As if to make one last-ditch attempt to remind us that it's still around, MySpace China has laid off two thirds of its staff, leaving about 15 employees left to swat flies. Worldwide, the sinking ship that is MySpace is laying off 500 people today. CEO Wei Lai (魏来) has also resigned, but no news if Wendi Deng (aka Mrs Rupert Murdoch) is still around as Chief of Strategy. But really, who cares? China Music Radar hits the nail on the head, "Did Myspace make any impact at all in China? Not in our experience. We never used it; we never encountered an artist that did. Since October, the site has been completely unusable here in China." Ouch. more ›

• Rumor: MySpace to Close China Doors [JLM Pacific Epoch] "Recent rumors have said MySpace China may close down and withdraw from the Chinese market, reports DoNews. Unnamed sources said on Thursday that MySpace China may undergo major restructuring in the near future and adopt media as its new orientation."
• 'Reactionary' Ringtones Spark Arrests In Tibet [NPR] "Police in Tibet have swept markets in recent months looking for banned music. Chinese state media report that police have arrested several suspects for allegedly downloading to their cell phones music that the government considers 'reactionary.'"
• How much are those bronze heads really worth? [Danwei] "I have been studying China's old palace architecture for over 70 years. I think that two out of so many parts of the palace's enormous structure, the zodiac animal heads from the Old Summer Palace don't have much value in themselves. There is nothing remarkable about their cost or craftsmanship. They were just water faucets, and very coarse compared with other artifacts from the Old Summer Palace kept at Peking University and other places. These days, they can be easily manufactured at small factories in Beijing or Guangzhou. The artistic value is just not very high."

• Kongzhong has released its role playing game "Tian Jie Online" on China Mobile's Mobile Online Game Platform, the first of three mobile online games to be released on China Mobile's new game platform.
• Shanghai doesn't seem the ideal place to buy a MP4 Player, according to a report from Shanghai Administration for Industry and Commerce, 75 percent of MP4 Players on sale are substandard, with inadequate capacity and abnormal radiation leaks.
• Chinese e-trading site Taobao have blocked the search engines of Baidu, Google and Yahoo. According to the site, this move is to protect its customers from fraud. Some online merchants optimize their general search results pages through technical and commercial methods, with the aim of gaining higher rankings and attract consumers to click their links and pages. Taobao hopes to curb this by blocking the search engines.

Touring season has official started for Chinese bands and this weekend Shanghai is bursting with shows worth checking out. Tonight the action starts early with three Xian bands playing at Yuyintang. Both Hush and 24hour Party People have played in Shanghai before and put on solid shows. This time they are joined by punk band Sucker. If you miss tonight's earlier show, you don't have to feel like a total bum, all 3 bands will be playing the STD party later that night at Atanus (if the weather holds out this should be a wicked party), and at Live Bar on Saturday, giving you two shots at redemption. Also on Saturday, Hedgehog, those infectious pop rockers from Beijing are back in town taking the stage at Yuyintang. Having recently taken off on their first China tour, Hedgehog is preparing for an upcoming tour of the USA in April. more ›

A last-minute add to the program over at JZ, the Copenhagen-based group called Jazz Kamikaze who have been getting rave reviews will be playing this thursday night at JZ Club. In fact, when Shanghaiist was in Copenhagen last February, we didn't hear the band but got to jam a bit with some of the players in it. They were great, very creative and vibrant musicians. And killer players! So we're expecting a great show from them. more ›

Sorry to be giving Edison a bit more air time than he deserves, but we just COULD NOT pass this one up. Just when we were wondering when it would happen, some entrepreneurial chap in Hong Kong has already gone ahead to design some Edison Chen t-shirts, created a MySpace page for it and an online store! The t-shirts cost HK$170 a pop (not sure if they'll deliver to Shanghai) and come in 3 designs each for men and ladies, with captions that read "Edison shot me too!", "Be my friend and I'll share the other 1000 photos!" and "Edison made me naive and silly!" Ingenious, and the t-shirts aren't bad-looking at all! Now, why oh why, weren't we the first to think of this idea? more ›

This video entitled “这个女人太要了” ("This girl wants it too much") uploaded to Youtube just five days ago has received over 317,000 views and raised a storm on the Chinese internet. It shows a young Chinese couple hugging and kissing at a subway exit point before finally saying goodbye. Well, it turns out that the clip was taken via the surveillance cameras that you see all around subway stations and the (really annoying) voices in the background were Metro staff. Shanghaiist doesn't quite understand Shanghainese, but here are two choice quotes:

“哦呦！这个女的还满好看的！” more ›

See the Chicago Improv All-Stars! more ›

Baidu has released its video search report, and Kaiser Kuo of the Ogilvy China Digital Watch translates and summarises some of the key findings. Interestingly, “adult-related” search terms account for 34.14% of daily search volume, followed by celebrity-related (14.74%), TV serial related (12.48%), and animation-related (12.21%) searches. Google is reportedly under investigation in China for tax evasion, says Paul Midler of The China Game.Chinese Skype users now exceed 25% of the global total.While venture capital... more ›

