Demos and Cassettes for China’s New Music

The history of popular music in China from the 1970s to the mid-2000s is dominated by dakoudai¹ – the excess cassettes (and later CDs) shipped to China for recycling. These were diverted upon arrival into the eager hands of a population finding their own voices after the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. But the new sounds Chinese artists were making needed to find their listeners. Demo cassettes provided one route for artists to reach critics, record companies and, ultimately, a new public.

The cheap and accessible medium of the compact cassette became the standard way to hold these new artists’ rough sonic sketches, their small size and light weight allowing them to be mailed or passed easily from hand to hand through the networks of artists, professionals and fans. Following a lead in a 2006 article about demo cassettes written by the critic Yan Jun, I met up with him at his Beijing studio to find out more about his treasured collection of cassettes from this period.

It’s a typical winter’s day in Beijing: bitterly cold outside but the sky is intensely blue and clear, and the view from the upper floor apartment we are in reaches all the way to the Western hills beyond the city limits. I’m here visiting artist, poet, critic and old friend Yan Jun in this late-‘90s apartment block just beyond the East 4th ring road of the city. It’s a residential building but Yan has converted this particular unit into a studio by bringing a lot of his equipment and material, and adding sound proofing so that he can record and put on performances here.

We are drinking tea together, along with the artist Xiang who is in town from Chengdu, and Shen Gun, label boss of Psychic records and Yan’s neighbour. Yan has just disappeared into the bedroom which now serves as a storage space, re-emerging with a clear acrylic box. This holds two rows of tape boxes with loose cassettes also jammed inside. They look old. I had been asking Yan about the text he wrote in 2006 (see Yan 2006), in which he reviewed his experience of demo tape culture in China over the previous decade. At the end of that article, he included details of some of the important demo cassettes in his collection. I was keen to know more and this triggered his search for the box today. It’s twenty years since that text was published and Yan’s acrylic box promises to hold some of the demo cassettes that it mentions.

He received these cassettes during a period from the mid-1990s to early 2000s while he was living in his hometown of Lanzhou and after he moved to Beijing in 1999. The cassettes were mailed to him, or handed over by artists and groups hoping to interest him in their work. He was well known for writing music reviews, organising gigs, and for his new record label Sub Jam which quickly became the major independent label for experimental music in China.

Yan goes through the box, carefully picking out each cassette box, and as he opens them up the plastic makes that distinctive cracking sound so reminiscent of music culture from the 1990s. Most of these cassettes still include the generic card inserts provided by the manufacturers filled in with hand-written comments and track listings. Some of them also include sheets of paper with hand-written or photocopied information or other visual material. He carefully reads the information written on each cassette, adding his own memories of the artists and how he received.

“These artists were either friends, or friends-of-friends, or maybe they had heard about me through my writings in the newspapers and magazines,” Yan comments to me. By the mid-1990s, Yan was writing extensively about new music in China as well as introducing music from abroad to the local audience. His writing was appearing in music and literary magazines like 通俗歌曲 [Popular Music], 读书 [Reading], 天涯 [Horizon], 南方周末 [Southern Weekend], 今日先锋 [Avant-Garde Today], 万象, 今天 [Today], etc. In these outlets he could write about the wider social meanings of the new music culture which was developing in China. The artists sending their home-made cassettes had not directly asked him to write about their recordings, but they obviously appreciated his reputation as a critic and publicist of the emerging generation of sound producers.

In English the word “demo” is a contraction of the word “demonstration” and these cassettes served as convenient ways to collect together newly recorded material, exchange ideas with peers during production and stimulate comments from other people and publications. Yan (2025) explains, “in 1996 I started to write columns as a rock critic. I made copies of demos I received and posted them to other critics or underground promoters. Sometimes I would even send them to the readers who wrote me letters.” 

For Yan, the demo recording² falls between a rehearsal recording and a finished work.³ By the late-‘80s rock bands in China were recording their rehearsals to allow them listen back later on and check their sound. Yan (2006) remembers the rock musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou being incredibly excited when he listened back to his band’s recordings on DAT tapes for the first time. Despite the basic quality of those one-track recordings, it was a revelation to him to finally be able to clearly hear his band’s playing.⁴

The demos we look at today have come from all over China: many from Beijing, but also Tianjin, Wuhan, Chengdu, Harbin, Guangzhou and other places. The now well-known bands Mutuigua, SMZB, Miserable Faith, Glorious Pharmacy and Dada are all represented in the box. Not everyone who sent demos became well known, though, and there are cassettes here by artists who passed away, went on to do other things or just disappeared. They are also not just demo cassettes: the demos are mixed together with other types of recording. For example, one of two tapes sent by Zuoxiao Zuzhou in 1998 is a live recording. The other is a pre-release demo of one of his early albums. There are recordings of live concerts from Tree Village in the suburbs of Beijing and at that time home to many underground musicians. Or recordings from other well-known venues, such as Keep In Touch Bar.⁵ Also recordings of radio programmes presented by Yan and other critics from Beijing and Nanjing radio stations both make an appearance. 

