Rock music venues work together to beat the blues

China's live music scene has evolved greatly in the past decade. COVID-19 put a halt to all live music for much of 2020 and into 2021 as venues closed their doors. School is one of the survivors.

"For a city, a live house venue is very important because it is crucial for giving birth to new bands and for indie music to grow," Zhu adds. "However, not all the live house venues in China could survive due to lots of reasons, such as the lack of live shows and wrong marketing strategies. Things got worse after the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, which forced many live house venues to shut down."

"The healthy development of live house venues is crucial for the vibrancy of indie music scene," Zhu says.

Indie music has been reborn thanks to popular reality TV shows, bringing indie bands to the limelight. There are more commercial opportunities for bands and brands are more open to sponsoring indie events as well, according to Zhu.

"But we want to keep the business going and giving opportunities to more new bands. If we just had those few successful bands touring nationwide, we wouldn't have enough shows to support ourselves financially," says Zhu.

"Most of the live house owners in China are former members of indie rock bands, so we know how to work with bands. However, when it comes to running a live house venue, we have to train ourselves about marketing, about management and so on," he says. "We need to make plans about training professional staff members for live house venues, such as sound engineers, lighting engineers and marketing managers."