30-second overview: In 1986, Ren Jiang-da — of Korean-Japanese heritage — borrowed NT$300,000 to take over a failing record shop and began importing "music no one wanted to hear" into Taiwan. Forty years later, the ecosystem that grew from that shop (live houses, independent labels, StreetVoice, the Golden Indie Music Awards) sent a band that sold records in a coffee shop all the way to the Golden Melody Award for Album of the Year, and sent a Taipei band that sings entirely in English to Coachella. Taiwan's forty years of indie music is a relay race without a finish line: every runner gasped for air, every runner thought they were about to collapse — but the baton never dropped.
The Dream That Three Hundred Thousand Bought
In 1986 Taipei, one year before the lifting of martial law. A young man of Korean-Japanese heritage who had grown up across from a Keelung fish market, Ren Jiang-da (任將達), borrowed NT$300,000 from friends to take over a small record shop on the verge of closing: Crystal Records (水晶唱片). He had no business plan, no market analysis — only a group of friends complaining they couldn't find foreign records, and an impulse he later summed up in three words: "You want to do it, go do it, and you'll get it done." (From a 2017 Mirror Media interview.)
The decision looked unimpressive at the time. Taiwan's record market was monopolized by major labels like Rock Records and UFO Records. The popular music (流行音樂) industry had no concept of "independence," and young people cycled between Western charts and Mandarin love ballads.
But Ren did a few things no one else was doing.
In 1987, he founded the monthly magazine Rocker, introducing the concept of underground music (地下音樂) to Taiwan. That same year he began organizing the "Taipei New Music Festival," running it for four editions and inviting cross-boundary lineups including Huang Yunling, Beyond, and Chao Chuan. In 1991, he released Sounds from the Bottom of Taiwan and the "Taiwan Sound Archives" series, using field recordings to collect indigenous voices, Naka-si (台語流行), Beiguan (北管), gezaixi opera, and night market hawkers' calls. At a time when everyone was chasing Western rock, he bent down to listen to the frequencies of the soil beneath his own feet.
✦ "I have a desire to make the minority, the unseen, be seen." — Ren Jiang-da (2017 Mirror Media interview)
Crystal Records became "the cradle of the alternative," "a springboard for artists." An incomplete list is enough to make the case: Wu Bai, Chen Ming-zhang, Black List Studio, Lei Guangxia, Zhu Yuesin (Pig Head Skin), Jinmen Wang and Li Binghui, LTK Commune (濁水溪公社), Chthonic (閃靈), Sugar Plum Ferry (甜梅號), 1976. These names would later be written into different chapters of Taiwan's pop music history, but almost every album released on Crystal lost money. Former Eslite Music director Wu Wuzhang put it precisely: "Crystal was full of passion and ideals, but lacked professional financial management — which is why it could only become a legend."
In 1993, the company faced a management crisis; production planner He Donghong was carrying personal debt of several million NT dollars. Staff went without pay for extended periods, but almost no one left. Former Crystal employee and singer Liu Mang A-de recalled: "All the employees staked their feelings on the company, wanting to prop it up — it was hard work, but there weren't many complaints."
In 1995, music director He Yingyi launched the "Crystal 10,000 Supporters Club," calling on supporters to each spend NT$4,000 on music products, sparking enthusiastic responses from political and arts circles — arguably Taiwan's earliest instance of crowdfunding for indie music. But the debt hole was too deep. Added to this, Ren's second daughter was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, and treatment in the United States cost a minimum of US$300,000. "Everything that could be done was done, and money that shouldn't have been borrowed was borrowed." He took out high-interest loans that compounded into an impossible weight. The medical costs crushed a record company and shattered a father. In 1994, his daughter died in Taiwan.
Yet in 1998, the Golden Melody Awards broke precedent by giving a Special Contribution Award to Ren Jiang-da — then only 42 years old, the youngest recipient in the award's history. Judge Li Jianfu said: "All mainstream comes from non-mainstream; he was willing to come through for non-mainstream creators when it mattered most, and knowing that almost every record he released would lose money — he certainly deserves recognition." (2017 Mirror Media interview.)
