China Meiguo

I came acoss an interesting article, Hard Pickin’ Into China’s Growing Music Industry, about 
folk singer/banjo player Abigail Washburn who recently performed at the Shanghai Expo. While I don't know Abigail personally and am not too familiar with her music, I am a fan of her husband, banjo-playing jazz, folk vituoso Bela Fleck.Abigail is quite unique in melding elements of traditional Chinese folk music with American bluegrass. She's also fluent in Mandarin Chinese and can therefore sing songs in Chinese as well as English which is bound to endear her to Chinese music lovers. Abigail Washburn first went to China in 1996, on a college summer trip. After spending some time studying Chinese in Shanghai, China grew on her and she thought she might live there before she embarked on her music career.

Despite her Chinese language ability which is exceptionally rare for American performers, Abigail still acknowledges that the music industry in China, although growing, is still very challenging. Not surprisingly, Chinese people generally tend to prefer Chinese pop music, known as Mandopop (华语流行音乐) or Cantopop (粵語流行音樂) when sung in Cantonese dialect) although major stars from the United States and other countries can also be very popular.

In her interview with Forbes, Washburn commented on the chaos of the Chinese music industry: 

"[W]hen you talk about the music industry, it can be frustrating. It is in the States now, too. In some ways, it feels like Beijing and Shanghai are ahead of the States, because they’ve actually skipped over CDs and record labels. They just do direct to consumer sales, which is where it needs to go in the U.S.But (China’s) such a small market (with) so little investment. And of course, in the music scene everywhere (in China), nobody has permits and (yet) everybody does everything."

You can check out Abigail's upcoming tour dates (in China and America) here and you can check out some of her music at Last FM and MySpace.