Taiwan Today

Music videos are more important than album covers these days, and Taiwan pop musicians know it. STAR TV's 24-hour music channel delivers Asian youth the sight and sounds of their favorite stars. SCENE ONE: Suite 1605 of Taipei's Lai Lai Sheraton hotel has been transformed for the day into a TV studio for this month's shooting of "Gone Taiwan," STAR TV's weekly half-hour program featuring top Chinese singers. The hotel furniture has been pushed aside, and a backdrop painted with bold black, gray, and brown swirls covers half the room. The set's dark "urban jungle" montage looks a bit surreal against the Sheraton's flower-patterned carpet and crystal chandeliers. The rest of the room is overtaken by TV cameras on tripods, white-hot lights, blinking screens, and a jumble of other electronic gadgets. Multicolored electrical cords snake across the room, making it hard to walk. A dozen technical crew members wearing baseball caps over long pony tails mill around adjusting dials and peering at screens. The atmosphere in the room is multilingual and multicultural. The producer is American, many of the technicians are from Britain or Hong Kong, and the hairdressers and stylists are local; their conversations buzz about in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Taiwanese. At 10:30 AM, program host Sally Yeh is having her eyebrows tweezed by a make-up artist while the camera crew finishes setting up. Her first interviewee, singer Jerry Huang (黃舒駿), will arrive in half an hour. By then, she will have transformed from a baby-faced youth in baggy overalls to a mod party girl in a hot pink miniskirt and tank top, her hair spiked with neon green and pink hair clips. Huang arrives at 11:10 with his own entourage of stylists and assistants. By the time everyone is ready for the cameras, the show is half-an-hour behind schedule. And this is only the beginning of what will be a long day. Yeh will repeat the entire process —changing her hair, make-up, and clothing, then resetting the cameras— five times today, in order to shoot five week's worth of programs. After Huang, the day's roster of top-selling pop bands and singers includes The Party, Assassin, Pan Mei-chen (潘美辰), and Lin Meng (林蒙). Yeh will be here until well after dark. SCENE TWO: Angela Chow (周英琪) walks briskly through the lobby of the five-star Grand Hyatt Taipei, led by a marketing manager from STAR TV. Dressed for a press conference later that afternoon, she is wearing the trademark super-hip outfit of a VJ, a long skintight black skirt with a wild fishnet belt and a glittering tank top. She has only twenty minutes for the interview —the day is packed with the conference, then a gala party to celebrate the launch of STAR's second movie channel. As she settles into a booth in the lobby coffee shop, she jokes about starting the afternoon with a strong drink. "Don't you dare," snaps the marketing manager. Chow orders mineral water, of course, and begins talking about her recent travels with rock superstars INXS and UB40, and her promotional tours of Tokyo and Dubai. Her popularity as a VJ has also led to her first acting role. This spring, Chow began starring in a Hong Kong TV series called "All in a Family." All this is a far cry from her lifestyle two years ago, when she was studying electrical engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She had come to Taiwan to visit relatives and was hanging out waiting for a summer job to start, when she heard about an MTV VJ contest. Says Chow, "My friend said, 'You speak English, why don't you try it?'" A few weeks later, she was chosen for a one-month VJ stint from among scores of applicants, most of them bilingual, Western-educated, fresh-faced youth like herself. Since then, Chow has led a whirlwind life split between shooting her two weekday music video programs —the "Awake on the Wild Side" morning show and the evening "Heart and Soul" — and traveling throughout Asia to shoot on-site specials with the hottest international bands. Chow, Yeh, and several other VJs with roots in Taiwan are one reason STAR TV's 24-hour music video channel has become immensely popular on the island in less than three years. The VJs represent the interests of local youth. They speak their language (literally), they interview their favorite singers, and most of all, they play their favorite Chinese and Western music. The music channel began beaming throughout Asia in September 1991 as MTV Asia, an affiliate of U.S.