📝 Curator's Note
Crystal Records' contradiction is the archetypal contradiction of Taiwan indie music: the purest idealists are often the worst businesspeople. Ren Jiang-da opened a door for Taiwan and got caught in it himself. Crystal closed in 2006. But the story did not end there: in 2021, He Yingyi announced that all Crystal recordings would be placed in the public domain, under a declaration titled "Now We Return Ourselves to Everyone." A record company that couldn't pay its staff ultimately gave all its music to the world for free.
The Sound Explosion After Martial Law Ended
On July 15, 1987, Taiwan lifted a martial law decree that had lasted 38 years. For music, this meant one concrete thing: you could finally sing loudly whatever you wanted.
Before martial law ended, Taiwan's musical environment was closed. Records required government review; lyrics could not touch politics; even "decadent music" could be banned. The lifting opened a valve, and an entire generation of suppressed creative energy burst loose. In 1989, Black List Studio released Formosa (抓狂歌). This entirely Taiwanese-language album shook the whole industry with hip-hop rhythms and political satire, proving that popular music could be both enjoyable and dangerous. That same year, Shida High School students Cai Haien, Zhang Mingzhang, and Ying Weimin (Xiao Ying) formed a band that would later be called LTK Commune (濁水溪公社). They mixed punk, noise, naka-si, and Taiwanese together, recording the life of underclass people in the most raw possible way. The 1995 album How's Your Anus? — the title alone caused mainstream media to retreat — became a classic among underground fans.
These sounds shared a common feature: they borrowed the form of Western rock and filled it with Taiwan's own content. LTK Commune used Taiwanese (台語) to scold politicians; Chthonic used black metal to sing about the February 28 Massacre; Lin Sheng-xiang used Hakka to sing about Meinong's anti-dam movement. Language itself became a manifesto. After Mandarin had monopolized pop music for forty years, singing in Taiwanese, Hakka, or indigenous languages was inherently political.
Martial law's end also gave birth to Taiwan's earliest outdoor music festivals. In 1995, two foreigners — Jami Marsh and Wade Davis — organized "Spring Scream" in Kenting, birthing Taiwan rock history's first outdoor music festival on a beach. That same year, Wild Rock Fest (野台開唱) launched in Taipei, establishing a multi-stage operational model and beginning to invite international bands like Suede and Moby. These music festivals (音樂祭) provided indie bands a growth space beyond live houses — but that's another article's story.
The 1990s Taipei underground scene concentrated at a few geographic nodes: the record shops of Ximending were information exchanges; the area around Shida Road was the colony's core; the cafes around Gongguan were where bands rested. This was the natural congregation of poor students and poor musicians, with no one designing any "cultural park": rents were cheap there because there were universities nearby, because basements could be tucked inside alleyways. A veteran music fan recalled Crystal's era well: "In an era when the internet was underdeveloped, Crystal was like a secret underground society, opening another world's door for us." (2017 Mirror Media interview.)
📝 Curator's Note
Post-martial law Taiwan indie music had a special duality: it was simultaneously "learning outward" and "excavating inward." Bands learned from Western rock's forms (punk, metal, post-rock), but filled them with Taiwan's own stories (White Terror, ethnic identity, class oppression, urban alienation). This hybrid of "foreign form + local content" meant that Taiwan indie music grew its own DNA from its very first day.
The Revolutionary Base Registered as a "Beverage Shop"
If Crystal Records was the delivery room of indie music, live houses were where it learned to walk. And the absurdity of Taiwan live houses can be summed up in one detail: the "Underground Society" (地下社會), which opened in a Taipei Shida Road basement in 1996, registered its business category with the Taipei City Bureau of Commerce as "hot and cold beverages, fruit juice, coffee, tobacco and alcohol."
Taiwan law simply had no category for live house; owners had no way to register as a music venue.
