Open-air Music Festivals In Mainland China:Current Situations Problems And Strategies

The open-air music festivals were originally from western countries,and the history in China is less than 20 years.The first one,called Midi music festival,was held in Midi music school in 2000 and had attracted lots of rock & roll musicians and amateurs inside and outside the school.It became an annual event since then.In 2005,the Midi music festival started to sell tickets,which signified the commercialization of the open-air music festivals in mainland China.The industrial chain had gradually formed and the evolution continued.“Strawberry music festival” is another music festival mark founded by the Chinese music company Modern Sky in 2009,after having held “Modern Sky music festival”.“Strawberry” shows a better variety of elements,including the features of spring,romance and love.The amount of music festivals in China blew out in 2010.The music festivals in China have become regular since 2011.With the mass basis accumulated in the past years,the music festivals seems to become a normal requirement from the public.A big amount of private capitals are involved which made the music festivals more pluralistic,and more and more ordinary audience are attracted.The market gets larger,the concurrence becomes intense and the differences appear.Following the society,the cultural industries in China enter the era of globalization with a booming development.As a part of the cultural industries,the open-air music festivals spring up and a diversity of music festivals emerge prominently.At the moment,the two major music festivals are the Midi music festivals and the Strawberry music festivals.At the meantime of rapid development of open-air music festivals,the problems on music styles,the unification of contents and the operations management has appeared gradually.This paper is concerned with the two major music festivals,Midi and Strawberry music festivals,and the analysis in on the cast,the music contents and the operations of the open-air music festivals.Based on the theory of music art management and the interdisciplinary approach including industry and marketing etc.,this paper analyzes the development background,features,current situations and problems open-air music festivals,investigates the origins of the problems and finds out the proper strategies to solve the problems.Concerning the outline of the paper,based on the examples of Midi and Strawberry music festivals,the paper discusses the open-air music festivals in mainland China in 3 sections:Section 1 introduces the situation of open-air music festivals in mainland China.The introduction is mainly on the features of open-air music festivals,the origin and the development.Taking the two major music festivals as examples,we summarize and analyze the aspects on the holding time,holding place,mise-en-scène and music types.The choice of research subjects and the research significance are explained.Section 2 focuses on the analysis of the current situation and problems of music festivals based on the aspects of the music works,the influence for the audience and the operations management.Section 3 is devoted to the origin of problems and the strategies for solutions.The reason of problems is detected according to the analysis in Section 2,and the strategies for solutions are investigated after the summarization and analysis of the origins of problems.The research of this section aims at the realization of the unification of economic values and artistic values of music festivals,the optimization of the operations management of music festivals and the extension of new profit models,which allows the positive development of the open-air music festivals in mainland China.The approach of the present paper involves the case studies research method,focuses on the aspects of detecting problems,finding out the origins and setting the solution strategies,and combines the documentary analysis method,on-site study method and interdisciplinary method.Through the examples of Midi and Strawberry music festivals,the research is on the communication and development of the open-air music festivals in mainland China with the attention to the current problems of music festivals in China/abroad and the referential experience of brand loyalty effect.The main purpose concerns the durable development of open-air music festivals,drawing attention to the social values and artistic values while pursuing economic values,and the unification of these values.