Category: Music

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Music

Ayen何璟昕 – a quick re-introduction

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Ayen何璟昕 He Jing’xin (earlier she used Ayen Ho for her English name) is very special and quite talented artist, musician and social media influencer (自媒体作者 zi mei ti zuo zhe). She was born in Guangdong Province and she lives in Beijing metro area now.

Sometimes people used the term “北漂(Baike, Wikipedia) bei’piao”。From what I observe, Bei’piao is quite common for musicians and some other artists, because Beijing is also China’s No. 1 culture center, in addition to be the capital of the country (the political center, and many good universities including the 2 leading ones). Here is an example of Shanghai singer who is also 北漂ing.

Live Performance

2025.10.18 CCTV 15 《15号音乐房子》 20251018 大概不到五分钟左右：漫步人生路；25分钟不到一点：祝福（粤语版）；44分钟左右：人生何处不相逢（粤语），中间有一小段国语版 最真的梦。这里有粉丝团的剪辑版（微博）。Technically speaking, CCTV show is recorded not live. But I will categorize it as live as I think it still has a lot of pressure.

2025.09.29 CCTV 3 [开门大吉]何璟昕带来经典歌曲《红日》

07-12-2022 CCTV 3 黄金100秒 appearance complete video via Baidu. Below are clips via Sohu: 广东女孩何璟昕唱响17岁写的原创歌曲《向光性》，温柔歌声，暖化心灵; 广东女孩何璟昕太有才了，现场带来原创粤语歌曲，直击心灵 (七夕词）; 广东女孩何璟昕脑洞打开，将从小熟读的诗句谱成曲子，这波操作太有才了 (I accidentally bumped into these as I was looking for an old video of hers – 何璟昕 北方工业大学 话剧. I didn’t find the 话剧 in which she was the director – she *may* have taken it down since I watched it a few months ago.)

(Update 08-01-2025) I found an old video of Ayen何璟昕 on Bilibili – 56红人馆 第204期 南方姑娘何璟昕北上追音乐 小清新曲风书写心情. You may need a Bilibili account in order to watch. Personally, I have a Bilibili account which is tied to my WeChat account.

(Update 07-19-2025, from 何璟昕的微博) 听民谣，来岳阳🎶 我会参加7月25号、26号的湖畔音乐节演出，地点在岳阳港工业遗址公园，这次准备了3~4首从来没有在现场演出过的新歌曲，欢迎大家来玩！

(Original June 2025) Here is my earlier post on her. The article was probably too long for a person who heard about Ayen何璟昕 the very first time. Below is an updated and a shorter version.

Show and Tell via Videos

Update 10-15-2025 Ayen recently started a new YT Shorts channel.

For those of you who really don’t like Douyin and like YT better: here is a video for Ayen and her mom – beyond-真的愛妳 吉他cover 母親節和媽媽一起合唱，媽媽第一次上鏡有點害羞 | Ayen 何璟昕

Also Bilibili: 南 屏 海 滩 it’s a combination of 南屏晚钟 (YT) and 上海滩。There are some similarities between those two song’s melodies.

Most of the video links go to Douyin 抖音. How to watch Douyin without an account? Basically, you need to complete the Chinese version of captcha (slide the shape/the object into its place). Also, you dismiss the phone number pop up after that. Btw, this is her Douyin live URL/address. Note I haven’t watched her live show yet, because before today 07-30-2025 I was under impression that we need a Douyin account in order to watch any live show. My assumption could be wrong.

Update 10-26-2025: also recently I happened to find another tip that get to DY on the mobile browser on the phone. That is the so.douyin.com DY’s own search engine. It only works on the phone though. It seems DY uses some “innovative” tricks on the front end.

(Original) I think this Douyin short video showed her skills very well. The song is 抖音《素顏》許嵩、何曼婷【動態歌詞Lyrics】Ayen was doing a cover, but it’s not a very straightforward cover. She puts efforts and creative thoughts into it. She has two versions of herself in the video.

Note this is not entirely new, as I saw she did it at other videos, such as this one – 許冠傑 – 半斤八兩 女生版 Acoustic cover｜粵語歌吉他彈唱｜Ayen何璟昕

and another one

【易燃易爆炸】的【笼】（电影《消失的她》主题曲）cover 陈粒 张碧晨｜Ayen何璟昕

And she did dance too. Ayen used to joke she didn’t know how to dance. I don’t know. But I know she learned dance in last few years. Personally I felt her dance move is good. Note dance is not her strong suite.

国粤双语：怨创天变了心 恨在今天再相遇

Btw, you don’t have to have an account in order to view Douyin videos. Just validate the capicha, and dismiss the pop-up for sign in.

梨涡浅笑：this song is 49 years old 🙂

奔赴星空粤语版

New song June-2025 fresh brewed 🙂 痴情的人最心碎(YT); Douyin short clip featuring the Ayen何璟昕

Old song June-2025: 海阔天空 (Douyin)

国粤双语 面具+天后: since I am learning Cantonese nowadays, I think I hear: “一首歌，一个面具，大家听好” in Cantonese at the beginning.

Here is Baidu Baike intro of Ayen何璟昕

(Update 07-18-2025) I just noticed she has another channel – Ayen阿昕的抖音: and I really like 献给永远的 and 不一样的泪桥 (compare to 伍佰的泪桥here). Btw, noticed her compilation here 阿昕的合唱。

Executive summary

She is a multi-talented artist, composer, lyricist, singer/songwriter and creator/influencer. 唱作人，网红 in Chinese. Here is her Wikipedia page, and her Wikipedia page in Chinese.