In academic literature, there’s not been a lot of attention paid to demo recordings and the media they are distributed on, not least in the context of the development of music in China. Demos are usually mentioned in passing simply as the means to cheaply record and distribute rough audio material. Demo tapes exist at a very early stage in the production of audio recordings. They hold the work prior to, or in place of, dealing with a record company or other kind of organisation. They are for unfinished, rough drafts of tracks, created when time, equipment – and access to professional channels of distribution are limited. They are also a relatively simple means of generating interest in the artist’s work through their distribution of the audio recordings with an audience particularly a way to share these drafts with the record industry to generate interest and perhaps a contract. Before artists had the need or access to official and professional channels for release, demo recordings—and the tapes holding them—filled a communication gap.

Although not all demos are recorded on cassette, their low barrier for entry means they are a natural medium for this purpose, and a natural fit for DIY culture and for the recording of demos. Wallach (2003) provides an account of the use of demo tapes in the Indonesian context. Toynbee (2003) understands demo tapes as part of the sketching process before formal production and relates them to Howard Becker’s (1982) “editorial moment” where, “artists work through a set of alternatives in the process of creation […] the successive sketches, drafts (or demo tapes) which are produced and then discarded.” Demo tapes can make up for a lack of recognition by labels. As Masters (2023) tells it, they played major roles in the development of Heavy Metal and punk in the UK in the 1970s, often being the only way to distribute recordings when the official record labels were slow to recognise the new bands and genres of music. The Hong Kong music critic Yuen Chi-chung lamented in 2023 that sometimes artists and bands never get signed to a label and their demo tapes may be the only record that they ever existed.⁶

The cheapness and ease of production of cassettes gives them an unprofessional quality, but this closeness to the point of production is the very thing which gives them their authenticity. As the critic Hu Lingyun (1999) wrote at the time, the limited resources available to musicians in China in the ‘90s meant the process of recording was necessarily basic. Only rarely did artists have access to professional equipment or studios. They were usually recording their performances in their homes, direct to cassette using a Walkman-style tape machines, or dubbing from an existing tape using a dual-cassette recorder.⁷

From the late-‘80s, cheap magnetic tape compact cassettes had supplanted vinyl as the dominant format for distributing audio recordings. Unlike vinyl which required specialist equipment for its production, recording your own cassette could be a grassroots activity when few other options were available or affordable. Because of this they played a pivotal role in the early development of a professionalised industry: “When self-produced records were still impractical, demos supported the nascent independent record system”, as Yan (2006) explains.

As international record companies opened offices in China and local labels began to develop, the artists identified the relevant A&R people in those companies who became targets for prospective mailings of these demo cassettes. As Théberge (1997)points out, in the Western context, self-promotion with demos had become an integral part of the work of an artist above and beyond the production of the work itself, and the accepted way to gain exposure. 

Nowadays, these cassettes holding demo recordings are important documents in the development of music in China. Eventually, tapes with demo recordings became items with value in themselves and were sold directly to the audience at gigs or by mail order. But, as Harrison (2022) explains, by the early 2000s computers became more common and powerful, and the internet was developing. It was possible to record higher quality audio, to burn CD-Rs (and later DVD-Rs) with much higher capacities, and network speeds around the country were increasing rapidly. These new physical formats and online services allowed for the superior reproduction of recordings, were more practical and convenient. By the mid 2000s cassettes were obsolete technology and manufacturers shifted production away from them.

But their reusable nature has meant cassettes never entirely disappeared. In the 2020s retro-nostalgia and a weird kind of convenience has meant that cassette tapes have become popular once again. The cassette medium introduced its own distinctive audio artefacts that gave the sound its distinctive quality. The physical quality of the cassette, the sound of the cheap plastic case as you open it up, the distinctive clunking sound when inserting the cassette into the player, the particular way the sound distorts when the cassette is played many times, all contribute to recalling the experience of a former time.

