1. The growing range of imported kinds of music
Although Cantopop is constantly dominate the Hong Kong music scene in early numerous years of the
21 st century, imported music has outsold Cantopop about the Hong Kong market ever since the mid-
1990s. Cantopop album sales and concert audience figures are significantly lower than these people
were during the early 1990s. Additionally there is a strong perception that the standard of Cantopop has
fallen as recording companies focus more about the picture with their stars, rather than singing or
songwriting. Somewhat ironically, English-language singers of your sixties and seventies, such as Teresa
Carpio, Christine Samson and Mary Leung, are engaged as singing coaches for up-and-coming Cantopop
starlets. The decline of Cantopop has coincided using a broadening of musical options and tastes among
Hong Kong popular music fans. The growing variety of imported styles of music offered in Hong Kong -
from Canada And America and Europe, Taiwan, mainland China and Singapore, Japan and Korea, has
contributed much to this particular broadening of taste and it has also generated greater diversity of
styles within Cantopop.
Ever since the 1980s, Hong Kong popular music is very much identified with Cantopop - for lots of
people Cantopop and Hong Kong pop are pretty much the same. This brief history has aimed to present
a different picture, emphasising that Hong Kong popular music has always - except perhaps for a brief
period inside the 1980s - been a multilingual affair. And whenever we examine Hong Kong pop from
your multilingual perspective, we could see that, despite concern over falling sales for Cantopop, the
state of health of the Hong Kong music scene is real ly quite good. At the moment, Hong Kong popular
music is a lot more multilingual than in the past for several reasons: the increasing internationalization
of markets for popular music, greater sophistication among local listeners and producers of music, and
the fact that the Mandarin and English music of your old days will be given a whole new lease of life as
record companies are increasingly looking beyond youth markets. The diversity of languages in Hong
Kong popular music this has produced goes along with a diversity of styles, images, and meanings for
popular music and it is in this particular diversity that the future health of the Hong Kong pop scene lies.