Full disclosure: I made some contributions to her Wikipedia page since March 2025.

A few things I liked about her

Hard working, and work smart.

She does most everything on her own, again refer to her undergraduate major and her multiple talents. Here she talks about how she makes the video:

一個人就是一個團隊？/揭秘：我平時是如何一個人製作視頻的！

She is also present in all the main music (or video) platforms, inside and outside China. I am listing some platforms below:

Douyin 抖音

WeChat (search Ayen何璟昕 in the app)

RedNote or Xiaohongshu (search Ayen何璟昕 in the app)

Bilibili (not updated as often recently)

YouTube; also 何璟昕（Ayen） – Topic (auto generated by YT as publisher sent new songs over to YT)

Spotify

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Below are more gearing towards my personal preferences, please feel free to ignore

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敏杰最钟意（喜欢）的何璟昕原创原唱的歌

Top songs that Ayen wrote and I like the most, sorted in chronicle order

向光性 (Apple Music, Bilibili, Spotify, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐)

月光 (Apple Music, Bilibili, Spotify, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐)

如果今天天气很好 (Apple Music, Bilibili, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐)

一切美好都像你 (Apple Music, Bilibili, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐)

時間不等你 (原唱) (Bilibili, Spotify, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐)

满天星星 (Apple Music, Bilibili, Spotify, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐)

明月高高天上挂 (Apple Music, Bilibili, Spotify, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐) — 国语版 顺游 在这里 (Apple Music, Bilibili, Spotify, YT; QQ 音乐，网易云音乐)

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敏杰最喜欢（钟意）的何璟昕翻唱或吉他弹唱的歌

Top songs Ayen covered, many covered with acoustic guitar. This is a tough task, because I like many of her covered songs. I have created many playlists on YT or YT Music. Here is one example.

I noticed a QQ Music playlist created by a friend is also very popular – much more popular than my list – understandable from the point that in mainland China there are a lot more listeners for both Cantonese and mandarin songs, compared to the listeners outside CHN.

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Lullabies 催眠曲

Btw, for lullabies, my recommendation is to listen to them from a MP3 player, not from the phone. Because ideally, we don’t want to look at phone extensively before bed, and also, we want to keep the phone outside bedroom – for less distractions and better sleep. I learned this trick back in 2012, from the CEO of Arch Coal my employer at the time. But I had to admit I failed many times and recently I am more serious following this best practice. A related thing I started to do is to use Apple Watch to track my sleep.

That being said: here is my YT playlist for lullabies. I have a similar PL on my iPod Nano I use for sleep or before sleep (we are talking about lullabies or songs during sleep, right 🙂 I got the songs from Ayen’s Cover songs on the U drive.

This is my favorite lullaby right now 11-25-2025

A related thing I started to do recently is to use Apple Watch to track my sleep – after the suggestion of my 15-year-old. Previously I used Fitbit sleeping tracking for a while, but I haven’t used the Apple Watch sleep tracking since its debut in 2020 (I switched from Fitbit to Apple Watch a few years before that), mainly due to the fear to facing the reality of looking at my sleep data. Oh well, not a really good excuse and also let me back to the topic. 

Similar singers

I saw some people commented on YT that that Hong Kong based 王菀之和陈洁丽的风格有点像Ayen何璟昕。我觉得读者可以自己去做判断。

PS: 后记

How to show your support? Here is Ayen的店 at Taobao淘宝。She has her own branded guitar and other peripherals (附件，周边）in addition to her top selling Ayen翻唱經典歌曲集.

Categories
Music

Why some songs get popular while others don’t

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Or put it in another way, why some singers break out (to become superstars), while others don’t? I am just asking a legit question. Note I am not music major. But I watched quite a bit music videos recently, and sometimes I wonder this question in the title.

I think one important factor is famous lyricist/singer.

For example, this one, 當時的月亮 (KKBOX), personally I like Ayen何璟昕 當時的月亮 – 王菲 Acoustic cover a lot. I noticed the lyricist is Lin Xi 林夕。 But honestly I still don’t understand much about the song. This is even after reading the explanation at Baidu. Quote some:

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《当时的月亮》可说是一剂降温的凉茶，免得听者未完成半张唱片便兴奋得爆炸。词意上不但延续《开到荼蘼》的不外如此世界观，更回应邓丽君的《月亮代表我的心》。即使“当时的月亮，曾经代表谁的心，结果都一样”。《当时的月亮》那淡淡的清凉，跟《过眼云烟》的寒气迫人，是两种绝对不同的感受。前者是甚么都无所谓的姿态，“当时如果没有甚么，当时如果拥有甚么，又会怎样。”。后者着力营造出凄凉的感觉，带点决绝地谈到解释、权利和义务，结尾一句“都是眷恋才让爱情危险”，说明自己不再眷恋的立场。

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Other 小众歌 examples

at17 —- Lost In L.A. (Original) || (Ayen cover) 安利一首小众好听粤语歌#2《Lost In L.A》cover at17

Many other Ayen cover songs, e.g., Leslie Chueng’s songs

叨叨冯： 平庸的音乐，优秀的配乐：《周处除三害》插曲《新造的人》为啥洗脑？ (this reminds me almost the same thing in the US politics, and US consumers)

Also by 叨叨冯:【会员专享】第72期：如果音乐行业存在金字塔，塔底的人是如何生存的？(member only, membership starts at $2.99 a month)

A related question is why some singers got famous while other good singers didn’t get famous: assume their singing skills are comparable.

