Thirty-second overview: In 1986, Ren Jiang-da, of Korean-Japanese descent, borrowed NT$300,000 to take over a failing record store and began importing "music nobody wanted to hear" into Taiwan. Forty years later, the ecosystem that grew out of that shop, from live houses and independent labels to StreetVoice and the Golden Indie Music Awards, sent a band selling records in coffee shops to the Golden Melody Awards' Album of the Year, and sent an all-English Taipei band to Coachella. Four decades of Taiwanese independent music has been a relay race with no finish line: every runner is gasping for air, every runner feels close to collapse, but the baton has never fallen.
A Dream Bought for NT$300,000
Taipei in 1986, one year before the lifting of martial law. Ren Jiang-da, a young man of Korean-Japanese descent who had grown up across from the Keelung fish market, borrowed NT$300,000 from friends and took over a small record store on the verge of closing: Crystal Records. He had no business plan and no market analysis, only a group of friends complaining that they "couldn't buy foreign records," and an impulse he would later summarize in three words: "If you want to do it, go do it, and you will make it happen." (from a 2017 Mirror Media interview)
At the time, the decision did not look like much. Taiwan's record market was monopolized by major labels such as Rock Records and UFO Records. The pop music industry had no concept of "independence." Young people moved between Western charts and Mandarin love songs.
But Ren Jiang-da did several things others would not do.
In 1987, he founded the monthly magazine Rocker, bringing the concept of underground music to Taiwan. That same year, he began organizing the Taipei New Music Festival, which ran for four editions and invited a cross-genre lineup including Kay Huang, Tat Ming Pair, and Chao Chuan. In 1991, he released the series The Sounds from the Bottom of Taiwan and Taiwan Sound Archive, using field recordings to collect Indigenous music, nakashi, beiguan, Taiwanese opera, and night-market vendors' calls. In an era when everyone was chasing Western rock, he instead bent down to listen to the frequencies of the land beneath his feet.
✦ "I have a desire to make things that are minority and unseen become visible." Ren Jiang-da (from a 2017 Mirror Media interview)
Crystal Records became an "alternative cradle" and a "springboard for singers." An incomplete list says enough: Wu Bai, Chen Ming-chang, Blacklist Studio, Summer Lei, Chu Yueh-hsin (Jutoupi), King of Kinmen and Li Ping-hui, LTK Commune, Chthonic, Sugar Plum Ferry, and 1976. These names would later be written into different chapters of Taiwanese popular music history, but almost every album released by Crystal lost money. Wu Wu-chang, former director of the Eslite Dunnan Music Store, 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, and producer-planner Ho Tung-hung carried several million New Taiwan dollars in debt. Employees went unpaid for long periods, yet almost no one left. The singer A-De, a former Crystal employee, recalled: "All the employees had an emotional bond with the company and wanted to keep it going. It was very hard, but there were few complaints."
In 1995, music director Ho Ying-yi launched the "Crystal Ten Thousand Supporters Association," calling on each person to spend NT$4,000 on music products of equivalent value. It drew an enthusiastic response from political, cultural, and arts circles, and was probably the earliest form of crowdfunding in the history of Taiwanese independent music. But the debt hole was too deep. Ren Jiang-da's second daughter was also diagnosed with the rare cancer neuroblastoma, and treatment in the United States would cost at least US$300,000. "We did everything we could, and borrowed money we should not have borrowed." He turned to loan sharks; interest compounded; eventually he could no longer hold on. Medical expenses crushed a record company and broke a father. In 1994, his daughter died in Taiwan.
Yet in 1998, in an unprecedented move, the Golden Melody Awards gave the Special Contribution Award to Ren Jiang-da, then only forty-two, making him the youngest recipient in history. Juror Li Jian-fu said: "All mainstream music is transformed from the non-mainstream. He was willing to offer timely help to non-mainstream creators, and was almost destined to lose money on every record. Of course he deserves encouragement." (from a 2017 Mirror Media interview)
📝 Curator's Note
The contradiction of Crystal Records is the prototype contradiction of Taiwanese independent music: the purest idealists are often also the worst businesspeople. Ren Jiang-da opened a door for Taiwan, but was himself trapped in it. Crystal closed in 2006 and entered history. But the story did not end there. In 2021, Ho Ying-yi announced that all of Crystal's recordings would be made public, in a declaration titled "Now We Return Ourselves to Everyone." A record company that could not pay salaries ultimately gave all of its music to the world for free.