Underground Society was co-founded by He Donghong and Chen Shuuzhen. He Donghong — yes, the same He Donghong who carried millions in Crystal Records debt — chose another way to keep doing what he believed in after leaving the record industry. This basement that could hold only 80 to 100 people became the heart of Taiwan indie music for the next seventeen years: 1976, Quarterback, Sticky Rice Band, Wonfu, Cosmos People, and 831 all completed their first, tenth, and hundredth performances here.
In the same period, The Witch House (女巫店) hatched Cheer Chen and Deserts Chang in a 50-person space hung with women's lingerie. This venue, opened in 1996 near Taipei's Shida Night Market, placed no limits on music genres — folk to heavy metal all had a stage — and with its feminist spirit and no-barriers openness defined an entire generation's image of "literary youth" (文青). Riverside Music Cafe (1995) became the cradle of folk singer-songwriters, providing a relatively quiet and literary performance environment. The Wall, which opened in 2003 with a 400-person capacity and professional hardware, established the standard model for international indie bands touring Taiwan. The south had its own bases too. Kaohsiung's Kafka by the Sea combined harbor city ocean culture and industrial background to become an important base for the southern Taiwan indie scene.
Each of these venues had its own character: The Witch House was a living room, Riverside was a study, The Wall was a training ground, Underground Society was a basement. But together they held up a complete "growing up" pathway: newcomers started in 50-person spaces, developed to 100, then 400, then Legacy's 1,000-person scale. Without this path, even the best bands could only stay where they started.
But in 2011, a fire at a Taichung nightclub killed nine people, and local governments across Taiwan immediately launched strict inspections of all performance spaces. The problem was that regulations classified live houses together with dance clubs and nightclubs — same fire safety standards, same land use zoning restrictions, with no alternative path to legal operation. Underground Society, The Witch House, and The Wall all received fines. Underground Society shut down once in 2012, with legislators attempting to amend the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Act to give live houses a more reasonable regulatory classification. It reopened in August; in October it received two more fines of NT$60,000 each — one for "violating public safety," one for "violating building use classification."
Mayday bassist Masa said at a press conference in solidarity: "As long as there is one path to survive and to walk — don't leave people who want to operate without any recourse." Mayday guitarist Monster, 1976, Köd Qiu Gin, and LTK Commune's Xiao Ying all stood up in support. This may have been the most united moment in Taiwan indie music history between "underground" and "mainstream."
On June 15, 2013, Underground Society closed its second and final time. The farewell on the official blog was calm and bitter: "The government has taken no action on live house regulations; the Shida three-district self-help group continues to pressure us from multiple directions, treating us as a social menace. Let us cherish all the memories we created together — thank you, everyone!"
After Underground Society closed, known electronic music creator fish.the launched the "Let's Make a Club Compilation!" project on Facebook, gathering 40 songs in less than a month and a half, paying tribute to that basement in a free online release. A venue disappeared, but the people and memories it had cultivated became music, and continued to circulate.
The closure of one basement exposed the institutional indifference of an entire nation toward musical cultural spaces — a problem that has not been fully resolved to this day.
🔢 Key Data
It was not until the 2015 amendment to the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Act that live houses received even preliminary legal status in Taiwan. Before that, not a single live house in Taiwan could obtain a fully legal business registration. In the seventeen years from Underground Society's opening to its closing, Taiwan indie music traveled from underground to the Golden Melody Awards stage — but the spaces that carried all of that were, legally speaking, always unauthorized structures.
From "Underground" to "Independent": A Revolution in a Word
Around the year 2000, a quiet linguistic revolution occurred in Taiwan's music circles. The term "underground band" began to be replaced by "indie music."
These two terms carry very different weight. "Underground" implies anti-mainstream, anti-commercial, hiding in an invisible place; "independent" emphasizes autonomy: you can be seen, you can make money, as long as creative control remains in your own hands.
