The lead singer of the band did printing in order to start a record business.
I made 1 million yuan doing music services, and turned around to run music festivals and spent them all.
The owner of the music company is not good at fun music, but instead goes to open a visual label and hold an exhibition...
Shen Lihui's every choice seemed incomprehensible to others.
Some people say that Shen Lihui can succeed because of good luck. Shen Lihui, on the other hand, felt that luck was also an inevitability.
He has a keen intuition and can always lay out in advance when the epidemic has not yet arrived. "China has hip hop", "Summer of the Band", online "Strawberry Music Festival", etc., most of the artists on the stage of these popular music variety shows come from Shen Lihui's modern sky.
All seemingly accidental eruptions are the seeds that were planted many years ago.
He has repeatedly told people about his worldview: games. "The world is like a game, and modern sky is a game in the game."
Carefully exploring, all illogical things are actually like the gears of fate, which are coupled step by step and roll forward, becoming Shen Lihui and the most personalized modern sky.
Chaos Jun and Shen Lihui chatted about his rock years and the story of modern sky, let's walk into Shen Lihui's "infinite game".
Shen Lihui | Founder of Modern Sky Chaos Gakuen Class 101
Text | Ordinary Little Summer
Rock star started a printing plant
Loss of 200,000
Heavy metal rock music in the '80s was a very fashionable thing. Most of the very popular rock bands wore leather pants, pierced ears, and long hair. And there is a band, unique, Liso's short hair, handsome face, clean suit shirt, breaking into the public eye. This is the sober band that Shen Lihui sang as the main singer.
Some record labels approached Sober Band and wanted to sign them. But when lead singer Shen Lihui asked about some specific needs: "Can you shoot us an MV?" The answer is "no".
Shen Lihui thought, then why sign the contract, we have to do it ourselves.
But releasing an album is a very expensive thing, and Shen Lihui decided to start a printing factory. Print to make money and support yourself in playing music.
At that time, Shen Lihui, who had no experience and connections, had a very hard life of starting a business, getting up at 5 o'clock every day, taking the bus to buy ink and paper and then moving back to the factory, even the workers went to the door of the foreign language printing factory to wait for someone to talk to and come back.
As a result, in 1991, it lost more than 200,000 yuan. This is astronomical for a person in his early twenties, when a month's salary might be only two or three hundred dollars. He felt that he would not be able to finish his life.
When the prints are bad, Shen Lihui, who has no money to compensate, shirks from the customer that it is not his fault. Spend every day in endless quarrels with customers.
Everything messed up. Printing was losing money one after another, and the band progressed slowly. Shen Lihui fell into the trough of his life, feeling that the world was very unfair, and he had put in so much effort but could not be rewarded.
At that time, there was no concept of depression, but Shen Lihui felt that he was sick and desperately wanted to be cured. So he watched Miyazaki's cartoon "Witch House Rush", and the world in the animation was so beautiful and simple. After watching it dozens of times, he wanted to try to face the world and others in that beautiful way.
One evening, Shen Lihui was preparing to take the bus home, and at the moment when the door opened, he saw a large tree opposite. Suddenly, Shen Lihui said "Hello" to the tree. The evening breeze blew, the leaves swayed, and he felt the trees responding ,hello. At that moment, an energy enveloped him. It turns out that the way you treat the world will respond to you in the same way.
After this day, Shen Lihui's attitude changed, "I must first satisfy myself when making orders, my own standards may be higher than the customer, will the customer also be satisfied?"
He talked more responsibly about customers, signed contracts, and stared at the process, and Shen Lihui's printing plant slowly improved. In 1997, it had reached a revenue of seven or eight million a year.
After having money, Shen Lihui can finally realize his real rock and roll dream - to put out a record for the sober band.
Shen Lihui is ready to set up a company to release an album for his band. But a company can't just have one band, that makes it seem like it's just a self-funded band.
But at that time, Shen Lihui only knew two bands formed by his students in the Arts and Crafts School, New Pants and Supermarket.
In the summer of 1996, the 20-year-old Peng Lei, together with his friends Liu Bao and Shang Xiao, formed a band called the Shape Master of the Metal Workshop, which later became the new pants.
At the costume academy dance, because the singing was too bad, the college students waiting for bungee wanted to blow them off the stage, but Peng Lei insisted on completing the performance.