Yes, that was our reaction when we saw these pictures, but sorry to disappoint all you Facebook whores (that includes ourselves!) out there, the image on the right is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com (校内网). It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to pan out their services to cover high schools and companies (though one wonders how they would do it with a name like that because "校内“ literally means "in school"). more ›

So both Myspace and Friendster have their own China versions. Now Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy Digital China Watch points us to a report on China Business News (第一财经日报) which cites an “industry insider” who says that Facebook plans to release additional language interfaces and intends to enter the China market as early as December this year. The paper also claims that "Facebook has given up its initial plan to set up its own China-based site like MySpace has done with MySpace.cn, but will instead acquire an existing SNS in China." more ›

Who is Yacht ? more ›

Singapore Season, a series of cultural diplomacy events that started in London in 2005, has been kickstarted in Shanghai with a sell-out concert by pop star JJ Lin at the Hongkou Stadium last Sunday. more ›

A couple days ago we asked for your photos and videos from the Yue Festival last week in Shanghai, and yesterday Archie from Spli-t Works, the event's promoter, sent us a link to the video embedded in this post. Looks like Ozomatli got up close and personal with the Shanghai crowd. Shanghaiist reader T also has a set of photos from the Yue Festival on Flickr. More pics here. Another Shanghaiist reader, who we assume... more ›

His instinctive understanding made the carcass snap and clarify beneath his nimble hand that held the knife so long, so many times, the handles' changed to shapes just like his fingers and his palms more ›

The novel tells the story of a teenage boy who receives a special notebook. Whenever he writes the name of an enemy in the book, along with a description of how and when that person dies, the enemy dies exactly as described.

The Absolute House mailing list must be just about the only one we don't receive email from, because we only learned recently (by seeing an ad in a magazine) that Jennifer Gentle, a band from one of our favorite "indie" labels SubPop, will be performing there on June 24th (when Shanghaiist will conveniently be visiting Singapore). Because we know you are wondering: No one in Jennifer Gentle is named Jennifer — it's a bunch of guys from Italy. more ›

Shanghai. It is all happening. Here's the proof: more ›

Thanks to a tip from vadaga, Shanghaiist learned that now you only have one option to login to your existing MySpace 麦斯贝 account page in mainland China - use of an anonymising proxy. more ›

They are also the "best live act I saw at Midi," according to Shanghai blogger and DJ Michael Ohlsson. Now, it should also be mentioned that Micheal does marketing for 4live, where British dance/soul/electronic/funk/disco band Kava Kava is playing at 9 pm tomorrow night. But Michael likes good beer, so we trust his word. And if you need another opinion, some guy on YouTube says "Kava Kava are the shit." Entrance is 50 kuai. Check out some Kava Kava tracks at MySpace. more ›

Recently, Shanghai has had its fill of hip hop, indie rock, and classic rock artists come to perform for the expats locals. We'll now get a bit of the pop and R&B vocal genres with the recent announcement of Christina Aguilera's Asian tour dates, which includes a stop in Shanghai. It will be her only concert in China ... sorry, Beijing. The tour is part of Christina's Back to Basics tour, featuring songs from her... more ›

This is a little old, but we have a feeling many of you haven't seen it yet. From what we have read and seen (front row last month at Yunfeng Theater) of ?uestlove, drummer for The Roots, we always thought the man also known as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson would be a pretty cool guy to hang out with. And then someone told us to check out his blog on MySpace and now our new goal in life is get invited to one of ?uestlove's cookouts should we ever leave Shanghai and move back to rockin' Conshohocken. His blog is an entertaining and honest glimpse into the life of a celebrity, although it seems as though he's not really sure if he feels like a celebrity yet. more ›

So both of these links work: more ›

Say wha? Yea 麦斯贝 (mai si bei), somewhat better known as MySpace, is launching its Chinese site in two days, or so say the good people at Sohu IT. The wildly successful social networking site is supposed to have had a complete local makeover, but if “麦斯贝” is any indication of that effort, we aren’t going in with high expectations. Other than a vague phonetic resemblance to "MySpace", the Chinese name carries no meaning of its own. In a market flush with foreign sounding brand names, 麦斯贝 could have just as easily been a water enema delivering bidet, eh-eh-good. more ›

The upcoming May holiday sees a Shanghai band heading to the US and a US band (not Pretty Girls Make Graves) coming to Shanghai. more ›

We're feeling a little lazy this afternoon. Could be the weather. Could be that we are distracted thinking about 21 kuai pints of Pale Ale. Anyway, we thought it a good time to share with you this music video. We downloaded the album last year but didn't see the video until recently. Thought you might enjoy it: more ›

Has the destruction of Wujiang Lu got you down? Need a quick picker-upper? If so, you might think about heading down to Henry's Brewery & Grill for a nice dose of comedy to turn that frown upside down. Does Henry's sound familiar to you, oh dearest reader? That's because it will also be the host of Shanghaiist next Happy Hour. Okay, that's enough self-promoting. This isn't the first time there's been some stand-up comedy on... more ›

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. more ›

A quick update on what you are doing Saturday afternoon and evening. We are happy to announce that the Shanghaiist Happy Hour at ENO will feature food prepared by the wonderful people at iiiit!. They have come up with a special menu (with special prices) for the party: more ›