The key figure driving this shift was Chthonic (閃靈) frontman Lin Chang-zuo (Freddy). He argued that bands should not be forever trapped in basements — they should actively come to the surface, record themselves, organize their own events, build their own audiences. Blow Media's retrospective of this period wrote that Freddy was "one of the early advocates in Taiwan for bands to step out of 'underground' and become independent bands." Chthonic itself was the best demonstration: a band that draws on Taiwan's historical mythology, fusing erhu and suona with black metal, signed with international label Spinefarm Records and performed at Europe's Download Festival, proving that "independent" and "international" are not antonyms. Lin Chang-zuo later even won a seat in the Legislative Yuan, becoming the first person in Taiwan's music history to walk from the mosh pit into the legislature.
Scholar He Donghong, researching Crystal Records, noted that Taiwan's concept of "independence" has a fundamental difference from the British-American concept: in the UK and US, indie is the declaration of war of a small label against the majors; in Taiwan, labels of all sizes have coexisted from the beginning. Rock Records is simultaneously Asia's largest "independent" label and also partners with multinational companies. In Taiwan, "independent" is more an aesthetic attitude and DIY practice than a structural opposition to the industry.
This explains a phenomenon that often confuses outsiders. Mayday formed at Shida High School in 1997, built their following in live houses, and released their debut album in 1999. Then they signed with a major label, grew their tours, filled Madison Square Garden in New York (tickets sold out in 48 hours), and CNN called them "the Chinese-language Beatles." But many Taiwanese still call them "indie band origins."
In Taiwan's context, "independent" refers to how you started, not how big you are now. This definitional ambiguity is both indie music's weakness (lack of clear industry boundaries) and its secret weapon: it makes the boundary of "indie" disappear, creating a field that can accommodate all kinds of sounds. From LTK Commune's noise punk to Cheer Chen's fresh folk, from Lim Giong's electronic experiments to Egg Plant Egg's Taiwanese rock — everything can find its place in this field. Mayday's commercial success didn't "betray" the indie spirit; instead, it proved something to bands that came after: you can walk from a basement to a stadium, and you don't need to apologize for it.
📝 Curator's Note
Taiwan's blurry definition of "independence" may be precisely because this island is too small. Small enough that everyone knows everyone, small enough that the distance between "mainstream" and "underground" is only one street corner: in New York, you can spend a lifetime in Brooklyn's indie scene without touching mainstream; in Taipei, after watching post-rock at The Wall, you walk five minutes and you're at the department stores of Xinyi District. The disappearance of distance makes opposition lose its meaning; collaboration becomes the survival strategy instead.
StreetVoice, the Label Archipelago, and the Golden Indie Music Awards
In 2006, StreetVoice (街聲) went online. This platform that let musicians upload work for free did something Crystal Records could not: it brought the barrier to distribution down to zero.
In Crystal's era, a band that wanted to be heard needed to be discovered by a record company, enter a recording studio, press CDs, and get them into record shops. After StreetVoice, all you needed was a microphone and a computer.
The entire global music industry was experiencing the same digital revolution — Taiwan was just one corner of it. Around 2000, download software like Napster and Kazaa caused physical CD sales to plummet; record companies closed or merged. But for indie music, digitization was a liberation: production costs dropped from million-dollar studios to a laptop, distribution costs dropped from a shelf in a record shop to a link on the internet.
StreetVoice's special quality was that it simultaneously played the role of platform and curator: regularly organizing events, discovering new talent, connecting labels and musicians, operating deep music media like Blow Music. Functionally it was more like a community center. StreetVoice later extended its services to mainland China and Hong Kong, becoming one of the most important digital hubs for Chinese-language indie music. Taiwan indie music evolved from a physical-space colony (the live house district) into a digital colony, with StreetVoice as the central station.
In the same period, independent labels began to cultivate niche audiences in depth, each label like a small island, managing a different sound ecology.
