Will Young People Even Care About the KTV Banned Song List?

We can’t yet tell you whether your favorite song will be banned. In fact, we don’t even know if any English songs will make the list – though if they do, they’ll probably be banned under the categories of promoting gambling and going against laws on religion, so keep an eye out if you’re go-to is Kenny Rogers.

But, as Sina News has pointed out, the crackdown comes at somewhat of an odd time as KTV appears to be in massive decline as a form of entertainment. What was a mainstay diversion for decades throughout China has come to face a reckoning over the past few years – and yes, it started before the pandemic wreaked havoc on indoor entertainment. What happened?

China’s Karaoke love affair began in January of 1998 when the first club opened in Guangzhou – Beijing quickly followed suit with its first opening that summer. At that time, KTV was a luxury for the rich with rooms charging upwards of RMB 35 for a can of coke and RMB 45 for a can of beer. But over the next decade, clubs discovered that it was much more profitable to cater to the masses (which was also enabled by wholesaling of songs), and the pastime became such a social sensation that young people were literally reading books about how to be a good KTV performer.

The industry boomed with two decades of steady growth until 2015, when the bubble burst and several major KTV chains went bankrupt. Some called it inevitable – after all, no industry can keep up that amount of growth indefinitely. But several years later, with many joints still struggling to recover, it’s become clear that there’s something beyond basic economics at play – instead, something in the culture has fundamentally changed.

By 2014, a clear generational divide was already forming. Young people were willing to pay a lot more when they went to KTV – people born in the 90’s were willing to pay more than RMB 500 around 80 percent of the time they visited, compared to just 24 percent of visits from people born in the 60’s – which would have been a great sign for the clubs, except that young people were also going a lot less often. Out of any given visit, patrons were over the age of 45 about 69 percent of the time, compared to patrons under 30, who made up around 20 percent of visits.

This year, a popular Zhihu post gave allowed publication DT Finance to parse through the data on why young people are turning on KTV. Some of the most popular reasons given were that there is always too much drinking involved, that only a couple of people actually sing while everyone else looks at their phones, and that they are too embarrassed to sing.

But commentators have pointed to other factors to explain the shift – in short, arguing young people these days just have better things to do. Livestreaming is fine to pass the time alone, while even seemingly traditional things like board games, video games, and cocktail bars, all of which weren’t available to the older generations, now take up a larger chunk of the new generations’ time.

The topic of banning songs managed to climb up the ranks of trending topics on Chinese social media with ease, but in the end, it may not matter all that much. After all, in fifteen years, will anyone still be going to KTV?

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Images: UNSPLASH, Jusky, Huwenwang