PS: actually, today I talked to my 15-year-old daughter about “why some pop music stars or singers” break out and become famous. And her comment is both interesting and to the point: basically, she mentioned luck. This seems to be the case for singer such as Sandy Lam.

PS:

伍珂玥父親身份曝光！家庭背景太驚人，難怪那么多導師力挺伍珂玥，也只有金星敢說出真相！網友：這樣我們有了答案了！娛樂名星 (since this is a somewhat critical video, I would caution and listen/watch it with a grain of salt).

Also – 周笔畅 (Wikipedia) – quoted below, please note I didn’t mean to pick on her.

1985年，周笔畅出生于湖南长沙的一个音乐世家，其曾外叔公是第一任中国音乐家协会主席吕骥，外公外婆和妈妈都从事音乐或音乐教育工作，而爸爸也是音乐爱好者。周笔畅的父母希望她长大后能成为作家或记者，所以给她取名“笔畅”，寓意“文笔流畅”。

她6岁跟随父母定居广东省深圳市。[19]她曾就读园岭小学、岗厦小学、福华小学及深圳福田中学。[20]

2003年，参加高考，由于深受粤语流行音乐及00年代活跃的陶喆，周杰伦等音乐人影响，有意往此行业发展，并以艺术生总分681分的成绩(广东卷900满分)考入广州星海音乐学院。

Why is that?

Unlike hard science or engineering, arts or music could be subjective sometimes. Pop music is even more subjected to consumer taste and social trend, both are more fickle. Or subject to some sort of manipulation. SingChina 中国好声音 is a good example of all this – go to 争议 – 李玟现场质疑赛制不公被羞辱事件 and you will know.

Categories
Music

钟晓京Jamie

Reading Time: 3 minutes

She is from Beijing. I am guessing she is born in 1980s: aka she would be about 40 now (baidu 钟晓京超女几岁了). I came across her at Bilibili, 钟晓京翻唱苏芮80年代经典歌曲《跟着感觉走》. This is the song that I listened in high school and college. || Update 09-01-2025: Jamie mentioned she was at 3rd grade in year 1993. Assuming she was 8 then, she was born in 1985.

Some background

(Sina Blog) 代表北京的传奇超女－钟晓京 (2006-07-04 22:09:20). Also Baidu pages (generated by AI). Please note Jamie is a music industry executive and she also graduated from 北外 Beijing Foreign Studies University which is considered the best college for English majors at my time.

Platforms we can find here

Apple Music – 钟晓京

Bilibili – 钟晓京Jamie: you will notice her English songs got most playbacks. This is understandable because that’s also her strength: she graduate from Beijing Foreign Studies University 北京外国语学院 and passed 英语专业八级。

YT – 钟晓京Jamie: right now she listed all English song she sang (as cover 翻唱）。Personally I think she can put up her Mandarin and Cantonese songs there too.

Douyin 抖音: 钟晓京Jamie：北京歌手，毕业于人大附中、北京外国语大学英语系，英语专业8级。曾就职于国际唱片公司。直播内容：中英粤及其他语种经典歌曲，流行、摇滚、爵士等多种风格。This is the platform that she is most active (I believe). Probably for many short video creators Douyin is also most lucrative too – we got to eat and and sometimes bring bacon home. She probably started her solo/creator career about 5 to 10 years ago, and this again confirms this old saying: many roads lead to Rome.

Facebook: Jamie Zhong

Instagram: jamiezxj

WeChat: 钟晓京Jamie (she does go live 直播 on WeChat sometimes, at least once a month). She mentioned the WeChat audience is slightly older than the audience at the other platform (Douyin).

(Update 07-7-2025) During this morning’s WeChat live, Jamie made an interesting observation, that is over the time, people change the way they consume the pop music, and also due to that, they change their preferences of the type of pop music they listen to as well. Nowadays people tend to listen to music that’s easy, vs. say Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you”. Because a lot of times people listen to the music as a background (noise). I will put more precise words from her if possible.

Btw, the price to ask her to sing a song is about 500 Yuan (what they called “520” stands for I love you in Chinese), or $70. It’s not too expensive, but it’s not too cheap. I imagine Tencent (WeChat owner takes a cut, probably at least 30%?). Also, Apple is probably not taking a cut here.

Btw, I did google search on this too – did people change the habit of listening to pop music

(Update 07-11-2025) Jamie commented on WeChat live that 小斗 (she meant Douyin, because WeChat and Douyin are competitors on the video/live front), is already in 工业社会，by that she meant the analytics for broadcaster (live show host), while WeChat is still at 农业社会。Good analogy. I guess that’s one reason the singer I like (you probably know whom she is, if you read enough of my blog posts), also goes live on Douyin sometimes. A second reason “why someone goes live only on Douyin”, I can think of, is there’s an exclusivity between the show host and Douyin (Byte Dance). Note this is nothing new, as we seen similar things on Spotify or Apple in the west.

Keep in mind I am 2nd class citizen there as I don’t have an account with Douyin. To log into Douyin, we need the Douyin app, but the app is only available in the China app store (including HK).