The Explosion of Sound After Martial Law
On July 15, 1987, Taiwan lifted martial law after thirty-eight years. For music, this meant one concrete thing: you could finally sing loudly what you wanted to sing.
Before martial law was lifted, Taiwan's musical environment was closed. Records had to be submitted for review, lyrics could not touch politics, and even "decadent music" could be banned. The lifting of martial law opened the valve, and an entire generation's suppressed creative energy was suddenly released. In 1989, Blacklist Studio released Songs of Madness. This all-Taiwanese-language album shocked the entire industry with hip-hop rhythms and political satire, proving that popular music could be both good to hear and dangerous. That same year, students Tsai Hai-en, Chang Ming-chang, and Ying Wei-min (Xiao Ying) at The Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University formed a band that would later be called LTK Commune. They mixed punk, noise, nakashi, and Taiwanese, recording the lives of working-class people in the roughest way possible. The title of their 1995 album Is Your Anus Okay? alone made mainstream media keep its distance, but underground fans treated it as a classic.
These sounds shared one feature: they borrowed the form of Western rock and filled it with Taiwan's own content. LTK Commune cursed politicians in Taiwanese; Chthonic sang about the February 28 Incident through black metal; Lin Sheng-xiang sang about Meinong's anti-reservoir movement in Hakka. Language itself became a declaration. After Mandarin had monopolized pop music for forty years, the act of singing in Taiwanese, Hakka, or Indigenous languages was itself political.
The lifting of martial law also gave rise to Taiwan's earliest outdoor music festivals. In 1995, two foreigners, Jami Marsh and Wade Davis, organized Spring Scream in Kenting, and the first outdoor music festival in Taiwanese rock history was born on the beach. That same year, Formoz Festival began in Taipei, establishing a multi-stage operating model and inviting international acts such as Suede and Moby to Taiwan. This festival culture gave independent bands another space to grow beyond live houses, but that is the story of another article.
Taipei's underground scene in the 1990s was concentrated around several geographic nodes: record stores in Ximending were information exchanges, the area around Shida Road was the settlement's core, and cafés near Gongguan were places where bands could rest. It was the natural gathering of poor students and poor musicians. No one had designed a "cultural park": rents were cheap, universities were nearby, and the alleys could hide a basement. A veteran fan, recalling the Crystal era, put it well: "In the age before the internet was developed, Crystal was like a secret underground society, opening a door to another world for us." (from a 2017 Mirror Media interview)
📝 Curator's Note
Taiwanese independent music after martial law had a distinctive duality: it was both "learning outward" and "digging inward." Bands learned the forms of Western rock, including punk, metal, and post-rock, but filled them with Taiwan's own stories: the White Terror, ethnic identity, class oppression, and urban alienation. This hybrid of "foreign form plus local content" gave Taiwanese independent music its own DNA from the very beginning.
A Revolutionary Base Registered as a "Beverage Shop"
If Crystal Records was independent music's maternity ward, the live house was where it learned to walk. The absurd situation of Taiwan's live houses can be summed up in one detail: when Underworld opened in a basement on Taipei's Shida Road in 1996, the business items it registered with the Taipei City Office of Commerce were "hot and cold food and beverages, juice, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol."
Taiwanese law had no live house category at all. Owners simply could not register as music venues.
Underworld was co-founded by Ho Tung-hung and Chen Shu-chen. Ho Tung-hung, yes, the same Ho Tung-hung who had carried several million in debt at Crystal Records, left the record industry and chose another way to continue doing what he believed in. This basement, which could squeeze in only eighty to one hundred people, became the heart of Taiwanese independent music for the next seventeen years. 1976, Quarterback, Sticky Rice, Won Fu, Cosmos People, and 831 played their first, tenth, and hundredth shows here.
