One of the main highlights of the conference is William Bao Beans session, where he presented a quick and sharp analysis of China’s mobile music market.

Here is a link to his presentation, check it out!

According to an interesting article yesterday in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Recording Industry Alliance is hiring 5 Licensing Officers with debt collecting or sales experience to sell their music services to local business. In other words, they are trying to use as much force persuasion as permitted by their lawyers to start making confused businesses to pay an extra set of Public Performance Licensing fees, on top of the existing IFPI and CASH fees.

Ralph Simon, Founder of MEF Forum, hosted this panel with key mobile entertainment industry heads to discuss the future of Mobile Music in Asia and the rest of the world.  Sandy Monteiro of Unviersal Music used a Malaysian example of the different RBT pricing to demonstrate the importance of heightening the perception of value to the consumer.

Both Converse and Cornetto are both connecting themselves to music to reach out to their very different core markets - alternative rock and pop.

Converse’s campaign is named “Love Noize” and they took a few underground bands from Beijing and toured them around China around the Beijing Olympics period. The campaign is targetted at the young and slightly rebellious crowd accompanied by a sophisticated online campaign. The tour was filmed and made into a feature film which has so far won numerous awards, click here to see the trailer.

One of the highlights of Day 2 of Music Matters is the first session at 9:15am…   The venue was packed even with the heavy partying most of the delegates participated in the night before.

The audience was presented with a working demonstration of Google China’s Music Service. Bin Lee, Engineering Director of Gogle China, said that personally he thought that there is a strong synergy between mobile (especially with the launch of Android and 3G in China later this year) and online but they didn’t have immediate plans to extend the music services to mobile just yet.

Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music, headed this mentoring and brainstorming session with American Born Hong Kong Chinese rapper MC Jin, to create a roadmap for this career.

In the session, Terry stressed that an artist had to be authentic and and stand by his causes, and resonates with his tribe. He believed that ultimately all artist should help change the world in a positive way. Music is not about money but emotions. He suggested that Jin should do as much as possible to reach out to his fans online and involve them in his development, get them to participate in his career.

Coca Cola - Open Happiness Single

Coca Cola created a great success with their “Open Happiness” single in Europe and the US - and replicating the success in Asia took a different strategy. Branding in the Western versions of the music videos has very subtle brand and product placement, due to the sensitivity of the audience.  However, audience is a lot more receptive towards brand and product placement, and so the Hong Kong version with the artist Joey Yung took it to the limits. Everything from the color scheme, bottles, her outfit and the animated co-stars of the music videos are all undeniably Coca Cola…

Opening

The day started off with Opening Remarks from Duncan Pescod, Permanent Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development of Hong Kong.   In this remarks, he noted that Hong Kong is working very hard to promote the creative industry of Hong Kong to make it the arts hub of Asia. A government entity called “CreateHK” was announced 3 days ago to support the industry and a HK$300 million fund had been set aside for the purpose. In addition, Hong Kong’s been further advancing Intellectual Property Laws for the digital environment and a new proposal will be presented later this year.

City Of Dreams, Multi-hotel, entertainment, shopping and gambling complex by Melco Crown (chaired by James Packer and Stanley Ho’s 31 year-old son Lawrence). This US$2.1 Billion development is the second of such to open in the Cotai Strip, just across the strip from the struggling Venetian.

What excites us the most is the Hard Rock Hotel, the second one in Asia (Oh, didn’t you know that there’s one in Bali?)

According to the latest statistics released by the Chinese government, the number of China’s netizens is now slightly over 298 million. This is a 300% + increase from 2007’s 88 million.  And over 117 Million of the 640 million registered mobile users use the mobile phone to access it, bearing in mind that 3G networks have not been launched in China yet. and of those mobile internet users, 70.8% of them are under 19 years old.