Wind & Sunny Records (風和日麗, established 1998) defined the sound of Taiwan's "literary youth aesthetic." Deserts Chang, Cheer Chen, and Waa Wei all launched from here; its commitment to refined production and fresh style shaped an entire generation's imagination of what "indie music" sounds like. White Wabbit Records cultivated experimental music and post-rock, becoming an important driver of Taiwan's noise and avant-garde sounds. Motel Label (角頭音樂), founded by Chang Si-shi-san, used Taiwanese (台語) and mother-tongue rock to document the island's sonic landscape. Indigenous singers like Chen Jian-nian and Ji Xiaojun found their platform at Motel Label. Streetcore Records (顏社) bet on MC Doge and Leo Wang back when hip-hop was not yet mainstream; Leo Wang later won the 2019 Golden Melody Best Mandarin Male Vocalist award, a milestone for hip-hop entering the mainstream.
These labels were connected into an archipelago through music festivals (音樂祭) and digital platforms. Megaport, Wild Rock Fest, and Ocean Music Festival became the United Nations of these small islands, letting different sounds collide on the same lawn. Blow Media's articles enumerated Taiwan's early important indie labels: "Crystal Records, Motel Label, and still-active labels like Dianthus, White Wabbit, Wind & Sunny, Streetcore, and re:public are the unsung backstage forces that have quietly held up Taiwan's indie music scene."
In 2010, the Ministry of Culture established the Golden Indie Music Awards (金音創作獎), Taiwan's first national-level award designed specifically for non-mainstream music. The Golden Melody Awards are a competition for everyone; the Golden Indie Awards are indie music's home field. Their establishment marked the state's official acknowledgment that sounds outside the mainstream also deserve to be seen, rewarded, and documented.
From Crystal Records' one-person operation to StreetVoice's digital platform, from Underground Society's 80-person basement to the Golden Indie Awards ceremony — Taiwan indie music took twenty-five years to travel from being legally unacknowledged, to having the state award it prizes. The path was not straight; it was full of failed labels, closed venues, and musicians who changed careers. But the ecosystem survived — and grew denser.
The Sound Spectrum: From Noise Punk to Breezy Folk
The most underestimated feature of Taiwan indie music is the stunning stylistic diversity it grew on a small island.
On the metal end, Chthonic and Flesh Juicer represent two completely different heavy routes. Chthonic set Taiwan's historical mythology to symphonic black metal; Flesh Juicer melts temple culture, bajiajiang (eight generals) face paint, and industrial metal together, with live shows like a cult ritual. The Chairman Band (董事長樂團) howls social issues in Taiwanese rock, carrying a grassroots anger and humor.
On the post-rock end, Sugar Plum Ferry (甜梅號) is an unsurpassable pioneer. Active since the Crystal Records era, this band built vast emotional narratives with purely instrumental music, influencing an entire generation of Taiwan post-rock bands. Aphasia's sound is more introverted and heavy, like a mountain in fog. Cicada brings the delicacy of classical chamber music into the post-rock framework.
The folk strand is longer. Its roots go back to the campus folk movement (校園民歌運動) of the 1970s, but indie-era folk is no longer the same thing as campus folk songs. Ara Kimbo (胡德夫) is the upstream source of that river — pioneer of the modern folk song movement, spiritual totem of indigenous music. Lin Sheng-xiang grafts Hakka eight-instrument music onto rock, using music to speak for the farming communities of Meinong. Deserts Chang, with a guitar and a husky voice, became the defining voice of the "literary youth generation" of the 2000s. Crowd Lu's fresh style let folk reach younger audiences.
And the "Little Fresh" label (陳綺貞, Sodagreen, Deserts Chang and others) was later exported to mainland China, becoming mainland Chinese listeners' strongest impression of Taiwan indie music. Taiwan Insight notes that "Little Fresh" had evolved from a music genre into a label for an aesthetic and lifestyle. This is an interesting paradox: the most "gentle" face of Taiwan indie music turned out to have the greatest international reach.