At the same time, Witch House, a fifty-person space hung with women's underwear, incubated Cheer Chen and Deserts Chang. Opened in 1996 next to Taipei's Shida Night Market, this venue placed no limits on musical genre, offering a stage for everything from folk to heavy metal. With its feminist spirit and open-door attitude, it defined an entire generation's imagination of the "wenqing," the cultured, artsy youth. Riverside Music Café, founded in 1995, became a cradle for folk singer-songwriters, providing a quieter and more literary performance environment. The Wall, which opened in 2003, used its four-hundred-person scale and professional equipment to establish a standard model for international independent bands touring Taiwan. Southern Taiwan had its own bases as well. Kafka by the Sea in Kaohsiung combined the port city's maritime culture and industrial background, becoming an important base for southern Taiwan's independent scene.
These venues each had their own character: Witch House was a living room, Riverside was a study, The Wall was a training ground, and Underworld was a basement. Together, however, they supported a complete path for "growing up": newcomers began in fifty-person rooms, then worked their way up to one hundred people, four hundred people, and then Legacy's thousand-person scale. Without this path, even the best band could only remain where it was.
In 2011, however, a fire at ALA Pub in Taichung killed nine people. City and county governments immediately launched strict inspections of all performance spaces. The problem was that regulations grouped live houses with dance halls and nightclubs: the same fire safety standards, the same land-use zoning restrictions, but without any alternative path to legal operation. Underworld, Witch House, and The Wall received fines one after another. Underworld briefly went dark in 2012 and, through negotiations with legislators, attempted to amend the Act for the Development of Cultural and Creative Industries so that live houses could be subject to a more reasonable legal classification. It reopened in August, then received two more NT$60,000 fines in October: one for "violating public safety" and one for "violating building-use categories."
Masa, the bassist of Mayday, said something at a support press conference that condensed the entire industry's helplessness: "As long as there is one path that allows survival, one path that can be taken, do not leave the people who want to operate at a loss." Mayday guitarist Monster, 1976, Kou Chou Ching, Xiao Ying of LTK Commune, and many other musicians also came out in support. This was perhaps the most united moment between the "underground" and the "mainstream" in the history of Taiwanese independent music.
On June 15, 2013, Underworld closed for the second and final time. The farewell on its official blog was calm and bitter: "The government has done nothing about live house regulations, and the three Shida neighborhoods' self-help association continues to pressure us from all sides, treating us as a source of social disorder. Let us cherish all the memories we created together. Thank you, everyone!"
After Underworld closed, the well-known electronic musician fish.the launched the project Let's Make an Underworld Compilation! on Facebook. In less than a month and a half, forty songs were assembled and released as a free online compilation paying tribute to the basement. A venue had disappeared, but the people and memories it nurtured became music and continued to circulate.
The closing of one basement exposed an entire country's institutional neglect of music and cultural spaces, and that problem has still not been fully resolved today.
🔢 Key Data
Taiwan's live houses did not receive an initial legal status until the Act for the Development of Cultural and Creative Industries was amended in 2015. Before that, not a single live house in Taiwan could obtain completely legal business registration. During the seventeen years between Underworld's opening and closing, Taiwanese independent music moved from the underground to the Golden Melody Awards stage, but the spaces that carried all of it remained, in legal terms, illegal structures.
From "Underground" to "Independent": A Revolution in One Word
Around 2000, Taiwan's music scene underwent a quiet linguistic revolution. The term "underground band" began to be replaced by "independent music."
The two terms carry very different weight. "Underground" implies anti-mainstream, anti-commercial, hidden in unseen places. "Independent" emphasizes autonomy: you can be visible and you can make money, as long as creative control remains in your own hands.
