Pop Music and the Golden Melody Awards

30-second overview: In 1982, singer Tsai Chin wrote an 8-page letter to the Director-General of the Government Information Office, Sung Chu-yu, outlining a pop music awards ceremony she had designed for Taiwan — all the award categories listed out. Eight years later, the Golden Melody Awards were born. Thirty-four years later, a Paiwan-language album beat everyone at the Golden Melody stage to win Album of the Year. This history is not just about an awards ceremony — it is about how the island of Taiwan decided: what kinds of voices deserve to be heard.

In 1982, Tsai Chin picked up a pen and wrote a letter.

The recipient was the Director-General of the Government Information Office, Sung Chu-yu. The letter ran to 8 pages and contained a complete Taiwanese pop music awards ceremony design she had drawn up, with all the award categories listed. Her logic was simple: "Europe and America have the Grammys, Japan has the Record Grand Prix, Taiwan is a pillar of Mandarin-language music — there is no reason we don't have a proper awards ceremony."

Two days later, Sung Chu-yu called her and said his whole family was a fan of her music, then asked if she would be willing to help make it happen.

Eight more years passed before the Golden Melody Awards were actually born.

The First Year: Nobody Knew What This Was

In 1990, the Golden Melody Awards held their inaugural ceremony — 11 categories, no red carpet, no broadcast. Twelve senior music figures sat in a meeting room listening to all the nominated works, then voted. Winners went to the podium, said a few words of thanks, and returned to their seats. The whole ceremony wrapped up in a few hours.

The big winner that year was Chen Shu-hua and Zhao Chuan, both singers at Rock Records. Looking through the Golden Melody winners lists of the 1990s, one mostly sees the names of a few record companies — Rock, Magic Stone, and UFO — rotating. At that time, the landscape of Taiwan's pop music was defined by those companies: Chang Yu-sheng, Chang Hsin-che, Hsin Hsiao-chi, and Chi Chin were all there. That era produced the golden age of all Mandarin pop music.

In that era, Taiwan was the production center of the Mandarin-language music world. At its peak, Taiwan's music sales even exceeded mainland China's, making it the second-largest music market in Asia (after Japan only). According to academic statistics, between 2002 and 2010, Taiwan's pop music accounted for approximately 80% of Mandarin music sales in the mainland Chinese market.

Nobody knew what the industry would look like 30 years later.

"Marching Forward" — and the Awards It Actually Won

In 1990, Lim Giong (林強) released Marching Forward (向前走).

The album had several unusual features: Lim Giong is from Changhua and sang in Taiwanese (Hokkien), writing about young people leaving central Taiwan to make their way in Taipei. That year, a great deal was happening in Taiwan — the Wild Lily student movement had just ended, martial law had been lifted only three years before, and the stock market had just crashed from a historic high. Marching Forward sold 400,000 copies — a miracle.

Cultural critic Zhan Hong-zhi said Marching Forward was "a representative work that broke the linguistic oppression and created a new format for distributing the pop music market."

But did this album win a Golden Melody Award?

It did. At the 3rd Golden Melody Awards in 1991, Marching Forward took Song of the Year and Best Album Producer. This is often forgotten: in its early years, the Golden Melody Awards did not overlook Taiwanese-language music — it was in fact one of the few mechanisms on the mainstream stage that took the new Taiwanese song movement seriously.

Lim Giong's later story is even more interesting. Spring Youth (春風少年兄, 1992) sold 500,000 copies, matchless at the time. Then he made an experimental electronic metal fusion album that was completely rejected by the mainstream market. He pivoted to film scoring, working with Hou Hsiao-hsien over many years and winning multiple international film music awards. The road away from pop music took him much further.

📝 Curator's note
Many people assume Taiwanese-language music was overlooked by the Golden Melody Awards in its early years — but the Song of the Year in 1991 was "Marching Forward." The real structural problem with the Golden Melody Awards was not "can't see Taiwanese-language music," but "can't see music outside the major record companies." That problem only began to change with the rise of independent music.

