Anne Ozorio <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Interestingly, CD stores in Hong Kong have an increasing number of
>issues with the covers printed in Chinese which indicates an awareness
>of the wider potential market, although most people who seek out western
>classical music have at least enough knowledge of western languages to
>read the titles.  How cost effective is this?  It's not hard to be bi
>lingual.  What's the market in China and SE Asia?

HK has always been a strange - one might literally say distorted - market;
with all of the idiosyncrasies one might expect from its simultaneous
British & East Asian ties (i remember one visit up there when the HMV
at TsimShaTsui stocked Stockhausen-verlag in its classical section but
trying to find XIAN Xinghai there was quite impossible).  Apart from
this, most HK business relies of tourist income for its lifeblood (the
HKTA runs shopping tours from the airport to get money from people simply
waiting for a connecting flight); but the competition for the entertainment
dollar with VCD (Video CD - the standard movie form still in East Asia)
sellers in the streets around the Nathan Rd tourist combat zone is mighty
fierce for a minority interest like CM.  When you can buy a Amy YIP Chi
Mei VCD for less than the cost of a Naxos CD....

On bilingualism: HK has traditionally been a bilingual market which
the Euro-orientated CM business has often pretended didn't concern it.
Their loss, frankly - they've always been local (East Asian generally;
not just HK based) companies which used bilingualism to maximise the
market (Hugo Production & Stereophile; the various Klaus Heymann
side-labels like Yellow River; even the PRC-based Shenzhen LV on occasions);
& in order to survive, the mainstream companies must be learning that a
Junggwohua text reads the same whether the listener is speaking pontonghua
in Beijing or Taipei; guangzhouhua in Guangzhou or Malaysia or hakkahua
in Hernggong....

(The fact that Chinese text is identical even when the dialects are
completely different in why Hong Kong films have traditionally used
Chinese subtitles for Chinese-language films.  Jie was quite indignant
to discover that the DVD of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon only gave you
the choice of pontonghua/Mandarin chinese with English subtitles or
English...  especially as pretty much the entire cast are actually
guangzhou- or hakkahua-speakers; & were doing the pontonghua phonetically....)

Chinese East Asia is a big market with a taste for music; but there was
a time not so long ago when the HK CM shops showed no evidence of this...
no doubt explaining why the ones which have survived are fighting hard
to continue doing so....

Live in peace
[log in to unmask]
endeavour2 project <http://www.geocities.com/robtclements/endeavour2.html>