The key figure pushing this change was Chthonic vocalist Freddy Lim. He argued that bands should not remain trapped forever in basements. They should actively move above ground, record for themselves, organize events for themselves, and build their own audiences. Looking back on this history, Blow StreetVoice wrote that Freddy was "one of the representative figures who, in Taiwan's early years, advocated that bands should leave the 'underground' and become independent bands." Chthonic itself was the best demonstration: a band using Taiwanese history and mythology as its themes, fusing erhu and suona with black metal, signing to the international label Spinefarm Records, and appearing at Europe's Download Festival, proving that "independent" and "international" were not antonyms. Lim later even won election as a legislator, becoming the first person in Taiwanese music history to walk from a mosh pit into parliament.
In his research on Crystal Records, scholar Ho Tung-hung noted that Taiwan's concept of "independence" differs fundamentally from that of Britain and the United States. In Britain and the United States, indie is a declaration of war by small labels against large corporations. In Taiwan, labels of different sizes had already coexisted. Rock Records was both Asia's largest "independent" label and a partner of multinational companies. In Taiwan, "independence" is more an aesthetic attitude and DIY practice than a confrontation within industrial structure.
This explains a phenomenon that often puzzles outsiders. Mayday formed in 1997 at The Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University, built an audience in live houses in its early years, and released its debut album Mayday's First Album in 1999. Then they signed with a major label, mounted ever-larger tours, filled New York's Madison Square Garden, with tickets selling out in forty-eight hours, and were called "the Chinese Beatles" by CNN. Yet many Taiwanese people still describe them as "having come out of the independent band scene."
In Taiwan's context, "independent" refers to how you began, not how big you are now. The ambiguity of this definition is both Taiwanese independent music's weakness, because it lacks clear industry boundaries, and its secret weapon: it makes the boundaries of "independence" disappear, turning it into a field that can contain all kinds of sounds. From LTK Commune's noise punk to Cheer Chen's gentle freshness, from Lim Giong's electronic experiments to EggPlantEgg's Taiwanese-language rock, all can find a place in this field. Mayday's commercial success did not "betray" the independent spirit. Instead, it proved something for later bands: you can walk from a basement to a stadium, and you do not need to apologize for it.
📝 Curator's Note
Perhaps Taiwan's definition of "independence" is ambiguous precisely because the island is so small. So small that everyone knows everyone, so small that the distance between "mainstream" and "underground" is only one street corner. In New York, you can live your whole life inside Brooklyn's independent scene without touching the mainstream; in Taipei, after watching a post-rock show at The Wall, you can walk five minutes and arrive at a department store in Xinyi District. The disappearance of distance makes confrontation lose meaning, and cooperation instead becomes a survival strategy.
StreetVoice, an Archipelago of Labels, and the Golden Indie Music Awards
In 2006, StreetVoice launched. This platform, which allowed musicians to upload their work for free, did something Crystal Records could not do: it lowered the threshold for distribution to zero.
In Crystal's era, for a band to be heard, it had to be spotted by a record company, enter a studio, press CDs, and get them onto record-store shelves. After StreetVoice, all you needed was a microphone and a computer.
The global music industry was undergoing the same digital revolution, and Taiwan's situation was only one corner of it. Around 2000, downloading software such as Napster and Kazaa sent physical CD sales plummeting. Record companies collapsed or merged. But for independent music, digitalization was liberation: the production threshold fell from million-dollar studios to a laptop, and the distribution threshold fell from record-store shelves to a link online.
What made StreetVoice distinctive was that it played both platform and curator: it regularly organized events, discovered newcomers, connected labels and musicians, and operated in-depth music media such as Blow StreetVoice. 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 independent music. Taiwanese independent music evolved from physical settlements, such as live house neighborhoods, into digital settlements, and StreetVoice was the central station.
During the same period, independent labels began cultivating niche audiences. Each label was like a small island, managing a different sound ecology.