There was a person in a suit and leather shoes offstage, quietly watching the three young people on the stage who did not even adjust the guitar strings. He is 28-year-old Shen Lihui.
After watching the performance, Shen Lihui issued an invitation to Peng Lei: "Next, I want to come up with a "Rock 97", do you want to play together?"
Peng Lei was particularly excited to announce that we had signed a contract. People ask what company you signed for. We signed a printing company.
At the end of 1997, Shen Lihui's album was born, but it was not called "Rock 97", but "Modern Sky 1". The game of Modern Sky has officially begun.
But the iterations of popular culture and the internet are evolving at unimaginable speeds. After 2000, popular music from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea became a new trend, and no one listened to rock music. Coupled with the rampant piracy on the Internet, no one buys records anymore.
Although Modern Sky made a lot of records and magazines in the first ten years, the company has been struggling on the brink of life and death, and almost closed its doors twice.
According to Pang Kuan, the band's current keyboardist for the Band new pants, at that time, Modern Sky was in a residential building near Beijing's Garden Bridge, and Shen Lihui rented a row of small houses downstairs as an office and rehearsal room. From the first floor into the basement, there is no window, there is a toilet is particularly dirty, the smell is very large.
Pang Kuan was working as a designer at Modern Sky, and the computer he used was particularly slow, and it took two hours to render a small poster. So as long as the machine is rendering, he sits down and watches a movie, and after watching the movie, the rendering ends.
Modern Sky's rehearsal room and recording studio are both basements where all three bands rehearse. Although the rehearsal room has done a relatively good sound insulation treatment, there will still be complaints from residents. Because when the drums are played, the low-frequency sound will penetrate the floor slab to the first and second floors, and the penetration of that sound is particularly strong, so it will cause trouble.
First Music Festival:
Like a nightmare
In 2006, Modern Sky relied on some big brands to do music platform services, and its business had just improved, and there was a balance of more than one million on the account. Shen Lihui proposed to do a music festival, and everyone in the company thought he was crazy and too risky.
At that time, there were several music festivals in China, but Shen Lihui felt that none of them were the music festivals he wanted. Modern Sky's music festival must be particularly visually pleasing, the band is particularly good, the scene is particularly fried, and it must link the lifestyle.
A vice president approached Shen Lihui and advised him not to get hot-headed. Shen Lihui replied, "We make a music-related service for Nokia, and an online music magazine for Motorola... It seems that we are still related to music, but what is the difference between this and the printing company we used to do? I said I don't want to follow them, I don't want to ask you what you want, we should create ourselves and let them follow us."
But when he really started to run the music festival, Shen Lihui felt that this was like a nightmare, so let's end it quickly!
In 2007, the first Modern Sky Music Festival invited more than 100 groups of artists from all over the world. At that time, no one in Shen Lihui's team had done this, and there were only three or four music festivals in China, and there was basically no place to learn from.
In the project management of the music festival, we can't grasp the key points, the approval process, the document specification, the artist arrangement, the stage construction, and the ticket management are all new things. Needing to be done in a very short period of time is a very easy thing to break down.
And these annoying setbacks slowly disappeared into Shen Lihui's memory. He clearly remembers spending more than 100,000 yuan to make a steel rainbow arch for the three days of the festival as admission. The most beautiful thing in the modern sky is the rainbow. Rainbows are as short and beautiful as music festivals. So at that time, he felt that there must be a rainbow door at the entrance to give everyone a shocking effect.
When all four stages of the music festival were set up, Shen Lihui took a taxi from the east to the scene of Haidian Park in the west. As the sun set, the orange twilight brushed his cheeks, and his eyes seemed moist.
It's all as dramatic, dreamy as a movie. On the last night of the festival, it suddenly rained heavily, and thousands of spectators in the stadium did not want to leave, swinging with the band in the rain. This rainy night carnival became Shen Lihui's deepest memory.
After the first modern sky music festival, Shen Lihui calculated that the 1 million he had earned before was gone. However, the fact that rock music can make money does start with music festivals.
In 2009, another music festival brand, Strawberry Music Festival, was founded, which gave the capital market a lot of imagination. Shen Lihui was also curious about how to price the things he had done for ten years in the capital market, so he contacted some investment institutions. In 2011, it accepted nearly 10 million yuan of investment from Paradise Silicon Valley.
After Modern Sky got this money, it quickly paid the advance payment of some artists, locked the upstream contract, and had the experience of doing music festivals, after which the Strawberry Music Festival was quickly copied across the country, and slowly Shen Lihui began to make money.