11 Coffee Shops

In February 2016, a band called No Party for Cao Dong (草東沒有派對) released their first physical album.

The first 2,000 copies were handmade, consigned only to 11 independent coffee shops and record stores in Taiwan. They sold out in three days.

That album was called The Ugly Child (醜奴兒), with no major label and no radio support. Lead vocalist Lin Keng-yu and guitarist Zhan Wei-zhu were high school classmates who ran into each other by chance on Caodong Street on Yangmingshan and formed the band there. The name came from that street; but when the membership changed and "the party at Caodong" dispersed, they called themselves "No Party."

At the 28th Golden Melody Awards in 2017, No Party for Cao Dong won Best New Artist, Best Band, and Song of the Year for The Strong Wind Blows (大風吹) — beating Mayday. Awards committee chair Huang Yun-ling said from the stage: "We had no choice but to hear the new generation. They are the explosion of a suffocated generation."

That was one of the rare moments in Golden Melody Awards history — a band that started from independent coffee shops, bypassing the entire traditional record industry's gatekeeping, walked onto the highest awards stage.

Then a great deal happened, and most of it was bad.

On October 30, 2021, No Party for Cao Dong's drummer Fan Fan (Tsai Yi-fan) was found dead in her Taipei quarantine hotel room at age 26. Fifteen hours before her death, she had posted her final Instagram entry: her twelve-year-old dog had died while she could not be there, and she wrote that she had cried for a long time.

In 2023, No Party for Cao Dong released a new album Broken Together (瓦合). At the 35th Golden Melody Awards in 2024, they swept Album of the Year, Best Mandarin Album, and Best Band — becoming the only band in history to sweep the Golden Melody Awards twice. At the ceremony, they did not appear; their manager went on stage to collect, thanked many people, and then said thank you to Fan Fan.

An Album of the Year Nobody Could Understand

In 2004, Chang Ching-wen and Tien Hsiao-hsun, as "A-Bao & Brandy," beat S.H.E at the 15th Golden Melody Awards to win Best Vocal Duo. The day after the ceremony, their record company announced dissolution due to shareholder disputes.

Chang Ching-wen (A-Bao, 阿爆) went back to study nursing, then became a host at the Indigenous Peoples Television station.

Fifteen years later, she returned under the name "A-Bao (A-Jing-Jing)" (阿爆（阿仍仍)).

The album kinakaian — Mother's Tongue, released in late 2019, was recorded almost entirely in Paiwan, mixing electronic, hip-hop, R&B, and traditional indigenous music. She co-wrote songs with her mother: her mother would recall expressions in traditional Paiwan, and A-Bao wrote them down. One song in the album is called "1–10" — it is the sound of her mother counting from one to ten in Paiwan.

At the 31st Golden Melody Awards in October 2020, the album won Best Indigenous Language Album, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year.

The Paiwan population is approximately 90,000 — less than 0.4% of Taiwan's total population. This is an album almost no Taiwanese person can understand in full — and yet it was judged by that year's panel to be the best pop music Taiwan produced. The awards chair said after the ceremony that kinakaian "generated the greatest resonance" among the 21 nominated albums and "transcended the barriers of language."

A-Bao said on stage: "If you don't understand why this album became the Album of the Year, please go listen to it. If you don't like it, please listen a second time!"

She spoke to indigenous viewers watching at home on television: "Don't waste your talents, and don't rely on your talents either."

⚠️ Contested viewpoint
A-Bao's victory was questioned by some music critics: "Was it genuine musical taste, or politically correct cultural signaling?" Supporters countered: Paiwan electronic hip-hop is one of the most avant-garde experiments in Taiwan's pop music — and the same would be true in any language. Kinakaian's Spotify streams grew substantially in the year following the award, indicating that listeners bought in — not because it was politically correct, but because it was good.

