Neocha's NEXT Player: Free Chinese indie music for you

UPDATE: Following the launch of NEXT 2.0, this entry now has the new player embedded below.

It can be hard work sometimes trying to find decent home grown bands in China. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty out there, just that — as we’ve discussed before on these pages — the country generally, and Shanghai in particular, still has a way to go before a proper ‘scene’ is established.

You can thank your lucky stars, therefore, for the good people over at Neocha. Already the leading website in China for the country’s creatives, and the force behind some of the best arts events in Shanghai, Neocha have once again delivered a stroke of genius by launching their NEXT player.

So what’s that then? Well, the NEXT player is basically like having an MP3 player that’s permanently hooked up to Neocha’s enormous and ever-expanding database of independent music. You can download it to your desktop (for those of you running Windows), or run it as an internet pop-up (for those of you not), and let it cycle randomly through the best independent music that China has to offer — be it rock, electronica, punk, hip-hop, IDM, shoe-gaze, or some other genre that you're into, there's something for everyone. All that, and it’s absolutely free. Fantastic! Shanghaiist knows what’ll be pumping on our stereo for a while to come anyway.

More information and download available here. It's also embeddable — as seen in this post. UPDATE: We are looking into how we can get the embeddable player not to play automatically ... sorry about that. We have moved the embeddable player after the jump until we get it to stop auto-playing.