ALBATROSS FESTIVAL
Event highlights Asian pop
When it comes to Lower Mainland music events, the Albatross Music Festival is a bird of a different feather. The two-day showcase is the first to celebrate the massive Asian pop music market.
The festival’s 17 acts come from China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Los Angeles and Mongolia.
Given the diversity of this region, it’s surprising that there hasn’t been a festival like this before.
Sammi Wei of event promoter Mubi Studio agrees. The Gastown-based Asian entertainment company has been involved in concert promotions as well as broadcast creations. Looking at the landscape, the firm felt that it could bring together an impressive roster of artists to appeal to a wide-ranging fan base. They chose Albatross, rather than the working title Asian Music Festival, to give the event distinct personality.
“One of our partners, Modern Sky, produces the Strawberry Festival which draws over a million people and we loved their marketing,” Wei said. “But they had the fruit, so we settled on the bird because of the branding and also because it sticks in your head as we don’t have them this far north. It’s also because it’s a migratory bird and that ties in with immigrants like myself as well as those who are second and third generation who might want to get into something from their culture.”
Among the megastars appearing are Hong Kong film actormusician Edison Chen, who sings in both Cantonese and Mandarin, South Korean chart topper Taeyeon (a.k.a. Kim Tae-yeon) and Vancouver-based Wanting Qu. All three of these artists mainly work in the pop ballad format, but there is also EDM crew Far East Movement from Los Angeles, Mongolian folkies Nair Band and Vancouverbased urban pop-belter Elise Estrada. Is this considerable linguistic variety an impediment when it comes to audience development?
“Not really, because Asian music is really trendy now with the
global explosion of (Korean pop) for instance,” Wei said.
“The market is incredibly big for the singer/songwriters in many languages, and we have really focused on those type of artists for our core — easier listening rather than heavy rock. And we also have a bit of hip hop, some reggae and more traditional folk.”
Wei said that building the event on high quality rather than specific nationality hopefully means it can go bigger as similar events in California have done. She admits that the Asian music market can be quite fragmented at times, but they hope to appeal to the side of it that has far-reaching tastes. The benefit for local performers is considerable.
“A lot of us in the office are musicians and know local performers, and to be able to give them performance opportunities turned out to be another facet of Albatross,” she said. “We weren’t originally going to have a second stage, but we had so many requests from local artists to play our event that we added a second stage for them to appear. It gives them the opportunity to get exposed in front of an audience that they might not otherwise reach and be discovered by them.”
Given that acts on the bill such as Matzka have already appeared at the legendary Glastonbury festival, the discovery element at the Albatross Music Festival might only be in the sense that the act hasn’t appeared here yet. With any luck, this new music event will be a launch pad for more of the international music scene to put Vancouver on its tour schedule.