The pied piper of planet pop has a dream that echoes those of many of its artists: MTV wants to become a superstar in the expanding universe of Chinese youth culture.

To orchestrate that dream, it is creating a web of alliances with China Central Television (CCTV), local broadcasters, cable TV stations, one of the fastest growing Chinese Web portals and the country's twin mobile phone carriers. If the music network's new-millennium dream plays out , it could be broadcasting music videos to nearly half a billion television sets, laptops and mobile TV receivers across urban China by the end of the decade.

A match made in the airwaves

The music television network entered Chinese pop culture by teaming up with CCTV nearly a decade ago to jointly produce the annual CCTV-MTV Music Honours show. According to Wang Xiaoming, who heads CCTV's National Filming Department, the programme is now one of the most widely watched entertainment shows on Chinese television.

This year's show, which was broadcast in early November, was so effective in capturing youth audience ratings that it was likely to be re-broadcast several times by the end of the year, said Wang, who personally supervised the filming.

The popular music programme, which features young icons of new-century culture across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, reaches more than 300 million television households in Asia.

MTV China executive Anna Kang said her company started collaborating with CCTV in 1999 to create the awards show and "the programme has been a huge hit every year since then."

MTV works with Chinese pop singers and actors, along with CCTV, Beijing Television and the Shanghai Media Group to turn out an array of original programming to quench the country's growing thirst for pop culture.

MTV affiliate Nickelodeon works with the Shanghai Media Group to produce shows for the east coast station Oriental Children's Channel and MTV's Chinese-language website, www.mtvchina.com.

While MTV China's 24-hour music channel now reaches 13 million cable-connected television sets in South China's Guangdong Province and Hong Kong, the visionary who heads MTV's musical march across the globe hopes to capture China's entire youth market by air, land and cyberspace.

Music online

To reach that goal, MTV Networks International President Bill Roedy touched down in Beijing recently to personally christen a partnership with the Beijing-based Internet giant Baidu to provide more than 10,000 hours of MTV China programming for online viewing and downloading on the website www.baidu.com.

"This alliance will give tens of millions of Chinese youths around-the-clock access via the Web to MTV programming," said Roedy.

Roedy has navigated MTV's rise across the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe and other points East and West; the icon of a global youth culture now transmits its music and messages through a broadcasting matrix that spans more than 100 satellite, terrestrial and cable channels and connects with a potential audience of 1.5 billion fans planet-wide.

Yet MTV China, rather than being a channel to fast-forward the import of Western music and culture, instead focuses on, and even creates, Chinese pop stars. It is helping the nation position its most talented musicians and record companies to dance on to the global stage.

Music executives in China and worldwide predict it is just a matter of time before the first Chinese band recording in English follows filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and actresses including Gong Li into the pantheon of planet pop gods.

MTV's new alliance with Baidu, meanwhile, includes a partnership with independent Chinese music labels like Modern Sky (www.modernsky.com) that gives higher levels of exposure to alternative Chinese groups, such as Supermarket, Sober and New Pants, said Modern Sky founder Shen Lihui.

Baidu CFO Shawn Wang said the cultural coalition Beijing created with MTV China was also speeding up Baidu's evolution from China's top Internet search engine into a global multimedia group.

The new MTV-Baidu set-up for Web-based video viewing also establishes a model for legal music downloads across the pirate-saturated waves of the World Wide Web. "Most downloads are free after viewers first watch a commercial," Wang said.

New partnerships

Although the Baidu alliance will add about 125 million e-generation Chinese to MTV's potential audience, Roedy and other strategists say they want to reach a much wider swath of the populace in the world's fastest growing economy.

Since 2005, MTV has forged new partnerships with mobile telecommunications titans China Mobile and China Unicom to provide music channel data to a combined user base of nearly 440 million subscribers.

Yet even that is not enough: MTV hopes to begin transmitting its music videos to nearly 500 million upwardly mobile urbanites in China, Kang said.

Some optimists hope the next CCTV-MTV Music Honours show might be broadcast to TV-cellphone users across urban China before Beijing stages the Olympic Games in mid-2008.

(China Daily November 25, 2006)