SINCE launching his debut album “Jay” in 2000, Mandarin pop star Jay Chou has built a massive fan base in Asia.

To mark his 20th anniversary in the music industry, the singer will release a set of vinyl records, Chou’s record company Sony Music announced June 30.

Featuring 150 songs from his 14 albums during the past 20 years, the set will include a blank vinyl disc to promote Chou’s upcoming album.

“This is the first time I have released on vinyl. My first album was released Nov. 6, 2000, and it’s meaningful for me to celebrate my career with a set of such discs,” Chou said.

Vinyl plays a small but vital part in China’s music industry. Rather than disappearing, the format is making an impressive comeback amid competition from digitalized music.

The resurgence of interest in vinyl also underscores the fact that the country has become a dynamic force in recorded music.

The Global Music Report: Data and Analysis for 2019, published May 4 by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, showed that China remained the seventh-largest market for recorded music.

Fans have reacted warmly to Chou’s release on vinyl. Bao Leshan, a 30-year-old Beijing office worker, has reserved a set of the records.

A big fan of Chou since she was a primary school student, Bao has bought all the singer’s albums, attended his concerts and even visited Tamkang High School in Taiwan, a location for Chou’s directorial debut movie, “Secret.”

“I have never bought any vinyl records before and I know nothing about them. I don’t even have a turntable, but I am planning to buy one to listen to Chou’s music,” she said.

Total global revenue in the recorded music industry reached US$20.2 billion last year, a rise of 8.2 percent from 2018. Revenue from vinyl rose by 5 percent, and now comprises more than 16 percent of overall physical income.

Vinyl records and the stores selling them remain largely unknown to many fans in China, who are content to listen to music on their smartphones and other devices.

However, there are a number of independent record stores in bigger cities, and more people are buying vinyl records in search of the perfect sound.

Collection started

LiPi-Records, one of the biggest stores selling vinyl discs in Beijing, is located in the landmark 798 Art Zone, home to vibrant art galleries, cafes and restaurants.

Inspired by the song “Yesterday Once More,” released on United States vocal and instrumental duo The Carpenters’ fifth album “Now & Then” in 1973, the store’s founder, Ma Chi, started to collect vinyl records.

When he visited a record store in Seoul during a business trip to the South Korean capital in 2007, he heard the song playing on a turntable.

Ma, who formed a punk band while studying flight vehicle design at Beihang University in Beijing and who worked for a Swiss company in the capital, said the song touched him and he became “enchanted” by vinyl records.

He soon began collecting vinyl records of various genres from second-hand stores he visited during business trips.

In 2009, Ma founded his store on a 27-square-meter space at the 798 Art Zone, selling his collection.

The store now occupies a 300-square-meter site and there are three branches, in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning Province, where Ma was born and raised, and also Blue Note Beijing and Blue Note Shanghai, two offshoots of the renowned Blue Note Jazz Club in New York.

The store at the art zone now sells about 1,000 vinyl records a month and has built up a solid fan base.

Companies struggle

In the 1980s, the recording industry on the Chinese mainland was booming, with millions of cassette tapes sold.

However, with the emergence of online streaming, vinyl records appeared to be on the verge of extinction.

Between 2002 and 2005, in particular, sales of CDs and other types of musical recordings fell sharply in China as a result of piracy and online streaming, with customers deserting record shops in droves as they stopped buying physical discs.

Even the bigger record companies struggled to stay afloat.

In the 1990s, China Record Group Co., the biggest and oldest company of its kind in the country, sold about 10 million records a year, including pop, folk and classical music by Chinese singers and orchestras, according to Hou Jun, the company’s vice president.

In the early 2000s, annual sales fell to some 10,000 copies, with a huge change in the way music was consumed leading to many Chinese record companies folding.

In the late 1990s, China Record Group Co. closed its last vinyl production line due to the declining market for physical records.

However, in 2018, when the company celebrated its 110th anniversary, it launched a project to revive vinyl output, importing a production line from Germany and setting up a factory in Shanghai.

Hou said: “We are optimistic about the market for physical records in China, although it will take time to recapture the glory years of the 1990s. Completion of the factory shows that the production of vinyl records in China, which started in Shanghai in the 1920s, is ready to take off again in the city.” (China Daily)