-based MTV. When MTV cancelled its agreement with STAR in May, the network formed its own music video channel using the same VJs. (MTV will relaunch its own Asian affiliate late this year.) It is one of the five channels carried by Hong Kong's STAR TV network, which extends from Turkey to Japan to Indonesia, encompassing fifty-three countries and territories in Asia and the Middle East and, according to the network, reaching 42 million homes or 200 million viewers. Taiwan is STAR TV's second-largest official audience after India. (Mainland China, where the network estimates reaching 30 million households, is the biggest unofficial market, but the network is banned there and actual data on viewership is unreliable.) STAR estimates that 2.4 million Taiwan households pick up the five-channel network and that 500,000 households tune in to the music channel each week, with most viewers between the ages of fifteen and thirty. The channel has become so popular that local cable companies have begun airing their own local music video programs, using look-alike VJs and playing much the same music. The channel's popularity in Taiwan soared after STAR TV began boosting its Mandarin programming in 1993. When the channel began, the content consisted almost entirely of MTV programs produced in the United States. But producers found that English-only programming had a limited audience in most of the region and that Asian and Western musical tastes differ. Today, of the five regular VJs on the air, three— Angela Chow, Nonie, Tao, and David Wu—have roots in Taiwan and host their programs partly or predominantly in Mandarin. The Chinese VJs have garnered a wide following in Taiwan, and now visit the island about ten times a year for promotions, tapings, and contests. Each month, the channel receives some three thousand letters and as many phone calls or faxes from Taiwan fans, most sending a message or song request to their favorite program host. During prime viewing hours in Taiwan, Chinese tunes make up 40 to 50 percent of the play list. The weekly program schedule currently includes two all-Mandarin shows airing several times a week: "Gone Taiwan" and "Chinese Top Twenty." The latter, which counts down the best-selling hits by artists from Taiwan, Mainland China, and Hong Kong, is the channel's top drawing program, pulling in about ten times the audiences of other shows. "It gains very, very high ratings— up to terrestrial TV levels, which is quite extraordinary for what is a fairly niche channel like ours," says Don Atyeo, channel general manager. The Mandarin shows were the channel's first non-English programs. "We always look to the Chinese markets as the most important, basically because the Indian market is well serviced by English language programming," says programming director Darren Childs. "We realized pretty early on that if we wanted to do well with any of our Chinese language audiences, we'd have to speak their own language and play their own music." This spring, STAR plans to begin beaming separate programming to the northern and southern sectors of its footprint in order to better target its two main markets— Taiwan and India. For Taiwan viewers, the change will mean fewer Indian and Middle Eastern videos and more of their favorite Chinese stars. "Taiwan has been a crucially important market to us primarily because most of the Mandarin repertoire originates in Taiwan," Childs says. The island's music industry is widely considered the center of Chinese pop music. Within Asia, Taiwan and Thailand have the most developed music industries, according to Don Atyeo. "They both produce almost entirely local music with a very distinct local sound," he says. "Taiwan artists do not cover songs from the West." Atyeo adds that the video production industry in Taiwan is also very sophisticated. "Particularly in the last few years, the music video industry has really boomed. Some of the best videos around the world come from Taiwan." How popular are Taiwan artists outside the island? "In China, very," Atyeo says. STAR TV receives requests for Taiwan videos from fans in many areas with Chinese communities, especially the Philippines. Atyeo also says that a "pan-Asian" market is evolving. Asian youth are becoming interested in musicians not just from their home country but from throughout the region. Although Western megastars such as Madonna have a large following, Atyeo says Asian youth generally prefer watching Asian singers. The influx of Taiwan stars is influencing the channel's non-Mandarin programming as well. In keeping with Chinese viewer's preferences for slow, melancholy love songs, programming directors have toned down the harder Western music forms such as heavy metal and gangster rap, and added softer, more conservative pop artists to the play list. Programs such as MTV's "Head-banger's Ball" and "Yo! MTV Raps!" have been phased out or moved to the wee hours to bring in the ballad-heavy "Heart and Soul" and the call or write-in request shows. While STAR's video channel has been greatly influenced by Taiwan's music industry, Atyeo says the reverse is also true: the local artists have been influenced by the channel. "With a 24-hour channel, you have the time and space to showcase a lot of music that doesn't get much exposure anywhere else," he says. "In that sense, we should be very beneficial to the industry. Working together, you should see a better channel and, more crucially perhaps, a more varied and more interesting Taiwan music scene."