A Good Day Records, founded in 1998, defined the sound of Taiwan's "wenqing aesthetics." Deserts Chang, Cheer Chen, and Waa Wei all began here, and its insistence on refined production and a fresh style influenced an entire generation's imagination of "independent music." White Wabbit Records went deep into experimental music and post-rock, becoming an important promoter of noise and avant-garde sound in Taiwan. Trees Music, founded by Chang 43, used Taiwanese-language and mother-tongue rock to record the island's soundscape. Indigenous singers such as Chen Chien-nien and Samingad found platforms for their voices at Trees. Kao!Inc. bet on Soft Lipa and Leo Wang when hip-hop had not yet become a prominent discipline; Leo Wang later won Best Mandarin Male Singer at the 2019 Golden Melody Awards, a milestone for hip-hop entering the mainstream hall.
Through Taiwan's music festival culture and digital platforms, these labels formed an archipelago. Megaport Festival, Formoz Festival, and the Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival became the United Nations of these small islands, allowing different sounds to collide on the same patch of grass. An article by Blow StreetVoice listed Taiwan's important early independent labels: "Crystal Records, Trees Music, and still-active labels such as Team Ear, White Wabbit, A Good Day, Kao!Inc., and re:public, have also worked tirelessly and quietly behind the scenes to support Taiwan's independent music scene."
In 2010, the Ministry of Culture established the Golden Indie Music Awards, Taiwan's first national-level award designed specifically for non-mainstream music. The Golden Melody Awards are everyone's arena; the Golden Indie Music Awards are independent music's home field. Their establishment marked the state's formal recognition that sounds outside the mainstream also deserve to be seen, rewarded, and recorded.
From Crystal Records as a one-person company to StreetVoice as a digital platform, from Underworld's eighty-person basement to the Golden Indie Music Awards ceremony, Taiwanese independent music spent twenty-five years moving from a condition in which the law did not recognize its existence to one in which the state gave it awards. This path was not a straight line. Along the way were failed labels, closed venues, and musicians who changed careers. But the ecosystem survived, and grew denser.
A Spectrum of Sound: From Noise Punk to Little Fresh
The most underestimated feature of Taiwanese independent music is the astonishing stylistic diversity it has grown on a small island.
At the metal end, Chthonic and Flesh Juicer represent two completely different heavy routes. Chthonic turns Taiwanese history and mythology into symphonic black metal; Flesh Juicer fuses temple culture, Eight Generals face paint, and industrial metal, making its live performances feel like cult rituals. Chairman Band roars about social issues through Taiwanese-language rock, carrying a grassroots anger and humor.
At the post-rock end, Sugar Plum Ferry is an unsurpassable pioneer. Active since the Crystal Records era, the band uses purely instrumental music to construct vast emotional narratives, influencing an entire generation of Taiwanese post-rock bands. Aphasia's sound is more restrained and heavier, like mountains in fog. Cicada brings the delicacy of classical chamber music into the post-rock framework.
The folk line is even longer. Its roots lie in the campus folk movement of the 1970s, but folk in the independent era and campus folk are no longer the same thing. Kimbo Hu is the upstream source of that river, a pioneer of the modern folk movement and a spiritual totem of Indigenous music. Lin Sheng-xiang grafts Hakka bayin and rock together, using music to speak for Meinong's countryside. Deserts Chang, later Chiao An-pu, used a guitar and a husky voice to become synonymous with the "wenqing generation" of the 2000s. Crowd Lu's fresh style brought folk into a younger audience.
The label "Little Fresh," attached to artists such as Cheer Chen, Sodagreen, and Deserts Chang, was later exported to mainland China and became Chinese listeners' strongest impression of Taiwanese independent music. An article in Taiwan Insight notes that "Little Fresh" has evolved from a musical style into an aesthetic and lifestyle label, its influence extending beyond music itself. This is an interesting paradox: the "gentlest" side of Taiwanese independent music turned out to have the strongest international circulation.
The thread of electronic music is often overlooked in narratives of independent music, but its influence is everywhere. Lim Giong transformed himself from a pop singer in the 1990s into an electronic music pioneer. That shift itself is a condensed history of Taiwanese music. He went from a Taiwanese-language pop star known for "Marching Forward" to an electronic musician DJing in underground clubs in Berlin. He later scored films for Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke, redefining what "the sound of Taiwan" could be through electronic sound. DJ Mykal, Sonia Calico, and others built their own electronic music scene in Taipei. In recent years, Organik Festival, held on a secluded island, has proved that Taiwan's electronic music community can create an international-level experience.
