San Francisco, Nov. 30 (CNA) Mandarin pop music, and Taiwanese music in particular, plays a key role in Google's efforts to promote its social networking service Google+ in Asia, a company official said Friday.
The rapid growth of Google+ in Asia hinges to a large degree on Mandopop, and there are plenty of examples of Taiwanese musicians being trendsetters in the genre, said Richard Li, associate marketing director of Google Taiwan.
Li's remarks followed a performance by Taiwanese rock band Mayday at the headquarters of Google-owned YouTube in San Francisco Nov. 28. The concert was streamed live on the video-sharing website.
Mayday's performance on YouTube, whose Mandopop content averages over 70 million views per month, was a start in promoting the music genre to a wider international audience, said Li, who co-organized the concert.
The performance by Mayday, the first Mandopop rock band to perform live on YouTube, also showed the different way entertainers can interact with fans on social networking services, Li said.
The real-time interaction between band members and fans using Hangouts, an application on Google+, cannot be replicated by interaction with graphics and text, Li said.
On Nov. 12, Mayday picked out the name of one lucky Google+ user to enjoy a Google-funded trip to the United States for the performance and a tour around the Internet giant's headquarters.
(By Stacey Wu and Scully Hsiao)