Shen Lihui and the author talked about the reasons for accepting investment in Paradise Silicon Valley at that time, when the investment manager was a reader of Modern Sky magazine and was very familiar with Modern Sky, giving them a lot of freedom. "Some investors will also refuse to do so, because we don't need so much money, so many institutions. So they're going to go and look at the companies that're at the bottom of the list, and I think it's going to be a positive side for the industry as a whole."
Slamming door owner
Is it true?
When "Summer of the Band" was just broadcast last year, someone transferred 10,000 yuan to Shen Lihui on WeChat and entrusted him to peng Lei, lamenting that "they are not easy."
Shen Lihui asked the other party, "Do you know how much money Peng Lei earns?" Every year he is a master who earns tens of millions."
The New Pants Band repeatedly mentioned Shen Lihui's slamming of the door in "The Summer of the Band". Peng Lei complained that Shen Lihui did not pay him to ask for a large string band, and Pang Kuan also said that Shen Lihui was a big wardrobe that did not put it, and slammed the door.
Shen Lihui mentioned that Peng Lei complained about himself, "Peng Lei is right, and I don't think Peng Lei is demeaning me, on the contrary, to some extent, it is a kind of praise."
"The generous owner has long since closed his doors". Shen Lihui owes money twice, once when he lost 200,000 yuan to run a printing factory and once to run a magazine called Modern Sky 3 million. "When you lose $3 million, you have to rethink what you did wrong." Shen Lihui said, "I am still quite conservative in my work."
"What Modern Sky first did, many people did not understand, as soon as they heard that it was the company opened by the lead singer of the band, they felt unreliable, and the subtext was that the boss would not run the company. Shen Lihui said that this kind of remark was a kind of stab wound to me. Since they think that the lead singer of the band is unreliable and it is shameful that the company does not make money, they must let the company make money and be reliable, and prove it to themselves and others."
Running a company can't talk about buddy righteousness like playing music, the most important thing for a company is to survive. Shen Lihui will now keep a lot of budgets tight from the company's operating level, and will not arbitrarily increase unnecessary investment.
When Peng Lei participated in "Summer of the Band", he wanted to invite a big string band, but the budget given by the program group was not enough, and he wanted to find Shen Lihui to let the company pay this money, but Shen Lihui did not agree.
He explained in an interview that "when a band goes to a show, all the budget should be made by the program group, not by the company, if the program group does not give enough money, then how much money there is to do, how much money to give you, how many people you invite." Budgets are always limited, and you have to execute your own plans according to a limited budget."
Is Shen Lihui really like the rumored door slamming?
The fruity VC band and the tongue band are both very popular bands today, but when planning the album "Modern Sky 3", no one was willing to give them an album to release a single, only Shen Lihui did it.
Shen Lihui hopes that "Modern Sky 9" are all new musicians, the vast majority of whom you may have never heard of, and some of them are even officially publishing studio works for the first time. This album is not geographically limited, you can hear voices from Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, Liverpool and other places, bringing together these artists with different backgrounds is a very interesting thing, but also a very expensive thing.
After all, these musicians are not Peng Lei, and there is no traffic at the moment, but Shen Lihui is still willing to give them records.
Later, hedgehogs, milk coffee, tour groups, etc. all left Modern Sky, and these bands were not from modern bands for Shen Lihui, but bands that grew up with Modern Sky.
At the same time, Modern Sky is also the first music company willing to give artists tens of millions of large prepayments.
In 2019, at the press conference of the Strawberry Music Festival, Shen Lihui stood on the stage to officially launch the visual label MVM, which Modern Sky has secretly planned for two years.
Li Shuai, the person in charge of the new game, said: "Old Shen yang we are actually quite expensive, but we need people like us who dare to do things in secret from the boss, and then the boss gives support." Come and push this thing."
He asked Shen Lihui, "Does Old Shen have any opinion on what we have done this year?"
Shen Lihui whistled,.
Those difficult artists
Shen Lihui always wears large black-rimmed glasses, thin lips tightly squeezed, with a strong square chin, looking very cool and serious. But when talking about the band of modern sky, Shen Lihui's expression immediately became soft, his eyes were shining, and the corners of his mouth were smiling.
Shen Lihui still remembers the first time he saw the new pants band rehearsal, the three children were all big tongues, singing not clear at all, but they had a lot of energy. That instinctive expression, the way of giving is very impressive.