🔢 Key Data
Since 2010, the Golden Indie Music Awards have been running for more than fifteen years, covering rock, electronic music, hip-hop, folk, jazz, and other categories. From LTK Commune winning Best Album, Best Band, and the Jury Award at the seventh edition in 2016 to new-generation multilingual and cross-genre creators such as Collage and ?te receiving awards in recent years, the Golden Indie Music Awards' winners list is itself an annual snapshot of Taiwanese independent music's diversity.
Cao Dong's Coffee Shops and Sunset Rollercoaster's Coachella
In 2016, a band called No Party for Cao Dong released its debut album The Servile. They did not use traditional distribution channels, did not place the album in record stores, and did not sign with a major label. They only sold copies on consignment in coffee shops and independent bookstores. The first pressing of two thousand copies could not meet demand. Every performance sold out instantly. In 2017, they won three Golden Melody Awards: Best Band, Best New Artist, and Song of the Year. The last award meant that a song by an independent band was considered the best song in all of Taiwan that year. In 2024, their second album The Clod again won Album of the Year and Best Mandarin Album.
The way Cao Dong succeeded is itself a parable. They had no management company, no marketing budget, and in the beginning even shot their music videos themselves. They proved that in the streaming era, a band could completely bypass the traditional industry chain and conquer an entire island in the most primitive way: good music plus word of mouth. An analysis in Taiwan Insight noted that Cao Dong's success "implies not only the alternative means of marketing music but also the crossover between two ideological categories." They won both the Golden Indie Music Awards and the Golden Melody Awards, breaking the long-standing imagined boundary between the two awards: "independent vs. mainstream."
Their lyrics are dark and sharp, precisely striking the structural anxiety of an entire generation of urban youth: low wages, high housing prices, and the generational predicament of seeing no future. The line in "Simon Says," "He understands, he understands, everything can never return," became a generational code. It finally sang, in four minutes, the frustration everyone had been afraid to say aloud. Their 2023 second album The Clod continued the same density of spirit and again swept the Golden Melody Awards, proving that Cao Dong's sound is a continuing need: the young people on this island need someone to sing their pain.
While Cao Dong was tearing open the island from within, Sunset Rollercoaster was moving outward.
This band, formed in Taipei in 2009, made a counterintuitive choice: singing entirely in English. Vocalist Tseng Kuo-hung, also known as Kuo Kuo, explained it with a kind of poetic calculation: English allowed them to "express indirectly," letting listeners discover meaning for themselves. The band's name came from the background of a photo they took with Photo Booth on MySpace, a roller coaster and a sunset. This absurd origin perfectly maps onto their musical temperament: not very serious, but serious to the bone.
Sunset Rollercoaster's music blends city pop, disco, funk, and psychedelic rock. Its retro synthesizer sounds carry a lazy romance that belongs only to the subtropics. After releasing their debut album Bossa Nova in 2011, they disbanded for a time. They regrouped in 2015 and released the EP JINJI KIKKO in 2016 to great acclaim. Their timeline is almost a perfect upward curve: Japan's Summer Sonic in 2011, New York's Central Park SummerStage in 2017, becoming the first Taiwanese band to record a live session at Audiotree in 2018, and the 2020 album Soft Storm, partly recorded in Los Angeles in collaboration with the legendary American musician Ned Doheny, being ranked fourth in Asia for the year by NME. In 2023, they appeared at Coachella. In 2024, AAA, their album with the Korean band Hyukoh, received seven nominations at the 36th Golden Melody Awards.
A band that set out from Taipei, sang in English, and played city pop and psychedelic rock told, in the language of globalization, a story that could only have grown in Taiwan.
