Rock and Roll: Glorious Years

After hanging up with Lao Zhao, Bian Lang called Chen Shuting and told her about it.

"Okay, Ke Tong, you can put aside the CD stuff for now. Quickly compile a list of all the bands that supported us and those whose albums were taken down today, along with their contact information, and give me a copy. I'm going to find Brother Hu now and discuss it with him. I reckon there won't be many bands from Nanyin who will escape unscathed. This matter needs to be resolved as soon as possible. If it becomes a point of contention later, it will be difficult for Rock Records to maintain its reputation in the industry."

Bian Lang shared Chen Shuting's view: if this matter is handled well, then Rolling Stone Music will have firmly established itself in the rock scene, which is more important than its chart performance.

After Chen Shuting left, Bian Lang started to ponder things himself. He had little experience with these kinds of group incidents in his previous life, so...

At this time, it was the early morning in Berlin, west of the mainland. Wang Wenhui dragged his tired body back to his apartment. He had just come from a party hosted by Hoffman Company. In order to promote the copyrights of Chinese songs that his company represented, he had practically worn down the door of Hoffman Company over the past few years.

As a subsidiary of DGM, one of the world's five major record labels, Hoffman's distribution business in Europe mainly targets Asian clients. However, similar to the situation on Earth in the previous life, Japanese and Korean groups are still the most popular Asian music in the European market, while China's strongest export is still its traditional folk music. As for pop singers, no matter how famous they are in China, they are basically only popular within the Chinese-speaking community.

The songs that Wang Wenhui's company distributes are even worse; they're all works by students from a chain of music education and training institutions in China. To put it nicely, they're getting the kids' work released in Europe, but frankly, the institution just wants to make money off parents. Spending six figures on this kind of gilded title—who knows how much it will actually help the children's development in the future?

Hoffman's company was well aware of the underlying meaning behind this operation. While they didn't refuse outright, their pricing and attitude were extremely arrogant. What should have been a simple matter often required Wang Wenhui to run himself ragged to get it done.

At this moment, Wang Wenhui's newlywed wife is lying in bed playing on her phone, while warm honey water prepared in advance for him is on the dining table.

"Wenhui, how was today? Did it go smoothly?"

Faced with his wife's question, Wang Wenhui downed half a glass of honey water in one gulp, and while loosening his tie, he vaguely replied, "It's alright, they'll give us two more endorsement slots from big-name producers this month."

This is also an important reason why Hoffman was able to control Wang Wenhui and why the education and training institutions were able to fool domestic parents. Without the endorsement of these big-name producers, they could have just found any company to release the product and done it, but the profit would have been much less.

"Wenhui, this path is getting harder and harder, and you're earning less than before. Have you considered changing direction? There are many excellent independent musicians in China these days..."

Before his wife could finish speaking, Wang Wenhui interrupted, "I'd like to too, but Goose Egg (a company specializing in music copyrights) practically monopolizes the export of most domestic music copyrights. Those independent musicians, even those with some fame in China, have almost no market here except among Chinese people. Hoffman still treats their work as a pure commodity. How many independent musicians in China can afford six figures... Never mind, I won't say anymore..."

Wang Wenhui graduated from the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin with a major in historical and contemporary music theory. After graduation, he and his wealthy classmate opened this copyright agency. At the time, both of them harbored a great vision of spreading Chinese music in Europe.

But after countless failures, his classmate returned to China to inherit the family business, leaving the company to him and finding him a way to support it. His initial dream was gradually buried deep in his memory.

"Wenhui, don't be discouraged. Have you been following the news about the domestic music market? The Rolling Stones, who became popular on Crazy Scale these past few days, have been banned by the Goose Egg (a Chinese music streaming platform). I looked up information about that band for you, and the lead singer, Bian Lang, is from our hometown of Yunnan Province."

Upon hearing this, Wang Wenhui's somewhat dim eyes suddenly flickered, but he then sighed, "With our current business, people won't believe us."

His wife was still not giving up. After fiddling with the phone for a while, she got up and put an earphone in his ear. The words "Material deception, hurried ants, uncultured people are not sad, he is not sad..." were transmitted into his ear.

The uplifting lyrics and the restless melody seemed to have shaken away the thick layer of dust that had been covering Wang Wenhui's ideals.

He snatched the phone from his wife's hand and went to the homepage of Rolling Stones on NetEase Cloud Music to study it. Looking at the photo of the band's profile picture, he felt that it looked strangely familiar.

I wanted to zoom in for a closer look, but photos that are the size of band portraits become a bunch of pixelated pixels if zoomed in any further.

He quickly took out his phone, bypassed the Great Firewall, logged onto Weibo in China, and found a large picture of the Rolling Stones on their homepage. The moment he saw the background clearly, he felt that he might really have a chance.

After another search, he discovered that the address of Rolling Stone Music Studio was the same address where he had been helping to buy records and send them back to Kunming since college.

After confirming that everything was correct, he calculated the time, excitedly kissed his wife, and then sent a message to Zhu Yan on his phone.

……

Bian Lang sat in the record store for almost an hour. Chen Shuting and Zhou Ketong's statistics came out: a total of 47 bands and independent musicians had voiced their support for Rolling Stone online. Compared to the entire independent music scene, this was just a drop in the ocean.

But only a few hundred people in the industry are well-known, so this one-tenth figure has a significant impact.

Aside from the 12 members of the Nanyin group, there are 35 others. Among them, 6 of them are people Bian Lang met and knew on the show, while the others are people he had only heard of.

As for those who were banned by Goose Egg, there are 12 from Nanyin, needless to say. The others were not completely wiped out. They were all those who uploaded content that violated the terms of the law and did not have the support of a major company. Including Lao Zhao and his Muge, there are a total of 28.

Looking at these lists, Bian Lang inexplicably felt that the burden on his shoulders was a bit heavy, but he would not back down. If he was going to fight, he would fight to the end!

He then called Zhang Fan to draft a statement, directly announcing that the Rolling Stones were withdrawing their copyright cooperation with the Goose Egg Music platform for their new song.

This immediately caused an uproar in the rock music scene. While many rock songs have been voluntarily banned over the years, those were usually due to problematic content. But Bian Lang's direct and open break with the platform is truly unprecedented since digital music began dominating the market.

He then called Lao Zhao first via voice message: "Brother Zhao, I have an idea. Could you grant us permission to release one or two of your band's songs? We'll choose one or two of the most classic ones, and I'll have someone create charts for them and release them on Crazy Scale. This game is very popular in Europe. The chart for my song has almost been downloaded 5 times. Consider it a preliminary step for our future works to go global."

This is the fastest solution Bianlang could think of right now, and he's grateful to these bands and musicians for supporting Rolling Stone.

Old Zhao only started paying attention to the rhythm game Crazy Scale after Bian Lang caused this trouble; he hadn't known anything about it before. "They've got big ambitions, huh? Do they really want to drag us all out to sea together?"

"Goose Egg (a Chinese music streaming platform) practically monopolizes the channels and resources for Chinese music to go global. Being blocked domestically isn't a big deal, since there are other platforms. But if they could go global, they could certainly give them a good piece of their minds!"

Hearing Bian Lang's somewhat seductive words, Old Zhao was tempted: "How do I do it? Tell me..."