History of Music of Hong Kong

Although Cantopop will continue to dominate the Hong Kong music scene in the early years of the 21 st century, imported music has outsold Cantopop around the Hong Kong market ever since the mid-1990s. Cantopop album sales and concert audience figures are significantly below these people were in the early 1990s. Additionally there is a strong perception that the standard of Cantopop has fallen as recording companies focus more on the graphic in their stars, as opposed to singing or songwriting. Somewhat ironically, English-language singers from the sixties and seventies, including Teresa Carpio, Christine Samson and Mary Leung, are now engaged as singing coaches for up-and-coming Cantopop starlets. The decline of Cantopop has also coincided with a broadening of musical options and tastes among Hong Kong popular music fans. The growing array of imported types of music for sale in Hong Kong - from Canada And America and Europe, Taiwan, mainland China and Singapore, Japan and Korea, has contributed much for this broadening of taste and contains also generated greater diversity of styles within Cantopop.


Considering that the 1980s, Hong Kong popular music has been greatly identified with Cantopop - for many people Cantopop and Hong Kong pop are basically exactly the same thing. This brief history has attempted to present another picture, emphasising that Hong Kong popular music has always - except perhaps to get a brief period inside the 1980s - been a multilingual affair. So when we examine Hong Kong pop from a multilingual perspective, we are able to notice that, despite concern over falling sales for Cantopop, the condition of health in the Hong Kong music scene is very quite good. Currently, Hong Kong popular music is far more multilingual than ever for a lot of reasons: the increasing internationalization of markets for popular music, greater sophistication among local listeners and producers of music, and the reality that the Mandarin and English music of your old days is now being given a whole new lease of life as record companies are increasingly looking beyond youth markets. The diversity of languages in Hong Kong popular music this has produced goes plus a diversity of styles, images, and meanings for popular music which is with this diversity that the future health of your Hong Kong pop scene lies.