Electronic music's thread is often overlooked in indie music narratives, but its influence is everywhere. Lim Giong (林強) transformed from a 1990s pop star to an electronic music pioneer. This transformation in itself is a condensed version of Taiwan music history. From being a Taiwanese-language pop superstar with "向前走" (Moving Forward), he became an electronic musician who DJed in underground Berlin clubs, later scoring films for Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke, redefining what "the sound of Taiwan" could be. DJ Mykal and Sonia Calico built their own electronic scenes in Taipei. And recent years' Organik Festival, held on remote sea islands, proves that Taiwan's electronic music community can now create international-caliber experiences.
🔢 Key Data
Since 2010, the Golden Indie Music Awards have spanned over fifteen years, covering genres including rock, electronic, hip-hop, folk, and jazz. From LTK Commune's sweep of Best Album, Best Band, and Jury Award at the 7th edition (2016), to more recent wins by cross-language, cross-genre new-generation artists like THAT/珂拉琪 and Soft Lipa/壞特?te — the Golden Indie Awards' winner list is itself an annual snapshot of Taiwan indie music's diversity.
Cao Dong's Coffee Shop and Sunset Rollercoaster's Coachella
In 2016, a band called No Party for Cao Dong (草東沒有派對) released their debut album Ugly Beauty (醜奴兒). They bypassed traditional distribution channels — no record shops, no major label — and only sold on consignment at coffee shops and independent bookstores. Their first pressing of 2,000 copies sold out immediately. Every show sold out in seconds. In 2017, they took home three Golden Melody Awards: Best Band, Best New Artist, and Song of the Year. That last award meant that an indie band's song was judged to be the best song in all of Taiwan that year. In 2024, their second album Impermanence (瓦合) again won Album of the Year and Best Mandarin Language Album.
The way No Party for Cao Dong succeeded is itself a parable. No management company, no marketing budget — their early MVs were shot by the band members themselves. They proved that in the streaming era, a band could completely bypass the traditional industry chain and conquer an entire island through the most primitive means (good music plus word of mouth). Taiwan Insight's analysis notes that their success "not only demonstrated alternative means of marketing music but also blurred the border between the two ideological categories of indie and mainstream." They swept both the Golden Indie Music Awards and the Golden Melody Awards, breaking the long-held imaginary divide between the two.
Their lyrics are dark and sharp, precisely hitting the structural anxieties of an entire generation of urban youth: low wages, high housing costs, a generational predicament with no visible future. The line from "Mountain and Sea" (山海) — "He understands, he understands, everything cannot return" — became a generational code. Because it finally put into four minutes what everyone was afraid to say out loud. The 2023 second album Impermanence continued the same spiritual density and swept the Golden Melody Awards again, proving that No Party for Cao Dong's sound is a continuing need: the young people on this island need someone to sing their pain.
And while No Party for Cao Dong was tearing through the island interior, Sunset Rollercoaster (落日飛車) was heading outward.
This band formed in Taipei in 2009 made a counterintuitive choice: singing entirely in English. Vocalist Kuo Kuo's explanation carries a poetic calculation: English allows them to "express indirectly," letting listeners discover meaning themselves. The band's name came from a photo background (a roller coaster and a sunset) shot on Photo Booth for their MySpace profile. This absurd origin perfectly maps onto their musical sensibility: not too serious, but serious to the bone.
Sunset Rollercoaster's music fuses city pop, disco, funk, and psychedelic rock, with vintage synthesizer sounds carrying a languid romance unique to the subtropics. They released their debut album Bossa Nova in 2011, then dissolved. Regrouped in 2015, released EP JINJI KIKKO in 2016 to wide acclaim. Their timeline is nearly a perfect ascending curve: Japan's Summer Sonic in 2011; New York's Central Park SummerStage in 2017; becoming the first Taiwanese band recorded by Audiotree in 2018; Soft Storm in 2020 being ranked 4th best Asian album of the year by NME (partially recorded in Los Angeles, collaborating with American music legend Ned Doheny). In 2023, they performed at Coachella. In 2024, their collaborative album AAA with Korean band Hyukoh (Hyukoh) received seven nominations at the 36th Golden Melody Awards.
