Music, space and community in Hong Kong

Abstract

In the recent two decades, the Hong Kong government has put a lot of efforts in promoting cultural and creative industry. It seems the support from the government to the music industry was not active enough when comparing to the film industry. The local music record sales volume dropped dramatically since the year 2000s. Under the rapid development of Internet and social media platforms, musicians can no longer attract fans through releasing records. The live performance may be an alternative channel to reach their music community and space is the most essential element for live music performance. However, it is indeed difficult to find enough and suitable spaces for it. For instances, the live house, Hidden Agenda, got into a licence dispute over the use of its premises in an industrial building and was forced to close because the government refused to grant it a public entertainment licence; singers performing music near MTR stations were often driven away by the property security guards. The capacities of existing music performance venues are often too large for fresh musicians who have difficulties in meeting a box office of over 1,000 in one show. With this puzzle in mind, this capstone project aimed to examine the importance of space for music industry development and the relationship between music practitioners and audience through the emergence of space. We chose Freespace Happening that was organised by West Kowloon Cultural District Authority as our major case study. Two more music spaces from Chinese context, namely Tiehua Music Village in Taitung and B10 Live House in Shenzhen, were also studied to provide inter-Asian referencing for Hong Kong music spaces’ reference. Ethnographic approach including participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interview and online survey were conducted with music spaces’ organisers, musicians and audiences. We found that there were strong interrelationships between the physical space, cultural object (i.e. the music), all human agencies within the space and the socio-historical factors from the society that have influenced the human agencies. As a new form of music space in Hong Kong, the outdoor Freespace Happening event provided an innovative example for future music space planning and execution. The data and information collected from Tiehua Music Village and B10, although might not be much applicable to Hong Kong, suggested new insights to the Hong Kong musicians and event organisers for self-reflexivity.