Jamie also commented YT: 翻唱的歌拿到的广告费大多数要交版权费。一个矛盾是如果是自己版权的歌，一般流量就低，也就没啥广告费。

My comments: Jamie is a straight shooter. She would say what’s in her mind. That obviously a double edge sword: it has both pluses and minuses because usually people don’t want to hear anything negative about them.

PS:

I wrote another two singers, and this is the 3rd of the singers series, the first two are: Liang Jingru 梁静茹 aka Fish Leong and Ayen 何璟昕. We know Fish Leong learned quite a bit from the famous Jonathan Lee (李宗盛), and Ayen 何璟昕 (links to Wikipedia, full disclosure: yours truly made some contributions to her Wiki page recently), is also quite unusual in her career path, she grew interest in music in middle school and high school, but she chose to attend a college in Beijing, major in digital media and arts (Engineering degree), and she launched her music career during/after college.

The key are: you got to love that thing, and you probably need to be decently good at it. The latter also depends on the the competitive landscape and the business overall of that field: for example, I consider myself a decent programmer, but not a 10x dev, but I still made a decent living because the field is fairly lucrative (at least in my 24/25 years career, this may change due to AI etc). But music industry is more competitive. So were the creator and short video platforms.

Categories
Fun Fun Video Music

My impression on shorts or short video

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Short videos 短视频 （short form content on Wikipedia) are getting popular nowadays.

I have some reservations on the shorts, YT shorts or anything equivalent. Below is not a complete list but let me try list some of the popular shorts platforms. My main reservations are the short durations of videos, their impact on kids’ focuses, and the relatively short time span of short videos in the internet and social media history.

YT Shorts: I know my younger daughter only watches the YT shorts when she gets my phone 🙂

Douyin 抖音 (since Sept 2026): I don’t have account for now. But I did watch two short videos today. Also, this series (or playlist) looks/sounds good to me at least 🙂

For douyin we have to have a China based mobile phone and Chinese ID. In other words the app is not open to foreigners or to outside world. ByteDance’s TikTok serves that market.

Btw, here is a famous account 与辉同行

Also a drumset performance (song: 搀扶, MV here)

The songs I listened to when I was young (from 1980s to 2006).

Two videos from Toutiao.com (also owned by ByteDance, the parent co of Douyin): 这老师火到人民日报了！高考誓师大会上，数学老师祝福语

and 大美中国走进广东惠州，山海秀美，惠州人看看！

Buiness model of Douyin (to be expanded)

抖音会员是什么 (Also, Zhihu)

This also makes me to think – maybe TikTok and Douyin 抖音 got popular for a legit reason? 抖音和TT在短视频领域称霸是否意味着字节跳动有她的独到之处呢？就像最近的DeepSeek 对ChatGPT 的冲击和影响？一般一开始先是deny, 接下去说她们肯定是抄了我们的作业，最后发现不对啊，我们可能需要抄她们的作业？😂 Because their presentation or their content or their engagement are better than competitors (say, YT Shorts, and FB Reels)?

Also the 2025 graduation festival: this has been a thing since 2000, and I recall Bilibili was the early leader.

TikTok: I didn’t use it much. But I am aware that it’s widely popular among young people, and it may have taken a dip recently in the USA due to the recent law barring the app. But again whatever ByteDance (Douyin and TikTik) was doing seems working very well with the young people across the world. And for that I think as a minimum we should acknowledge their success: I understand sometimes it’s harder for people outside of China to acknowledge that Chinese people or engineers did something really impressive. If we can do that, we can follow up with some more helpful or meaningful questions such as why are they successful? What can we learn from them, and so on.

WeChat (short videos) 微信视频特指短视频: I don’t watch much of it honestly, especially recently – besides I watch a few music videos there 🙂 One reason I watched music is to stay away from politics. As some of you may know, I am not a fan of the current resident of the WH in the USA. From WeChat I saw content creators can also create playlist. Personally I haven’t found a way to share the link for the 合集 yet, note I don’t have a 微信公众号或者视频号.

Bilibili: they have both short videos and long videos. I am not fully converted to 弹幕 yet though 🙂 (Update) I finally moved up to level 2 there, after answering 60 questions (mostly are simple questions). I tried to verify myself as HUST alumni, but I failed 🙁

Here is one example of Bilibili video. Now I also recall the difference between Bilibili and Douyin: the former is a bit smaller in terms of scale, and also, they cater to the young and educated folks, while Douyin is for everyone. They have a playlist or 合集/视频选集 feature too, here is an example.

Also: I just uploaded my 1st video.

(06/04/25) I found a tip to not see the 弹幕 , just pop up the video in the bilibili app.

(06-11-25) Just learned sometimes the platform has exclusivity agreement with creator.

RedNote: or XiaoHongShu. It got a pop recent amid the TikTok ban. The bump or pop probably faded away. But the platform itself is quite popular among Chinese users and has quite good engagement from my observations. RedNote can create a playlist #合集 too. Here is one example Ayen何璟昕国粤双语合集. Note: it’s best to open this in the app. I noticed on my Mac it will automatically download the Android apk file for RedNote app. Or you may go to the xiaohongshu website and I am not sure if the same functionality exists on the website.

From consumer point of view, I think consume in moderation is the key. But from creator point of view, short video and playlist or 合集 in Chinese is a great way to generate interest.

Business model or income

I speculate one reason artists or creators do short video instead of longer or full length videos is due to copyright laws. I am not attorney but I guess a 20 or 30 seconds clip is less likely to cause issues for the copyright owners than the full length version.

This is more from the content creators or advertisers’ point of view.