On the same road, breakthroughs were happening in different directions at once. Elephant Gym, from Kaohsiung, became a representative of Asian math rock through its precise structures: irregular meters, complex counterpoint, and purely instrumental narrative. They have long been invited to European and American music festivals. Fire EX. used Taiwanese-language punk to sing the sound of the Sunflower Movement. "Island's Sunrise" became the unofficial theme song at the 2014 occupation of the Legislative Yuan, and the connection between music and social movement had never been so direct. Collage was the most unexpected combination: Amis, Taiwanese, and Japanese mixed into rock and folk, a two-person lineup with the fullness of an orchestra, winning Best New Artist at the 33rd Golden Melody Awards.
The rise of hip-hop and R&B also broke the long-standing rock-centered structure of independent music. 9m88 shone through jazz and R&B, winning Best New Artist at the 2020 Golden Indie Music Awards. ?te left medical school for music and won Best New Artist at the 2021 Golden Melody Awards. Long before hip-hop became mainstream, Soft Lipa opened up a new pattern with jazz hip-hop, and the independent release model he built at Kao!Inc. proved that rap music could also take an independent route. Amazing Show, calling itself "cyber taike" with self-made technological instruments, mixed electronic music, temple fairs, and the Eight Generals into rock, creating a strange species that could only have grown in Taiwan.
The internationalization of Taiwanese independent music is not one sound being heard by the world, but many sounds being heard at once. Behind each sound stands someone who chose the hardest road.
📝 Curator's Note
The question Taiwanese independent music is most often asked internationally is: "Do you sing in Chinese or English?" The answer is: "Both, and also in Taiwanese, Hakka, Amis, and Japanese." This linguistic diversity is the natural expression of the island's own multicultural genes; no one deliberately designed it. Collage's Amis rock, Lin Sheng-xiang's Hakka folk, Fire EX.'s Taiwanese punk, Sunset Rollercoaster's English city pop. Behind every 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 Has Not Ended
In 2018, an academic article in Taiwan Insight called Taipei "the latest global capital of indie music." The title sounds glamorous, but the cracks beneath it have never disappeared.
The small market is a structural problem. How many full-time independent musicians can a population of twenty-three million sustain? If a four-person band earns NT$20,000 per performance and plays four shows a month, after venue fees, transportation, and equipment maintenance, the money each person takes home is probably only enough to pay rent. The vast majority of independent musicians have another job, teaching guitar, doing design, or writing code. Music is passion, not a profession.
Streaming platforms have reduced the threshold for distribution to zero, but they have also pushed album income close to zero. When a song is played one thousand times on Spotify, the creator receives roughly the price of one cup of bubble tea. The legal status of live houses is somewhat better than in Underworld's era, but mid-sized venues remain severely insufficient: between The Wall's four hundred people and Legacy's thousand, there is a missing middle step that allows bands to "grow up." The Kaohsiung Music Center, opened in 2021, and Taipei Music Center have filled the gap in large venues, but independent music needs small spaces scattered across street corners even more, and those spaces are constantly being swallowed by rising rents and urban renewal.
Talent mobility is another hidden pain. Outstanding musicians are recruited by major labels, or simply move to the larger market of mainland China. Those who remain face a contradiction: the market is too small to support you, but once you leave, you cannot find the same density of creative ecology that Taiwan has.
The most fundamental question is this: as independent music becomes more and more mainstream, how much meaning is left in the word "independent"? In a 2016 feature, Blow StreetVoice wrote that Taiwan has at least five different interpretations of "independence": "independent" as non-major-label release, "independent" as encouragement of DIY spirit, "independent" as admiration for a critical underground spirit, "independent" as the developmental context of local band circles, and "independent" as an inheritance from Western music history. These definitions sometimes contradict one another. Perhaps, as that article concluded: "Define your own independence yourself."
The digital era has also fundamentally changed how independent music survives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, live houses were forced to suspend operations, and online livestreams became an alternative. Streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and KKBOX have made Taiwanese music easier than ever for global audiences to discover, but the revenue share from each play is so small as to be discouraging. Musicians must rely on performances, merchandise, brand collaborations, and YouTube operations to sustain themselves. The studio album has changed from an income source into a calling card. This is a shared predicament of global independent music, but for Taiwan, whose market is only a fraction of Britain or the United States, the pain is especially evident.
