A. Obsessed with Chinese Music Shows - May 2026 Indie Web Carnival

2026-05-17

Preamble

For the Indie Carnival in May 2026, Juhis invites us to write a love letter about something we like. Easy excuse, I mainly write about things I like on this blog anyways, like the Glasswing Butterfly, the Swan Lake Ballet three times about different adaptations, and just a list of The Raven Boys Quotes that I liked (there is just about one on every page).

Who am I to refuse an excuse to talk about my favourite genre of show: earnest contestants that try their best to get a laugh or smile from the audience with unscripted planning. Obviously this one will be about Chinese Music Shows, but I think lots of places have their equivalent that I also thoroughly enjoy British Panel, Korean Variety, and USA’s Game Changers. In an age of LLM/AI, I think these types of shows will get more popular because people want to see human connection and authenticity to actions rather than distrusting what they see on screen.

The Music Shows

Chinese Music Shows were extremely accessible and released with English Subtitles on YouTube when they aired (someone of them may be off or taken down because of copyright reasons now). About me, watching shows is where I get the majority of my new music and add them into my playlists and the exclusive reason why I listen to music on YouTube music. Where else would I be able to get a unique live performance from a niche show?

In any case, the main reason why I watched these shows is because of Zhou Shen who has an angelic voice with a funny personality and/or Ayanga who is a musical actor who conveys emotions wonderfully. I always stay to watch the rest of the show because the rest of the singers are just delightful! This is very similar to how British Panel Shows have their comedians and just rotate them through all the shows when you are big enough.

If I were to give a short list of ones I recommend:

This is going to be an aside: Not a lot of people know about Cpop as compared to Kpop and Jpop that the duo of videos “Cpop is dead” and “Cpop is not dead, it’s misunderstood” video summed up well. Cpop is first, hard to define if it’s not a ballad song, second, you have to find the artist that resonates with you, the third is that the cultural driver is the music theme song for a movie or show (OST). There are tones of new songs coming out by young singers that are plenty popular in the mainland like Zhou Shen 14 entries in of Tencent’s top 200 song list at the time I wrote this post. Why? He is a ballad OST singer and shows that the cultural driver works in China still. And essentially, it works for me because music shows are categorically media that I can watch to find more music.

Singing with Legends

In any case, I’m going to further constrain this topic to talk about Our Song/Singing with Legends. I liked this show so much, I was the one that made the English Wiki page for it. It used to have full English Subs but it's only partially subbed now. It can be found on YouTube and episodes 8-12 have been subtitled here. There are six seasons in total, my favourites are season 1 and season 3.

This show was conceived as Fei Yu-Ching's retirement show and tied it to passing the torch to the next generation inspired by the collaboration with Jay Chou on Far Away. At a very similar time, Fei Yu-Ching suddenly regained popularity when his song Yi Jian Mei/A Branch of Plum Blossom became a Tiktok meme

How it works is that the show has an A set and a B set with 4-experienced singers and 4-newcomer singers in each set. The younger singers audition for the older singers to proceed into duets with. They don't know who the other singer is or what they sound like so they need to figure out how to harmonize on the fly.

If they end up picking each other, they perform new duets! Lots of them are reimagining of the older singer's classics but there are plenty of new mashups. The duo's end up partnering in groups of four so we end up getting trios and quartet performances too. I like the show because they seem to genuinely seem to have a great time performing together, where there is silly banter between performances, and behind the scenes experiences of how they developed the stage concept together.

Some of my favourite performances from Season 1

The reason why I like these shows is how they end up reimagining and refreshing old songs with new covers and everyone appreciates them, I don't think we get enough similar appreciation in Western Music. Covers seem far and few between with artists after the get established and songs older than 10 years seem to get quickly forgotten by mainstream audiences. If you have one good song in China fifty years ago, chances are people are still regularly playing them today (as noted in the Cpop is dead videos).

North American Adaptation

If there is an TV producer out there who wants to make a North American adaptation, they absolutely need to hire based on vibes and friendliness instead of cut-throat competition. The first season of Singing with Legends worked so well because the singers were so keen on cooperation and remixing. I'm going to give examples of pop stars because I think that's the easiest way to picture the situation.

For the older group, I can imagine the Fei Yu-Ching stand in could be industry heavy hitters like Dolly Parton, Elton John, Paul Anka, Stevie Nicks. And I think it works since social media has been redirecting attention to some older musicians.

I think if they don't want the Chinese pretense, bring the Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus pretense and how beneficial a mentor is since they collaborated on songs like Jolene. I think they should not be on the show at the same time to give more chances to different singers to collaborate together.

They could get a mix of mid-experienced stars who are in their ~20 years of experience to fill out the rest of the mentor pool like Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Adele, Anderson Pak, T-Pain, Hayley Williams, Kelly Clarkson and so on. The newcomers pool should be under ~10 years of professional experience. Some examples off the top of my head would be Olivia Rodrigo, Alyssa Cara, Lil Nas X, Conan Gray, Chappell Roan, Noah Kahan, people who got popular recently!

Thanks for reading and the excuse to ramble! I hope you go revisit an older artist that you liked but haven't listened to in a while, or maybe go try listening to Cpop or a new show :)