Yan plans to exploit the qualities of the cassettes to create a link back to the artists’ original conditions by producing new copies of his collection: “I want people to experience the life situations of those young people when they were originally recorded: what kind of house or apartment are they are in? What are the smells and feelings they are experiencing? How can we link this to today’s music?” He wants to make copies of each demo on second-hand cassettes. But not identical copies with pristine audio: each cassette will be recorded tape-to-tape from the previous copy, so the audio will degrade with each generation, exactly as it would when he received the cassettes and copied them for his friends in the ‘90s. 

All in all, this collection represents a fascinating and diverse historical record of that period. In addition to the box of cassettes he shared with me that day, Yan tells me he has two more boxes in the studio. This project will try to regain the qualities of these cassettes as tactile and sonic memories of a particular period in China. The finished products will refuse a deceptive perfection and retain some of the meanings that the artists and groups committed to the fragile strips of magnetic tape in those clear plastic boxes.

Bibliography

Becker, Howard Saul. 1982. Art Worlds. University of California Press.

Harrison, Anthony Kwame. 2022. ‘“HERE, LISTEN TO MY CD-R”: Music Transactions and Infrastructures in  Underground Hip-Hop Touring’. In The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology, edited by Elisabetta Costa, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, and Jolynna Sinanan. ROUTLEDGE.

Hu Lingyun. 1999. ‘北京故事 = Beijing Stories’. In 北京新声 = Beijing New Sound: A Sonic China Project, edited by Ou Ning. Wenyi Publishing.

Masters, Marc. 2023. High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape. The University of North Carolina Press.

Shen, Nuoji (端傳媒 Initium Media). 2023. ‘切片90年代香港獨立音樂：消逝的，可會重生？ = Slices of Hong Kong Indie Music in the 1990s: Vanished, Can It Be Reborn?’ June 10. https://theinitium.com/project/20230610-culture-1990s-hongkong-indie-music-hidden-scene.

Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Music/Culture. Wesleyan University Press.

Toynbee, Jason. 2003. ‘Fingers to the Bone or Spaced Out on Creativity?’ In Cultural Work: Understanding the Cultural Industries, edited by Andrew Beck. Routledge. http://systems.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/ejour/netlibrary.pl?t=137678.

Wallach, Jeremy. 2003. ‘“Goodbye My Blind Majesty” Music, Language, and Politics in the Indonesian Underground’. In Global Pop, Local Language, edited by Harris M. Berger and Michael Thomas Carroll. University Press of Mississippi.

Yan, Jun. 2006. ‘独立音乐史前史——小样乱弹 = The Prehistory of Independent Music — Random Ramblings on Demo Tracks’. In 灰飞烟灭：一个人的摇滚乐观察 = Ashes to Ashes: Personal Observations of Rock Music, by Jun Yan. Edited by Ning Zhang. 文化先锋书系. 花城出版社 Guangzhou Publishing House.

Yan, Jun. 2025. Cut-Off: A Few Cut-Off Segments. Party Perfect!. https://alwayspartyperfect.bandcamp.com/album/pp-11-cut-off

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1. 大口袋 ↩︎
2. 小样 = a “mock-up” or “proof” in the context of printing. ↩︎
3. “小样的概念，原本是介于排练录音和正式作品之间的东⻄[…]” (Yan 2006). ↩︎
4. “我借了一个小型DAT录音机，也是一个一轨并进去的录音。 我录了一些⺠谣的歌，当时我就兴奋得醉了两天，我从来没听过我们自己做的音乐录得那么 清晰，尽管是一轨的。 然后就梦想着有一个四轨的磁带录音机，如果那时候有的话，那光景可能会不一样，我们的音乐会 进步得很快，清晰地审视自己的作品。” (Yan 2006). ↩︎
5. 保持联络酒吧. ↩︎
6. “技術好的進入唱片工 業,成為職業樂手,不然就慢慢淡出,成為「都市傳說」:偶爾有人提起,但證據總是含糊 不清。他以達明一派成員劉以達在1980年代曾組過一支叫DLLM的樂隊為例,也是近年才有 人把舊demo上載,讓人一睹這怪獸的形狀。” (Yuen Chi-chung, quoted in Shen 2023). ↩︎
7. “也是在那个隔音间中，我重组了乐队以惟一的设备⸺一台双卡录音机，使用手动拼贴录制了惟一的小样。” (Hu 1999). ↩︎