A band that set out from Taipei, sings in English, plays city pop and psychedelic rock, used a global language to tell a story that could only have grown in Taiwan.
Along the same road, breakthroughs in different directions were happening simultaneously. Elephant Gym (大象體操) set out from Kaohsiung, becoming a representative of Asian math rock through precision structure (irregular time signatures, complex counterpoint, purely instrumental narrative). They receive regular invitations to European and American music festivals. Fire EX. (滅火器) sang Sunflower Movement energy in Taiwanese-language punk. "Island's Sunrise" (島嶼天光) became the unofficial anthem of the 2014 Legislative Yuan occupation — the connection between music and social movements has never been more direct. THAT/珂拉琪 (Nakaw) is the most unexpected combination: Amis, Taiwanese, and Japanese mixed into rock and folk, with a two-person formation that has the full feeling of an orchestra, winning Best New Artist at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards.
The rise of hip-hop and R&B broke the indie music landscape's long rock-centric structure: 9m88 shone with jazz and R&B, winning Best New Artist at the 2020 Golden Indie Awards. Soft Lipa/壞特?te gave up medical school to pursue music, winning Best New Artist at the 2021 Golden Melody Awards. MC Doge (蛋堡) established a jazz hip-hop template long before hip-hop became mainstream, and his independent distribution model built at Streetcore Records (顏社) proved that rap music could take the indie route. Beautiful Nuuance (美秀集團) self-describes as "cyber-Taiwanese" with self-made technological instruments, mixing electronics, temple music, and bajiajiang into rock — creating an uncanny creature that could only have grown in Taiwan.
Taiwan indie music's internationalization is multiple voices simultaneously being heard by the world, with a person who chose the hardest road standing behind each one.
📝 Curator's Note
The most common question asked of Taiwan indie music internationally is: "Do you sing in Chinese or English?" The answer is "both — and also Taiwanese, Hakka, Amis, and Japanese." This linguistic diversity is the natural expression of this island's own multicultural DNA — no one designed it. THAT/珂拉琪's Amis-language rock, Lin Sheng-xiang's Hakka folk, Fire EX.'s Taiwanese-language punk, Sunset Rollercoaster's English city pop. Behind each language choice is an answer to the question "who am I."
✦ "The success of this band implies not only the alternative means of marketing music but also the crossover between two ideological categories." — Chen-yu Lin on No Party for Cao Dong, Taiwan Insight, 2018
A Story That Hasn't Ended
In 2018, Taiwan Insight's academic article called Taipei "the world's newest indie music capital." That title sounds glamorous, but the cracks underneath have never gone away.
The market being too small is a structural problem. How many full-time indie musicians can 23 million people support? If a four-person band earns NT$20,000 per show and plays four times a month, after venue fees, transportation, and equipment maintenance, each member takes home roughly enough to cover rent. The vast majority of indie musicians hold another job (teaching guitar, doing design, writing code); music is a passion, not a career.
Streaming platforms brought distribution costs to zero, but also brought album revenue to near zero. A song played 1,000 times on Spotify earns the creator approximately the price of one bubble tea. Musicians must rely on performances, merchandise, brand collaborations, and YouTube to sustain themselves. Studio albums shifted from a revenue source to a business card. This is a shared predicament of global indie music, but for Taiwan — with a market fraction the size of the UK or US — the pain is particularly acute.
Talent flow is another hidden hurt. Excellent musicians are poached by major labels, or simply head to the much larger mainland China market to develop. Those who stay face a contradiction: the market is too small to sustain you, but if you leave, you can't find this density of creative ecology anywhere else.
And the most fundamental question: as indie music becomes increasingly mainstream, how much meaning does "indie" still carry? Blow Media wrote in a 2016 special issue that Taiwan has at least five different readings of "independent": the "indie" of not being released by a major label; the "indie" that encourages DIY spirit; the "indie" that worships a critical underground spirit; the "indie" in the local band scene's development context; the "indie" that inherits the Western music history. These definitions sometimes contradict each other. Perhaps, as that article's conclusion said: "Define your own independence."