"That's enough for me. It's not how popular a band is starting to be, it's where you can see if it really moves people." This is a kind of intuition of Shen Lihui.
Shen Lihui's intuition proved to be correct, and twenty years later, the new pants band became the head rock band, and more people got to know them after last year's summer.
Is Shen Lihui only like this for the head band?
When Modern Sky signed Ma Wei, song Dongye in the folk field was already on fire. At that time, Shen Lihui and the big agent had been worried, what should Ma Song do? But no one expected that "Nanshan South" was on fire again.
The artists under modern sky are very individualistic and often poke Lou Zi for Shen Lihui.
The right band to reinvent the statue, usually away from business, rarely endorsed. But brands that really find it cool can also be considered. The agent then took up the Ray-Ban glasses campaign and told them to walk the red carpet, and it was not okay again - walking the red carpet was too uncool. The agent was so angry that he ran to Shen Lihui and spit bitter water: This band can't be brought.
Last year's Zeng Yike airport incident also added a lot of trouble to the modern sky. But as an economic company, all it can do is take her Weibo account. But she can't collect her mobile phone, she can also open a trumpet, press can not press.
Shen Lihui has done more work for this kind of extreme personality artist. For Modern Sky, talent comes first.
There are a lot of "neuropathies" in our company. Shen Lihui frankly said that this is the spiritual temperament of modern sky and also a defect as a company.
In the past two decades, Shen Lihui has become more aware of human nature. We are all selfish, and artists are even more selfish. "It's always a thing that if it's done well, it's because they're very talented and great; if it's not done well, it's because the record company didn't promote it to me." 」 Shen Lihui talked about the routine of his artists, "Because I am such a person."
Operating idol groups, you can use the elimination mechanism, who does not obey, they will be eliminated, who is not hard to eliminate. But that's not the case with modern skies. At the beginning of his founding, Shen Lihui believed that this world is a pluralistic world, and everyone's perspective and expression should be different.
Shen Lihui chose to sign a person, must be because his expression can move people, must have their own original works.
Managing these very individual artists, in addition to systematic economic contracts, Shen Lihui feels that first of all, we must respect their differences. Amplify their strengths, even some that are not fatal. But when the truly fatal shortcomings are exposed, the company is also helpless.
For a company to live longer, it must be supported by systematic hard rules. But for Shen Lihui, this matter is somewhat contradictory. Because the company operation is a purely rational thing, and he is the lead singer of a band, a very emotional individual. In the past, Shen Lihui would be more accustomed to the emotional level of artists, because as the lead singer, he could understand their sensibility.
Now modern sky has more than 100 groups of artists, some of which are not very popular. Shen Lihui said that he was doing modern sky with the attitude of being a museum. "When we choose artists, we're actually sampling, recording and sampling the existing era, so the more you sample, the more slices you get in an era." When you look back at an era, with these people, you also restore the culture of an era, of course, from the sound of such a culture."
After talking about these bands, the author asked Shen Lihui, will you regret not being the lead singer of the band now?
The corners of Shen Lihui's smiling mouth hung down, and after a moment of silence, he said, "No regrets, I don't want to express it as the lead singer of the band now."
I'm lazy
Want to make a mascot
Shen Lihui's office has a wall full of books, and the author asked, "What management books do you have on the shelves?"
"I don't have a single one, and I look at it with a headache." I don't think I know anything about management." Shen Lihui replied with interest.
Modern Sky has always been a very casual company, and has done a lot of things based on interest. But at the end of 2018, Shen Lihui found that he had done a lot of things, and it seemed that he did not earn money, some hidden costs were not calculated at all, and there were great problems in finance.
At the same time, Modern Sky has more than 300 employees, a variety of business branches, obviously can not continue to be so casual. It turned out that Shen Lihui's most annoying finance, personnel, and performance had become the things he attached the most importance to in the past two years.
Including artists that seem difficult to manage, there are also rules to follow, and Modern Sky now needs to establish some standards and methods to push it forward. In Shen Lihui's view, the modern sky may be partial to science students, some places have achieved 90 points, but some places fail, if they fail, the company is very dangerous, and it is likely that they do not know how they died.
Shen Lihui's management art is fully empowered. "If I don't let my employees do anything, I'm not exhausted."
