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.

After the first day warming up, the music festival fight hits intensity on the second day. Here are the Day Two lineups for Round 2 of our festival fight.

Strawberry’s local lineup is no weaker on May 1st. Watch out for Beijing’s post-punk representatives Re-Tros and Hedgehog’s upbeat tunes. Bands lining up on the Overload Stage (metal stage) don’t seem as strong as the first day’s but the last band, Liquid Oxygen, are definitely worth a look.

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.

We've had a music festival explosion in 2010. In the old days we would be lucky to have one music festival per holiday – this year we've had several to choose from almost every break.
Then again, history has taught be to be wary of everything: Midi Music Festival 2008 - cancelled; Modern Sky Music Festival 2009 – All foreign bands cancelled; The Killers Concert 2010, cancelled; etc. Foreign bands still have to go through a complex procedure to get approved to play in China. Besides providing information such as passport numbers, they have to send the government mp3s and lyrics of 5 songs. I think the officers just want free mp3s.

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.