The digital era has also fundamentally changed how indie music survives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, live houses were forced to suspend operations; online livestreams became the alternative. Streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, KKBOX) make it easier than ever for Taiwan music to be discovered by global audiences, but the per-stream royalties are dismally small. Musicians must sustain themselves through performances, merchandise, brand partnerships, and YouTube management. Studio albums shifted from revenue sources to calling cards. This is the shared predicament of global indie music, but for Taiwan — with a market a fraction of the size of the UK or US — the pain is especially acute.
The government's role is also changing, slowly but definitively. Taiwan Beats, the Ministry of Culture's brand initiative, attempts to push Taiwanese music onto the international stage, with subsidy programs supporting musicians' participation in international music conferences like SXSW, MIDEM, and Music Matters. The opening of the Kaohsiung Music Center (2021) and the increase in music programming at cultural venues across the country all indicate that the public sector is beginning to see indie music as part of cultural soft power. But whether resources are actually reaching the people who need them most — the young bands still rehearsing in garages, still looking for a venue to put on their first show — remains an open question.
Perhaps the answer is hidden in Ren Jiang-da's story.
In 2017, at 61 years old, he had long since left the music industry. Crystal Records was a dream too painful to revisit. "You can't imagine that kind of pressure. I hope Crystal doesn't leave even a thread of a trace in my mind." He was volunteering at a community welfare organization called "After School Haven," accompanying disadvantaged children in Taipei's Datong District. Everything was gone, but he was still doing the same thing: making the unseen, seen.
That day was his last class. He brought a turntable to the classroom, playing from the Beatles to Lin Sheng-xiang, from Leonard Cohen to Zhao Yihao. About twenty children and parents sat there, listening to unfamiliar music, their faces showing uncertain expressions. He said: "Today is my last class here — let me be self-indulgent for once!" And then: "You might not understand now, but one day in the future, you will remember this moment."
A record shop folded. A basement closed. But what grew from those places has spread to every corner of the whole island: every live house still holding on, every college student uploading a first song to StreetVoice, every young band rehearsing in a garage in Kaohsiung, Tainan, or Chiayi. Those seeds aren't some business model or industrial strategy — they are a belief simple enough to be almost naive: this island should have more sounds heard.
What Ren Jiang-da said to those children may be the same thing Taiwan indie music has been saying to this island for forty years: you might not understand now, but one day you will remember.
Further Reading:
- From Deserts Chang to Ann Phoung — the identity shift of Taiwan indie music's representative voice, from the flag incident to the politics of renaming
- History of Rock Music in Taiwan — the complete path of rock in Taiwan, from banned songs to mainstream
- Taiwan Music Festival Culture — how the Ocean Music Festival became an indie music incubator
- LTK Commune — thirty years Taiwanese-language punk underground, first Golden Melody nomination upon dissolution wins Best Taiwanese Language Album
References
- Mirror People: The Beautiful Failure — Crystal Records' Ren Jiang-da, Mirror Media, 2017 (primary interview)
- Crystal Records (Wikipedia), history, Taipei New Music Festival, Golden Melody Special Contribution Award
- Underground Society (Wikipedia), live house regulatory disputes and closure history
- Indie is the new mainstream? The conception of independent music in Taiwan, Taiwan Insight, Chen-yu Lin, 2018 (English academic perspective)
- Indie Music Fan Awards Viewing Guide (1): What Is Indie Music?, Blow Media, 2016 (Taiwan indie music definition debate)
- No Party for Cao Dong (Wikipedia), band history and Golden Melody Award records
- Sunset Rollercoaster (Wikipedia), international tour records, Coachella 2023, NME rankings
- Crystal Records Sound Archive Public Domain Declaration, Founct Media, 2021 (primary declaration)
- Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development, Ministry of Culture, Golden Indie Music Awards, pop music industry policy
- StreetVoice, Taiwan indie music digital platform