
A strategy like this will also gently prod the generally conservative readership into accepting alternative ideas about music.
"We expose our readers to a wider range of music as they flip through the pages filled with safe, familiar pop music," says Jesper Chan. "Starting from the debut issue we established a 'golden ratio' for our content: 70 percent on pop music and 30 percent on alternative genres."
Harmonious marketing
The golden ratio is applied throughout the organization, down to the selection of artists and bands they invite to perform at re:spect live gigs. It is a strategy that sustains healthy profit margins by surreptitiously educating the consumer, as business partners follow consumer demand.
"We love to see our business clients change their attitude towards music too," says Jesper Chan. "I remember we had been selling [Taiwanese singer-songwriter] Crowd Lu to our clients for live gig performances before he became well known in Hong Kong. Our clients were skeptical until they saw Crowd's performance themselves."
The success of re:spect encourages the trio to continue with their against-the-grain strategies. Gary Chan relies on a primary principle that is totally opposite to what the industry has always been doing.
"Record labels do not value individuality of their artists. It does not matter who they are selling, they just feed whoever it is into the marketing machine to mold them into a clone of someone you have met before," says Gary Chan.
"With Redline Music, we want to do it the other way round -- we do not want the talented artists to become what we like, we want to go with who they really are, and to assist them to get the most out of their talents as well as their styles. Be it mainstream or alternative, we believe great music has to be sincere.
"Great and sincere music does not discriminate among genres. You just need the right marketing strategy to sell it."
