Cai Xukun Criticized for Unlock-style Music Release
With the blacklisting of Chinese star Vicki Zhao Wei (趙薇) and a wave of rumors rocking the entertainment industry recently, the Chinese government has stepped up on censorship and control measures, with the Cyberspace Administration of China announcing the launch of ten new regulations under “Operation Clean Sweep”.
Album Track Release Took Over Four Months
Popular star Cai Xukun (蔡徐坤) caused a furore due to inappropriate marketing of his album “Lost” <迷>. Despite his album sales hitting 80 million Chinese yuan after having started selling for over four months since April, only half of his songs have been released, with majority of song tracks even missing its titles. This “deposit” style of music release has been criticized, with netizens questioning, “You can’t release the songs fully even after four months?” while some also said they are unable to accept the marketing gimmick of “progressively unlocking” the album tracklist. However, loyal fans defended their idol and said that Cai Xukun is surely not the only singer who is using this mode of track release, and this has led to a war of words online between both sides.
Fans Warned To Avoid Verbal Attacks
Some lawyers felt that neither the webpage on the music platforms nor marketing posts by Cai Xukun’s studio have clearly mentioned about the “pay first, collect later” nature of the product, which means it might be running afoul of consumer protection laws.
Cai Xukun’s studio then quickly released the entire tracklist for “Lost” on August 30, which was followed by an apology post to consumers thereafter. In the post, the studio thanked the press and netizens for their supervision of the album, and stated that it would act strictly to provide a more comprehensive notice to consumers about the album to ensure their legal rights are being protected. It then issued another statement saying it would be cooperating with Operation Clean Sweep, and called on fans to express their views rationally in support of a healthy and progressive online environment.
This article is written by Joyce for Jaynestars.com.
Source: On.CC
For them to sell a album with released dates in stages is becoming common in China, but it is really not a fair practise. And to not inform the buyers of the exact full release time even after 4 months of waiting is not acceptable.
Sell what you have, you can sell as you released… And why rush thru selling a album when you dont even have enough songs?? I heard the songs the company did released after this backlash, it was just laughable.
I really enjoy those days I buy a album and enjoy the whole album for weeks… This method of sales and marketing tactics should be banned. Using your fans money on credit.
Wow, first time I’ve heard of this practice. What stopping them from taking the money and run? And like you said the songs are rubbish as they need to meet the deadline rather than need to be good to appeal to the audience for their money. Wow, just wow, another exo that needs to be axe >_> and yea, this practice needs to be banned
@LittleFish Most definitely… Sounds like a big scam.
What?? That’s really a scam method and horrible PR for the artist. No titles for missing tracks? Then what the ____ are the people buying?
The artist and company definitely deserves backslash for this. It’s also time for fans to wake up and not blindly support their idols.
Wow, this is the first time I heard about buying an album without full songs and missing title tracks. How is this even allowed? After 4 months already, all the songs weren’t even released and fans didn’t know the title tracks for some songs. This is definitely a scam. If there isn’t a crack down going on, the company will not do anything.
Didn’t know about such selfish tactic until the online news media started reporting about it. It sounds outright deception and taking advantage of the consumers. Artists like Cai Xu Kuan and especially JJ Lin are not struggling singers or belonging to struggling management team. They have the financial ability to invest in the music album production before releasing for sale. What they are doing is using the consumers’ money from the presale to produce the music album.
Saw a YT video commenting that this is getting common but usually the singers will not be dragging that long like CXK (one other singer released the rest of the songs within the same month). And after this news reporting, CXK’s team releases most of the remaining “songs” but netizens’ feedback stating that not only the “songs” are extraordinary short, they sound gibberish with no proper tune, leading to speculation that the “songs” are still not ready but they could not delay anymore for fear to be the next to be cancelled by the state.
And his fans do not mind being taken advantage of as they started the usual fans fanatic unruly behaviour attacking the online news media that first reported it.
Well, I’m all for the government to take SBags like that off the market. Seriously though, they are so rich already, why needing to get people money to invest in the stock market…. Use your own money, greedy people