YouTube油管和抖音有哪些差别？｜Weitube

一个50万粉丝抖音博主能赚多少钱，涛哥爱拆机真实收入全面公开#抖音创作者 #涛哥爱拆机

今天是庆祝我粉丝到50万的福利视频！回答一些你们常问我的问题，感谢每一个菜鸡粉丝的支持和陪伴！#这个视频有点料

PS: I will probably translate this post to Chinese, or rewrite a new one in Chinese.

Categories
Music

Songs I listened when I was in 20s

Reading Time: 2 minutes

(Update 11-08-2025)

I have YT Music subscriptions (it’s probably a part of YT Premium sub) for a few years now. And I listened to YT and YT Music quite a bit especially since the sub. It allows me to play the music in the background. And they actually sent me a recap: the songs I listened to the most in past year etc. I believe those are the artists or musicians I listened to the most in each year:

2023: Sandy Lam 林忆莲 (Wikipedia)

2024: Fish Leong 梁静茹 and G.E.M. Gloria Tang Sze-wing 邓紫棋 (Wikipedia)

2025: Ayen Ho 何璟昕

I listened to many songs on this list 1990s-love-songs-90年代玉女歌手排行榜 too: but not the first song 最爱。The main reason was I didn’t understand Cantonese and at the time I probably only listen to the most popular cantonese song that’s being played in non-cantonese speaking regions. In other words, I listened to songs such as 一生何求。But I do remember this one’s melody – 劉小慧 ~ 初戀情人【Music Video 】

(Original)

Mostly mandarin pop (Mandopop), and cantonese pop (Cantopop). That was about 35 years ago. Not a complete list.

Sandy Lam 林憶蓮
林憶蓮、李宗盛 – 當愛已成往事

傷痕 Scar 林憶蓮 傷痕專輯: Love, Sandy (1995)

愛上一個不回家的人

CHEN Hui Xian 陈慧娴
Tao Wu Jie 跳舞街

Qian Qian Que Ge 千千阙歌

Piao Xue 飘雪

Hong Cha Guan 红茶馆

Sha Nv 傻女

Chen Shu Hua 陈淑桦
Meng Xing Shi Feng 梦醒时分

Gun Gun Hong Chen 滚滚红尘

QI Qin: Wang Shi Shui Feng 齐秦 往事随风

ZHAO Chuan: Ai Yao Zen Mu Shuo Chu Kou 赵传 爱要怎么说出口

WANG Fei: Tian Kong (Sky) 王菲 天空

Whitney Houston. I was a big fan of her in college. I remember spent about 10 Yuan (remember at the time the monthly allowance was like 100 Yuan) to buy her album “Hero” when I was in college.

This is a song “When you believe“, sung by her and Maria Carey.

Categories
Music

Shall We Talk?

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I listened to this song recently, Mar 7, 2025 to be exact, from Ayen何璟昕‘s Eason 陳奕迅 – Shall we talk 女生版 Acoustic cover. 最近听到，Ayen何璟昕翻唱，陈奕迅原唱的歌 – 陳奕迅 | Shall We Talk (高清音)，粤语版，下面的视频有关于这首歌的讲解。

您真的聽懂《Shall We Talk》嗎？解讀林夕愛的哲學，聽歌學閱讀理解，現場鋼琴彈奏，20200302（中文字幕）(I came across this video a few days ago, and I also mentioned here – Cantonese song and lyrics writer)

也让我重新反思我自己对小孩的期望和平时跟她的交流。

听到/懂这个歌，我已是知天命之年 🙂

另外一个版本：shall we talk—小背心 （许靖韵Angela Hui 和 李靖筠Gladys Li） You will notice a heart warming scene towards the end. 两个女歌手都是93年出生，我大学毕业那一年：一下子32年过去了。

The original video for the above video cut is here – 許靖韻李靖筠洪卓立陳家樂活著Viva彌敦道失戀太少最後的茱麗葉人來人往 戀無可戀阿門愛後餘生黃色大門給自己的信無心戀唱他都不愛我小日子心癮找對的人Shall we talk今晚唱飲歌最終回英皇經典金曲 Go to 01:09:16 for #ShallWeTalk; the conversation between singers after the song was also good – it last a few minutes.

Btw, I just created a YT playlist for Shall We Talk.

Last but not least, How to communicate with adolescent or teenagers

Categories
Music

想見你想見你想見你

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Wikipedia entry – 想见你想见你想见你 (English: Miss You 3000), note this is both a movie (TV) and a song.

八三夭 is the author and singer group for this song: they are official 🙂

Cantonese

八三夭 831【想見你想見你想見你(粵語版) Miss You 3000】 電視劇「想見你」片尾曲 Official Music Video

笑忘書-張敬軒 連續劇 續集-容祖兒 三生三世-張杰 想見你想見你想見你-八三夭 劇集medley cover by 許靖韻 小背心 Angela Hui (scroll to 10 min 30 sec for 想見你想見你想見你)

想見你想見你想見你 (粵語版) Miss You 3000 – 八三夭 831 medley cover by 許靖韻 Angela Hui

Personally, I like 【粵語】想見你想見你想見你｜火土填詞 x AYAN何璟昕｜想見你劇集主題曲 , while not official, the best. I know I am likely biased to some extent 🙂

Here is another one sung by Ayen – 粤语版《想见你》吉他弹唱GuitarGuitar (I am not sure if this is official, the Ayen何璟昕 channel is here).