The Record Companies Died, the Music Didn't

In 1997, Taiwan's record industry reached its historic peak — more than NT$12 billion in annual output, the second-largest music market in Asia.

In 2018, that figure had fallen below NT$4 billion — a drop of more than 70%.

CDs stopped selling, and digital downloads found no buyers either. Rock Records old-timers recalled that during those years someone would say "the record industry is dead" every few months, and it started to sound more and more like the truth.

But music didn't die.

Streaming took over. According to Spotify's 2023 data, Mandopop's global monthly plays exceed 500 million, with annual growth of 45%. The fastest-growing listeners are not in Taiwan — they're in Brazil, India, Mexico, and Germany. Crowd Lu built his following through StreetVoice, bypassing the traditional record industry entirely; his MV on YouTube has exceeded 100 million views. Eggplant Egg's (茄子蛋) "The Prodigal Son" (浪子回頭) has passed 580 million YouTube views, redefining the place of Taiwanese-language music among the younger generation.

Government money went into this wave as well. In 2021, the Taipei Music Center opened, with government investment of approximately NT$6 billion, providing a 5,000-seat indoor venue and a 13,000-seat outdoor venue. The same year, the Kaohsiung Music Center opened, with approximately NT$5.4 billion invested. Ten years ago the industry was in physical records; ten years later it is in live performance and streaming ecosystems — Taiwan chose not to disappear, but to keep existing in a different form.

Four Languages, One Awards Stage

The Golden Melody Awards made a choice about linguistic diversity — one that doesn't make obvious commercial sense.

Starting with the 14th ceremony in 2003, the Golden Melody Awards disaggregated the "dialect" category into three separate award tracks: Taiwanese (Hokkien), Hakka, and indigenous languages. The significance of this decision is not just cultural policy — it is a public declaration: Taiwan has more than one voice.

From Hu De-fu's Ilha Formosa, to Chen Chien-nian's Ocean, to Lin Sheng-hsiang's contemporary music based on Hakka mountain songs, to A-Bao's Paiwan electronic hip-hop — the Golden Melody Awards winners list has gradually become a record of Taiwan's linguistic diversity. This is not a special case across a few ceremonies; it is a systematic choice sustained for 34 years.

At the 35th ceremony in 2024, indigenous singer Panai Kusui won Best Taiwanese Album and delivered a speech that silenced the entire venue. Variety magazine ran a cover story on the ceremony. That was a signal that media outside Taiwan is beginning to take the Golden Melody Awards seriously.

💡 Did you know
The Golden Melody Awards is one of the very few pop music awards globally that simultaneously holds independent competitive tracks for four languages — Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Hakka, and indigenous languages — each with a complete set of awards, none merged together. This design makes almost no commercial sense — but it makes the Golden Melody Awards the most concrete mirror of Taiwan's multilingual culture.

Fan Fan's Drumbeat

At the 35th Golden Melody Awards in 2024, No Party for Cao Dong's manager stood on stage, finished reading the list of thanks, and finally said: thank you, Fan Fan.

The venue was quiet for a few seconds.

Fan Fan's drumbeat is still inside The Ugly Child.

References

• Golden Melody Awards official website BAMID (primary)
• CNA: Tsai Chin Shares the Story Behind the Birth of the Golden Melody Awards (primary)
• Taiwan Insight: Indigenous Popular Music and Language Revitalisation in Taiwan (2023)
• NPR: A-Bao English interview (2022)
• Music Ally: Mandopop 500 million monthly streams on Spotify (2023)
• Variety: No Party for Cao Dong triple prizes at 35th GMA (2024)
• Taiwan Insight: Why Taiwan is still the creative heart of Mandopop (2018)
• VERSE: Cultural analysis of Lim Giong's "Marching Forward"

Related Topics

• Taiwan Folk Music and Songs (zh only): the roots of Taiwan's music before the Golden Melody Awards existed