With its 12-year history, Midi Music Festival is the granddaddy of China’s music festivals – highly respected and influential. In 2011, they originally planned to hold four music festivals– Beijing and Shanghai in May, Rizhao (Shandong) in August and Zhenjiang (Jiangsu) in October – and had been promoting all of them since the beginning of the year. Last month, though, rumors began to spread that Strawberry Music Festival (organized by Modern Sky Records) would be taking place in Zhenjiang in October instead of Midi. Organizers of both festivals eventually confirmed the rumors via the Internet. Midi fans reacted with great confusion and anger, and Midi Festival held a press conference on August 22 to explain exactly what happened.

If the first round of our Festival Fight was just a warm up, and Midi played its big cards in the second stage what will happen in this final round?

Legendary might be one of the most over used words in music related articles. But it’s a word that has to be used to describe Strawberry’s final day lineup. There’s bold folk musician Zhou Yunpeng, the unique Second Hand Rose and the leaders of China’s metal scene, Yaksa. Who’d imagine, the final surprise comes from the festival’s Taiwan Stage, after three days of youngsters, it’s Hu Defu to play last. He may be called Bob Dylan of Taiwan, but even that is not enough to describe his contribution to China’s modern music industry … I’ll just have to skip those one thousand words.

There’s not long left till the May music festivals kick off, and the two major competitors, Strawberry Music Festival and Midi Music Festival have both announced their full lineups.

In Round 1, we'll give you the long list of the opening day acts and sort out which festival comes out on top.

Strawberry promised to throw the biggest party of the year, and from April 30 to May 2, they will take over Tongzhou Canal Park in the east of Beijing and have six stages, including the Strawberry Stage (the main stage), the Love Stage (pop/ alternative/ folk stage), the Overload Stage (metal stage), the Taiwan Stage, the electronic music stage and a stage for school bands.

It seems that 80 percent news about music or bands in Beijing are about music festivals these days. There are really so many of them. One thing that agitated the whole scene was actually one music festival in another city: Midi Festival announced a while ago that they were forced to cancel the their event in Zhenjiang, despite the ten-year contract they signed with Zhenjiang government. One day after that, Modern Sky Records announced that they are going to organize a Strawberry Festival in Zhenjiang upon invitation from the local government. Earlier this week, Midi sent out a broadcast message stating that they will reveal what actually happened at a press conference on Aug 22 and take legal action against Zhenjiang side afterwards.

Even though we have four music festivals lining up over the same days this long weekend, only one of them – the Chaoyang Pop Music Festival – is actually in the city. Struggling to look for ways to get out to the other three? Here are some tips that might help: