When a Chinese festival promoter pulls the plug ...

... this is what it looks like. Courtesy of China Music Radar, a blog run by Split Works, a group of Westerners based in Shanghai and Beijing who have promoted shows by Sonic Youth, Ozomatli, Talib Kweli and, last week, Ghostface Killah.

At the beginninng of June, we pointed you in the direction of the JinShan Crazy Beach Music Festival. You can read the post HERE. If you read the post, you will remember that we were dubious about it, seeing as we were 6 weeks away and there were few if any references to it online of in the media..

We’ve just received word that, despite commitments to media partnerships (and, we presume, artists and production), the investors have pulled their investment overnight. The following email tells it better than we possibly could:

Sorry to inform that Crazy Summer Music Festival has encountered big problem and all the promotion and execution works for the festival need to be stopped right now. The investor party had stopped investing on halfway, all due payment for treatment to media partners, for tickets exchange, for artists etc all have no way to continue. Sorry for that. I highly appreciated your big support. We know there are already promotions out at this point, and all the due resources i promised to give are not dispear anyways, please help me exchange all the promotion coverage and exchange resources into countable values and give back to me. We will ask for a rightful payment for giving back to you.

If the investor party had made any behavior in order to get off this obligations, just ignore, all rights and values for you to help promoting the event will be returned.

If there are already pages of promotion out, please exchange into value, and get back to me, iwill get those values back to you. If there are enough to get every information withdrewal, please let those not out. and please still give me the value exchanged from all the preparation and pages left for it. Thanks. Sorry for the big trouble, Sorry.

Sorry for everything, and thanks for your understanding. Sorry.

Honestly, we expected something like this, and we also expect more in this vein as the market progresses. Inexperienced organisers and investors see sexy opportunity – fail to budget properly, fail to obtain the right artists/ promotion/ licenses – investors pull out, festival gets canned. Festivals are very historically tough to get off the ground – conventional wisdom is that they take 3-4 years to break even (if indeed they ever do). We may see more of this before the cycle reaches any sort of maturity...