The government's role is also changing slowly but unmistakably. The Taiwan Beats brand promoted by the Ministry of Culture attempts to bring Taiwanese music to the international stage, while subsidy programs support musicians attending international music trade events such as SXSW, MIDEM, and Music Matters. The opening of the Kaohsiung Music Center and the increase in music programs at cultural venues around Taiwan both show that the public sector has begun to treat independent music as part of cultural soft power. But whether resources are really reaching the people who need them most, the young bands still rehearsing in garages and still looking for a place to hold their first show, remains an open question.
Perhaps the answer is hidden in Ren Jiang-da's story.
In 2017, at age sixty-one, he had been away from the music industry for many years. Crystal Records was a dream too painful to revisit. "You cannot understand that kind of pressure. I do not want any trace of Crystal left in my mind." He was serving as a volunteer teacher at Fangxuewo, a community nonprofit, accompanying disadvantaged children in Guoshun Village, Datong District. Everything was gone, but he was still doing the same thing: making things that had not been seen become visible.
That day was his final class. He brought a vinyl record player into the classroom and played music from the Beatles to Lin Sheng-xiang, from Leon Redbone to Chao Yi-hao. Below him were more than twenty children and parents, listening to unfamiliar music with doubtful expressions. He said: "Today is my last class here, so let me be willful for once!" Then he added: "You may not understand it now, but one day in the future, you will remember this moment."
A record store collapsed. A basement closed. But what grew out of those places has already spread to every corner of the island: every live house still hanging on, every university student uploading a first song to StreetVoice, every young band rehearsing in a garage in Kaohsiung, Tainan, or Chiayi. Those seeds were not a business model or an industrial strategy, but a belief so simple it was almost naive: this island should have more sounds be heard.
What Ren Jiang-da told those children may be the same thing Taiwanese independent music has been saying to this island for forty years: you may not understand it now, but one day you will remember.
Further Reading:
- From Deserts Chang to Anpu — The identity transformation of a representative voice in Taiwanese independent music, from the national flag incident to the politics of identity behind a name change
- The History of Taiwanese Rock — The complete path of rock in Taiwan from banned songs to the mainstream
- Taiwan's Music Festival Culture — How the Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival became an incubator for independent music
- LTK Commune — Thirty years of Taiwanese-language punk underground; after disbanding, the band received its first Golden Melody nomination and won Best Taiwanese Album
- Sodagreen — From the 2001 NCCU Golden Voice Award to the 2023 Chitang Movie Night, the full twenty-year arc of a Taiwanese indie band, including the trademark lawsuit and the resistance under the “Yu Ding Xi (魚丁糸)” alter ego
References
- 【Mirror Image of Humanity】Beautiful Loser: Ren Jiang-da of Crystal Records, Mirror Media, 2017 (first-hand interview)
- Crystal Records (Wikipedia), history of Crystal Records, Taipei New Music Festival, Golden Melody Special Contribution Award
- Underworld (Wikipedia), live house regulatory controversy and closure
- Indie is the new mainstream? The conception of independent music in Taiwan, Taiwan Insight, Chen-yu Lin, 2018 (English academic perspective)
- Independent Music Fans' Awards Viewing Guide (I): What Is Independent Music?, Blow StreetVoice, 2016 (debate over the definition of Taiwanese independent music)
- No Party for Cao Dong (Wikipedia), band history and Golden Melody Awards record
- Sunset Rollercoaster (Wikipedia), Sunset Rollercoaster's international touring record, Coachella 2023, NME ranking (English)
- Statement on Making Crystal Records' Recordings Public, Fount Media, 2021 (first-hand statement)
- Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development, Ministry of Culture, Golden Indie Music Awards and popular music industry policy
- StreetVoice, Taiwan's digital platform for independent music