Mandarin

想見你主題曲 cover 八三夭【想見你想見你想見你】吉他彈唱 女生版 | Ayen 何璟昕

八三夭 831【想見你想見你想見你 Miss You 3000】電視劇「想見你상견니」片尾曲 Official Music Video

魏嘉瑩 Arrow Wei【想見你想見你想見你】feat. 魏如昀 Cover 八三夭 831「想見你 상견니 Someday or One Day」片尾曲

Btw, I created a YT playlist for the song here. Side note: from the number of views, we can see mandarin views is much higher than cantonese. This is understandable in the sense that Mandarin speakers is probably 10 times of Cantonese speakers over the world. Google estimates there are 1.18 billion mandarin speakers in the world, vs 120 million cantonese speakers (refer to my blog post here 全球将近有1.2亿人口使用粤语 ). For comparison google search indicates there are 1.5 billion English speakers in the world.

Warning: try not to loop this song during the night. I did it once and it didn’t help my sleep 🙁

Categories
Life Music

你曾是少年

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第一次听这首歌，是因为我最近开始听Ayen阿昕的歌。S.H.E【你曾是少年】吉他彈唱 Acoustic guitar cover 畢業季｜Ayen何璟昕: btw, 我同意Ayen阿昕唱完歌后说的那一段鼓励毕业生的话。很多年之前，我应该还是大学低年级，有一次系里让我们全年级去一个大的阶梯教室开会，有一个日本留学生（研究生）给我们讲话：他用中文写了两个字，初衷 (Original Intention)。他说的也是类似的意思：就是提醒我们不要忘记出发前，我们最初的想法。

这里有official video – S.H.E [ 你曾是少年 Wings of my words ] Official Music Video (｢少年班｣電影主題曲).

KKBox 有歌词。以下摘抄几句：

或許再過上幾年 你也有張虛偽的臉
難道我們 是為了這樣 才來到這世上
這問題來不及想
每一天一年 總是匆匆忙忙

你我來自湖北四川廣西寧夏河南山東貴州雲南的小鎮鄉村
曾經發誓 要做了不起的人
卻在北京上海廣州深圳某天夜半忽然醒來 站在寂寞的陽臺
只想從這無邊的寂寞中逃出來

======

At the same time, somewhat related topic, please read this one as you see fit – 人到中老年少折腾

PS:

I came across this video 20岁和30岁的我：跨越10年的合唱《给十年后的我》 (Douyin, Bilibii) and think it has similar meaning.

Categories
iPhone app Music

Playlist

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Music playlist is quite common nowadays. For me personally I was a bit late to the party. I did use playlist on my iPhone Apple Music app, and on my YT: both desktop and iPhone. But recently since I started to participate the group exercise class at the J, I realized playlist and music in general is a big deal. I believe the Yoga teachers at the J has a playlist too.

An example or case study

清新女声何璟昕：薄荷糖般的味道甜入我心 (QQ Music QQ音乐 ) Note: you will likely need to log in to see the content. For me I use my WeChat login (SSO) for many China-based website/apps. You can read more about Ayen 何璟昕 here

I created a few Playlists for Ayen 何璟昕 on YT and YT Music – this one specially for original songs – Ayen阿昕原创+新歌. Note I have the premium subscription for YT and it allows me to listen to the YT Music in the background, in addition to some other features such as skipping ads in a video.

And I just noticed she has some playlists on YT too: this one is for 翻唱 cover – Ayen cover 何璟昕的翻唱

She did quite a bit of 翻唱 (cover, or acoustic cover) in last few years. I like them all. Some of songs are new to me because I left mainland China in summer/fall 1997. Below a “mixes” of 翻唱 cover songs I listened on 04-08-2025 early morning – “Mixes are playlists YouTube makes for you” per YT. I think the link above may expire after certain time. Btw, I think “mixes” or the YT generated list is a good way to explore what’s out there, because YT will recommend new songs. So in other words, this kind of playlist has some discovery functions. Update 04-20-2025 Btw, I realized this is a dynamic list. Update 04-28-2025: I started to appreciate the computers (and the AI) may have an edge or advantage to create playlist, based on the listening history. The recommendation algorithm may be similar to the social media posts suggestion.

【Mr. 森林】Acoustic guitar cover | Ayen 何璟昕 (Oct 16, 2020, this is YT upload date, same below) Hint: this one has about one minute of funny behind the scenes 花絮/彩蛋 videos in the end – made me realize that it’s not easy to learn a new song and so on. Obviously, it depends on the song itself too. Also, I think many people would appreciate some of the light hearted carefree nature in the behind the scenes 花絮/彩蛋 too.

梅艷芳 – 似是故人來 Acoustic guitar cover 吉他弹唱 粵語翻唱+旗袍 | Ayen 何璟昕

千千闕歌 | 吉他彈唱 cover 陳慧嫻/張國榮 經典粵語歌 | Ayen 何璟昕 (Apr 17, 2020)

Eason 陳奕迅 – Shall we talk 女生版 Acoustic cover (Jan 21, 2022) I didn’t pay attention to Eason 陳奕迅 to be honest, and only till very recently I read his Wikipedia page.

