Asia Pacific Quarterly #3: Media Partners Boost Taiwan's Acts

Promoting a new album amid declining music sales is a challenge for any record company in this market. For independent record companies, negotiating promotions with media partners is one important strategy.

"Cost control is the basic approach we have to take," says Ason Chen, president of Rock Records, Taiwan's leading independent music company.

One economically savvy move was Rock's recently announced sales and distribution deal with Universal Music Southeast Asia (Billboard, July 26). But Rock also makes smart use of media deals.

"Co-operation with the media will be the key point; we can do a lot of joint promotion. The more joint promotions you have, the more resources you have to [sell] the album."

For Rock Records, a pioneer within the Asian music industry, joint promotions with media companies are crucial to competing with the deeper pockets of multinational music companies.

Rock's latest album from female soloist Leong Jing-ru, "A Beautiful Life," arrived early this year. The company chose a marketing theme, then worked with media partners to drive it home.

"We did everything to try and make her the only choice for Valentine's Day," Chen says.

Among the events to promote "A Beautiful Life" was an outdoor concert promoted jointly with radio station Hit FM, which raised awareness of the album with pre-concert announcements.

An innovative prerelease deal with video rental chain Blockbuster also had an impact. Rock distributed a small number of album-preview video CDs (a format unique to Asia) to each Blockbuster store that customers could borrow for free. Chen says those few thousand discs were constantly out of stock.

Hooking up with MTV Taiwan was another important part of the process. Leong was the station's artist of the month for February and was also a guest VJ.

Getting that kind of promotion is not always easy, because Rock does not spend much on advertising with media partners.

"It's difficult, because we don't have as much money to invest per album [as the majors], but we have many releases yearly," he says.

Rock's release volume—it expects to release 30 albums this year from 24 artists—gives it some negotiating clout with media companies, as does the top names on its roster.

Among the top artists sought by the media and signed to Rock are Richie Ren, a popular male vocalist from China, and May Day, an act returning to the scene this summer after a two-year break. (Taiwan's compulsory military service requirements frequently suspend the careers of young artists.)

"Every time we try to sign up an artist [for key promotions], we think about which labels are friendly to us," says Oscar Lin, manager of programming and talent relations for MTV Taiwan.

Chen acknowledges that the promotional campaign for "A Beautiful Life" brought mixed results. Sales hit 80,000 units, shy of a goal of 100,000 units. But the problem, he says, was the musical direction of the album rather than a failure of media promotion.

"The songs were more mature than before, and we did not target teenagers like we did for the previous album," he says.

MTV Taiwan has helped Rock seek a slightly older audience for the singer, and this should boost sales of Leong's next album. Again, for Rock, a media partnership in the process is essential.

"Her songs are well-known, but her personality is not well understood," Lin says. In Taiwan, saccharine love songs are a pop staple, and artists rarely are portrayed with much personality. So Lin says that presenting Leong as a guest VJ, as a personality rather than a pop idol, was an important step.