One-hundred and eighty yuan can buy many things in Beijing, including an hour at a karaoke club, drinks with a few friends or an intimate dinner with the one you love.
It can also get you a ticket for the city's hottest new nightspot Star Live, a pub where pop and rock artists perform live.
Some fans have been going every Saturday night since Cui Jian, the godfather of Chinese rock 'n' roll, staged the first concert at the club in July.
Other big names in the Chinese pop music scene such as Zheng Jun, Sha Baoliang, Wang Feng, Zhu Zheqin, Li Quan and Overload have also performed at Star Live.
On that first night, Cui rekindled the audience's passion for rock music. They waved their arms in the air and danced. The concert was scheduled to last just an hour and a half, but because of the audience's enthusiastic response, there was an encore that lasted for one more hour.
"I felt so good. The audience was terrific and we had great fun together," Cui said after that performance. "We Chinese rockers have finally got a great live stage after waiting for so many years."
At the end of his concert in August, Zheng Jun said: "This is the way I love to sing."
Wang Feng, who also performed in August, later wrote on his blog: "An audience of 1,000, relatively speaking, is not a big gig, yet the venue, the setting and the sound equipment are all very good. It's similar to the rock venues in the United Kingdom."
And the chemistry between singers and fans has been just as good.
"The audience encircled the stage, and the communication between them and me was terrific," Zheng said.
Beijinger Zhao Jie, 22, went to Cui's concert as well as the July concert by Zhu Zheqin, aka Dadawa, a Tibetan-inspired new age singer/songwriter.
At Cui's concert, she saw many young female office workers kick off their high heels and rush to the edge of the stage to wave hands and sing with him.
"I did not expect the atmosphere to be so thrilling," Zhao said. "My friends and I all had a lot of fun. It was very different from the pop concerts I had been to before. I think it could catch on in Beijing in the future."
So successful was the first round of concerts that the organizers China Music Alliance Ltd, Mediact Jingwen Media Holding Group and Warner Music wasted no time in lining up more Super Live concerts for this month, featuring stars that are at least as popular as those that started the series.
And Super Live will hit the road next year. Xu Xiaofeng, managing director of the China Music Alliance, said he and his colleagues are preparing to take the campaign to Shanghai, Guangzhou and Kunming.
Zhu Ying, managing director of Star Live, said he planned to open similar live music venues in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing and Shenyang in the near future.
The aim is to make these live concerts an important part of the Chinese music industry by generating more fan interest and nurturing new pop stars.
This idea of the concerts started earlier this year when Xu and Cui began discussing ways to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Chinese pop and rock music. Cui was set for three concerts in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province in the northeast, but Xu was more ambitious.
He wanted concerts in Beijing, the birthplace of Chinese rock music. What's more, he thought three rock concerts were far from enough to mark the 20th anniversary. His idea was a 20-concert series starring 20 leading singers and bands representing different musical genres.
The two lamented the fact that although Chinese pop music has been around for 20 years, it still lags behind music from the rest of the world. They thought the series could give the Chinese industry new impetus if it took music directly to the people with live performances.
"Music venues are very common in the United States and European countries," said Xu, a veteran music agent who has organized some of the top pop concerts and festivals in China over the past 10 years.
Every city in the West has a few such venues to enjoy music on weekend nights, Xu pointed out, "but we Chinese pop fans in big cities have only a dozen gigs at the arenas every year, and most people in small cities in remote regions have no chance to enjoy live concerts. They have to listen to albums, some even pirated copies."
New singers do release albums every year, he added, but at the few live gigs where they appear, they don't really sing. They just play their albums via the sound equipment, and that dishonesty has hurt the music industry.
Xu says he believes live music could help improve not only the performance level of Chinese pop singers, but also the quality of their music.
"For the audience, it provides music and the electricity of a live atmosphere; for the performers, it is a chance to share their music more closely with their fans," he said.
"A spontaneous communication develops between the performers and the audience, it brings out great improvisation."
The live performances also give talented guitar, bass and drum players the rare chance to give public live performances, rather than just moving from one recording studio to another. Although some of them play at pubs and bars in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, the audiences are limited as not everyone goes to a bar to listen to music.
No windfall
After agreeing to do the concerts, Xu and his colleagues at Mediact Jingwen Media Holding Group and Warner Music set to work to prepare for the 2006 Super Live project.
They settled on the Star Live pub because, they said, not only does it have the best sound and lighting equipment in Beijing, but it also can house 1,000 people.
"Our target audiences are young white-collar office workers, business people touring Beijing and the 100,000 or so foreigners in Beijing," said Chi Yongqiang, deputy general manager of Beijing Mediact Yue Sheng Culture Development Co Ltd.
The idea was certainly not a new one. Wang said live venues overseas had investigated the markets of Beijing and Shanghai, but decided they weren't ready. However, the Chinese groups pressed on.
"We know very well that it would be a long-term investment and that we wouldn't get our money back straight away," said Wen Quansheng, executive vice-president of Mediact Jingwen Media Holding Group.
"It takes time to develop an audience, but we do hope to provide them with a terrific musical experience. We also hope the new live venues will promote the development of the Chinese rock music industry."
Someone had to have the confidence to take the first step, Wen said. Now that the program has been launched, he has high hopes for the future market based on the positive response to the first seven concerts over the past two months.
There are still problems for the organizers, though. Although Cui and Zheng drew more than the 1,000 fans that Star Live could accommodate, concerts by Gao Qi and the band Overload did not sell out.
"If people were used to spending Saturday night at Star Live, enjoying music and having some drinks, they shouldn't care much about who's singing," Xu said. "On the contrary, they should be happy to listen to different singers every time."
Even so, the organizers acknowledged they have to do more publicity to draw in large audiences.
Concert-goers also have a few complaints. Zhao Jie, for example, said that despite her enthusiasm, "the guards were too rude - probably they had never seen fans get so excited and the drinks were more expensive than the entrance ticket."
The organizers say they are working on these problems.
Chi said: "I hope that in the near future Beijing music fans get into the habit of going to Star Live and spread the word so tourists and business travelers know about the place."
(China Daily October 2, 2006)