陳奕迅 – 苦瓜 粵語吉他彈唱女生版（完整版）| Ayen 何璟昕

鄭秀文 | 終身美麗 Cover 吉他彈唱 何璟昕 (Feb 15, 2019)

一人有一個夢想 – 黎瑞恩 (Mar 30, 2021)

陳奕迅 Eason – 最佳損友 Acoustic cover (Aug 28, 2021)

謝安琪【喜帖街】Kay Tse 鋼琴+吉他彈唱 這是一首關於懷舊的粵語歌 | cover by Ayen 何璟昕 (Mar 22, 2020; make sure watch till the end 🙂

衛蘭歌曲串燒！低半度/驗傷/就算世界無童話/街燈晚餐 新歌老歌 吉他彈唱cover | Ayen 何璟昕 (Mar 1, 2020) This is a new experiment of singing 4 songs together (one after another) – 《低半度》《驗傷》《就算世界無童話》《街燈晚餐》

王菲/李健 – 傳奇 Acoustic cover｜吉他彈唱｜Ayen何璟昕 (Sept 30, 2022)

盛夏的果實 – 莫文蔚 Acoustic cover｜吉他彈唱｜Ayen何璟昕 (Aug 12, 2022)

你的眼神 国粤双语版 cover蔡琴/卫兰/林志美 Acoustic cover｜吉他弹唱｜Ayen何璟昕 (Sept 9, 2020)

周傑倫《回到過去》女生版宿舍版吉他彈唱 | Ayen 何璟昕 (Sept 25, 2020)

一场游戏一场梦 – 王杰 Cover 吉他弹唱 – 电影《风中有朵雨做的云》插曲 何璟昕 (Apr 7, 2019)

粵語民謠「四季歌」女生版 Acoustic cover 生活需要一些安靜🍃｜粵語歌吉他彈唱｜Ayen何璟昕 (Jul 22, 2024) My comment: one of my favorites, I like this simple folk song 🙂

阿郎戀曲（許冠傑）Cover 吉他彈唱 何璟昕 (Jul 16, 2017)

一生何求 陈百强 (Feb 26, 2021)

Other playlists I plan to create

Some of my older readers may know I have an iPod Nano 7th generation. Right now I just sync all my iTunes songs that I like from Mac to the iPod. Thinking creating playlist next (from Mac, then sync to the iPod Nano).

Usage of playlist

I think there are at least two use cases for me. One is the background music during work. Another one is background music for sleep. I used to listen to the radio (more specifically NPR or over the night it’s more likely BBC World News), but listening to news has its downside, because sometimes the news can be depressing, and other times news would keep me awake. I prefer some calming music over news. A secondary factor is using iPod nano as radio drains battery more quickly.

More on YT Playlist

I found playlist is integrated with YouTube Studio (I create YT video there too). I have 203 playlists: I think I need to clean up some. Also the link above is only available to me (because I am the owner of my YT Studio account).

PS:

Google search “can people make money from curating music playlist”

Search Labs | AI Overview

Yes, people can make money curating music playlists. Platforms like Playlist Push and others offer curators payment for reviewing music and maintaining active playlists. Pay varies, with some curators earning $1.50 to $15 per song reviewed, depending on their playlist’s listenership.

Btw, I just noticed two of my YT Music playlists have more than 1,000 views.

Ayen阿昕翻唱

and

Ayen阿昕原创+新歌

Categories
iPhone app Music

YouTube Music and Music Industry

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Music made together may one day heal mankind. – from “We Gather Here Together” (YT)

For music streaming nowadays I mainly use YouTube Music, because I have YouTube Premium subscription. It’s not perfect, but YT Music has a decent collection, and functionality.

YouTube and YouTube Music

When I was listening to Ayen 何璟昕 music both via YT and YT Music, as I switch between them as I was trying to conserve some data usage (partially because I lost power and Wi-Fi a few days ago). I noticed that YT Music is sometimes automatically generated by YouTube (Google), for example this channel. More on YouTube automation here.

Also, I realized there are two ways we can avoid using cell phone data.

1) Listen to music on YT Music: if we download the video via Wi-Fi in advance, and listen to it in the Download mode, not the library mode. The playlist in Download mode can play continuously, or you can actually loop the playlist if you like;

2) Watch videos on YT, if we download the video via Wi-Fi in advance. If we start playing from the last downloaded video, it will continue to the next, and so on.

If we are watching the video from the library mode, it will use data on YT Music.

YT Music Sync from Library to Download: there is a sync icon button in the downloaded playlist, press it and a popup will show up, ask you to confirm, you say yes, and it will apply the update.

Some More Tips for YT and YT Music

Loop in YT: I just found out we can loop a single song on YouTube too (move mouse over the video, right mouse click, and you see an option of “Loop”. Also, sometimes YT has the “transcript” function (I think it depends on how the creator set it up), and you can follow along with the lyrics for a song (or words/captions for a video). Note the looping works both on Desktop and in the iOS app.

YT Music: you can loop a song or loop a playlist. The icon is at the bottom right when you play a song. If you just want to loop a song, tap twice and make sure you have a number “1” inside that loop.

A bug in YT Music (italics for emphasis):

I learned this lesson the hard way a few times. I found that, “saving to playlist” in YT Music website will mess up my playlist pretty badly. Now if I can stay away from doing that. By “messing up” I mean a lot of duplicates or songs that I don’t intend to add got added when I did the “save” 🙂

Also, I found recently, for many songs, we can jump directly from YT to YT Music by press a “play icon button” inside YT (when applicable).

Sometimes we need to get to the comments and edit. Below is the link getting to the comments.