Now that the team of Modern Sky has slowly grown, Shen Lihui believes their judgment. For example, if the company wants to sign an artist, Shen Lihui opened his eyes on the OA, closed his eyes and so on.
Some time ago, when the epidemic struck, all offline entertainment activities suddenly stopped. Modern Sky, as the fastest response company, launched the "House Strawberry Is Not a Music Festival" public welfare live broadcast on February 4 in conjunction with Station B, with more than 70 musicians performing online and a peak of nearly 500,000 viewers.
But Shen Lihui felt that the live broadcast was not right, and as a result, the team did not continue to ask him, and directly put the "house strawberry" online. The results were well received.
At first glance, the effect was not bad, Shen Lihui thought so.
Shen Lihui is a lazy person and a workaholic at the same time. He felt he was better at the strategic and content creative levels, so he slowly divided the management and operational aspects to others.
He even hopes to become a mascot of the modern sky in the future, have more time to enjoy the music itself, and do things that really excite him.
Shen Lihui's infinite game
The world is a game, interlocking. Coincidences are everywhere, and so is what Modern Sky does.
No one expected that the band that existed when Modern Sky was founded, took to the stage of the Workers' Stadium twenty years later and held a concert, and through a variety show, the charm of the band was great.
Folk songs also benefit from years of accumulation in modern skies. For example, Song Dongye was a member of the audience of the first Modern Sky Music Festival, and the record of his favorite singer Wan Xiaoli was produced by Shen Lihui. So it went very smoothly when negotiating song dongye's contract. At the same time, I also couldn't imagine that one day, because Maggie Cheung liked Song Dongye, she found the modern sky through a friend and wanted to see Song Dongye. After listening to Maggie Cheung's music, Shen Lihui tentatively asked, "Do you want to sign for Modern Sky?" Then Maggie Cheung came.
Before Modern Sky, there were basically no hip-hop artists, and when Shen Lihui decided to do a hip-hop label, he only wanted to break even in three years. However, Shen Lihui still led the team to quickly lock in upstream resources such as Chen Guanxi, Red Flower Society, Wanida, Tizzy T, and Manshuk. A survey by the "China Has Hip Hop" program team found that these particularly important hip hop artists are in the modern sky. Later, with the help of variety shows, hip hop quickly exploded.
After folk songs, hip-hop, and bands have become popular trends in Chinese music, many people ask Shen Lihui what will be the next trend?
"I really don't know, it's an intuition. Who would have signed him and thought that his songs would be so hot in the future?" Shen Lihui thought about it, "In fact, we really believe in the value of good music itself. It's not so much luck as we know what's good in this industry standard. While the art world is a very subjective thing, Modern Sky has been doing well for the past two decades."
It seems difficult for onlookers to understand Shen Lihui's every choice, from the lead singer of the band to the printing factory, and then became the owner of the music company, and after twenty years of earning some money, he went to do things that had nothing to do with music, such as vision, exhibition, etc.
Modern Sky's business model and what Shen Lihui does are actually an extension of the logic of his worldview.
In Shen Lihui's world view, the world itself is a game, and modern sky is a game that he has developed in the game, which is a link in the world.
We look at the characters in the online world, he may feel that he is very free, he can go to the left, he can go to the right, to the left you will meet who, to the right you will meet who, but in fact the results are written, we think about the real world, in fact, it is the same, in fact, there is nothing you have to pursue,
The world is so nihilistic. Everything I see in front of me will turn to dust in a hundred thousand years, and I feel like I am just such a dust. That's fine. Why can't you make some new attempts, there is nothing to lose.
Even if the modern sky is gone many years later, the works and spirit it leaves behind can continue to influence many people to use their abilities to create something different. It could be music, it could be a movie, it could be architecture, it doesn't really matter, creative people come first.
After understanding this matter, Shen Lihui became more and more sober and had no doubts about the world, so there would be all these things behind the modern sky. Shen Lihui felt that he had just made a game within a game. It's not great either, it's a boring thing, it's a boring thing.
What exactly is Modern Sky? Shen Lihui also couldn't say clearly, it was like having life, slowly stretching out its tentacles and gradually growing into its current appearance, constantly changing, constantly subverting itself. It doesn't even look like a music company anymore.
Had some dreams and experienced so many things. Shen Lihui got an answer: I want to do some things in the game that consume my time, but I want to make the time in the game more happy.
Modern Sky is the never-ending story of Shen Lihui's game world. (End)