Google – My Activity (YouTube comments)

Also, YouTube History has a link to “Comments”

A subtle bug in YT Music

Someday I hope I can become a product manager for YT Music and I noticed a subtle bug: in the YT music occasionally the cover page (the image and the song name) is wrong. The music or the song is still correct. The video is correct too.

a screenshot from YT
YT: note the YT music image and song name don’t match the song in YT

Music industry

The landscape of digital music is overly fragmented, in my opinion. For example, in China it appears QQ音乐 and 网易云音乐 (Ayen何璟昕 on 网易云音乐) are popular. In the west Spotify and Apple Music are two largest platforms. Personally, I used mostly YT and YT Music as I have YT Premium Sub. Then there are the social media platforms: which are also fragmented, obviously.

Keep in mind in last 10 years or so, the music industry has experienced seismic shift – music is increasingly being streamed online, instead of the good old days of CD, or singles sales. I think it may have something impact on Ayen 何璟昕‘s journey becoming a musician/song writer/singer. She does have one advantage: her undergraduate major is digital media – and we can see some of her work in the MV (music video) she created.

I still remember the days at Best Buy there are racks and racks of CDs on display, it was probably 15 or 20 years ago. Both our 2012 Toyota Camry and 2012 Toyota Sienna still had CD player build in – both has bluetooth and USB too, so it can be connected to smartphone.

Google search “npr music indstry steaming” || NPR – How the music industry has changed in the first quarter of this century

Copyrights etc.

Also, I just came across this – 中国音乐人，困在版权里。从虾米音乐关停聊聊中国音乐人的版权困境。by Feng’s Music Channel (叨叨冯). You may read some of the comments if you know Chinese. It’s interesting to say the least.

This reminds me at St. Louis Children’s Choirs, they check the copyrights of the music or the song they are singing, and pay the author a royalty or something like that. I don’t know if they use companies such as Swank Motion Pictures or some other company. Btw, our old daughter sung at St. Louis Children’s Choirs from 1st grade to 7th grade, and we have many wonderful memories.

More about music copyrights in China: 什么是音乐版权？by HEM Records

I recall many years ago, probably in year 2004, I heard a lot of controversy of copyrights issues at YouTube too. That’s when YouTube was bought by Google.

In terms of singers, think I am going to write about Sandy Lam (Lin Yi’lian) and G.E.M. Deng Ziqi next.

It’s hard to make a decent living as a musician

I am not talking about the top dogs, such as Taylor Swift in the USA, or G.E.M. Deng Ziqi in HK. They make money both from music (even from streaming, because of their music are being played quite a bit on streaming platforms), and from live performance.

But most musicians are not that lucky: the two income streams are usually not enough to make decent living. I saw people work on a few other things to make ends meet: teach, write customized music (song, lyrics, collaborate etc.), make/sell instruments. For example, I saw many song writers do customized music. And Ayen何璟昕 does all three. Carlos makes instruments.

(Update 05-03-2025) I confirmed above with a friend who has about 3 millions streaming (a year) on Spotify. He told the gross profit is about $10,000. But he needs to pay record label and recoding studio etc., so basically he has nothing left after that. He also said people like Taylor Swift has billions of streaming for her songs. Also Spotify has better payout ratio for people like Taylor Swift, compared to ordinary creators Joe and Jane. Last but not least, this is not new phenomena: it was like that pre-streaming, and I assume that’s applicable for the days when CD, cassette and vinyl were the main media for distribute the music. So if I could expand it a bit, it’s basically similar to the wealth distribution of the USA: the rich get richer, the poor becomes poorer. (Update 05-16-2025) This reminds me of the similar point Warren Buffett said here on YT Shorts – “a more and more specialized economy”.

(Update 05-09-2025) I looked around a bit more. I found couple places that musicans can sell their products.

TomPlay website

Gum Road (also google search “any musicians successfully sell on gumroad”)

Related: Google Search “is it harder to survive as musician”

Last but not least, [Piano Cover] 八三夭 831 – 想見你想見你想見你｜你沒看過的超難還原鋼琴版 (the piano instruction video and also the author sells music sheet too)

(Update 05-12-2025) I found couple music platforms that act between musicians and the YT. For example, I found this one ewway.com at 痴人. And I came across another one Bquate SAC from this song 此生无憾 (国粤对唱版). I like to do a bit more research in the near future.

(Update 05-13-2025) Here is another one 敢开始 submitted by Tencent. In this case, it seems the song was submitted by the publisher to YT Music. You can watch the actual music video here –東風日產勁客《敢開始》Ayen何璟昕 原創歌曲 既有所想，就勇敢開始，不為一個結果 .

I noticed “Auto-generated by YouTube” (link goes to Reddit) in the description. From programming or software integration point of view, I speculate the music platforms have backend integrations with Google/YouTube via API. This is likely accomplished via a batch process.

Last not not least, I found the competition among Chinese songs are so tense, and for example, for 哪吒2主题曲 — 此生无憾. I am aware of 7 versions on YT. And this is only a partial list. One of them is very gimmicky, and obviously I won’t give special attention to the channel or the video. But you can guess which one 🙂

1

2

3 – 此生无憾 (国语女生版)

4

5

6

7 – 哪吒主题曲【2】完整版《此生无憾 》张碧晨演唱👍🌹好听

PS:

Also refer to How to listen to Chinese music or songs nowadays

PS 2:

I noticed one Ladue HS graduate picked composition as the college major. I think the college is JHU. I want to wish the senior best of luck.

PS 3:

A thread on Apple Music