General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202611 min read

The Big Band (乐队的夏天)

The Big Band (乐队的夏天, "Summer of the Bands") is a Chinese original music variety show produced by the streaming platform iQIYI together with Miwei Media, in which established and emerging Chinese bands compete in live performance for audience votes. Hosted and fronted by Ma Dong (马东), the show ran for three seasons, in 2019, 2020, and 2023, and is credited with bringing China's independent band culture from a niche scene into mainstream view.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Original music competition; bands perform live and are judged by "super fans," professional music fans, and the live audience, with no mentor panel³
Seasons	Season 1 premiered May 25, 2019 (12 episodes); Season 2 ran July 25 to October 10, 2020 (15 episodes); Season 3 ran August 11 to October 20, 2023 (11 episodes); each episode about 120 minutes¹
Season 1 result	New Pants (新裤子), Miserable Faith (痛仰), Hedgehog (刺猬), Click#15, and Penicillin (盘尼西林) became the annual HOT5 bands⁴
Douban ratings	Season 1: 8.7/10 from 144,618 raters; Season 2: 7.4 from 68,301; Season 3: 7.2 from 29,460 (as of June 13, 2025)¹
Season 1 reach	Douban score rose from 7.4 at launch to 8.7 at the finale; 366 hot-search entries across Weibo, Zhihu, and other platforms; Baidu search index peak of 845,825⁵^•⁴
Audience	About 60% of viewers aged 25 to 35; 53% male; Beijing and Shanghai the top two regions⁵
Production	Produced by Miwei Media, the team behind the debate show U Can U Bibi (奇葩说); total producer Mou Di (牟頔)⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Season 1 (2019)

The season opens with the selection itself: from more than 3,000 bands across China, the producers screened over 1,000 and picked 31, ranging from 30-year veterans like Face to Reflector, the first punk band to play the Great Hall of the People.²³ The first episodes are a placement round. Each band plays one song live, and the 190-member fan jury votes on the spot: 100 ordinary fans with one vote each, 20 professional fans with two each, and five super fans, Qiao Shan, Wu Qingfeng, Ma Dong, Zhang Yadong, and Gao Xiaosong, wielding up to ten votes apiece, so the old guard's opinions can swing everything.²³

The field cuts from 31 to a top 16, then a 1v1 revival round throws eliminated bands back into head-to-head duels. Episode 9's revival is reworked mid-season so that Miserable Faith and Click#15 both advance.²⁴ Along the way the show's small bands become its biggest stories: the village-rooted Jiulian Zhenren from Hunan, the retro-funk duo Click#15, and the teenage folk duo Sisi and Fan, all unknowns before the cameras arrived.²⁵ In episode 2, Miserable Faith's lead singer spars with host Ma Dong in a running verbal duel. In episode 3, Hedgehog's frontman, overwhelmed mid-performance, smashes his instrument in an emotional burst that becomes the episode's title.²⁶

The moment the season is remembered for is New Pants singing "Do You Want to Dance" in the late rounds, and the whole room losing its mind. The Beijing band, formed in the 1990s, had spent years as new-wave survivors of a scene that moved on without them. On the Big Band stage, singer Peng Lei's deadpan sneer and keyboardist Pang Kuan's synth hooks turned a song about numbness into a communal rave, with the audience and even rival bands on their feet. It crystallized the show's promise: a band everyone assumed was past its prime suddenly looked like the future. The finale runs a "summer theme" creation round and a HOT5 ranking round in episode 11, with the final order announced in episode 12: New Pants champion, Miserable Faith second, Hedgehog third, Click#15 fourth, and Pentashin fifth.²⁷ A farewell music party closes the season, with Li Yuchun performing her new song "Wa" and Da Zhangwei and Peng Lei trading barbs as old friends.²⁶

Season 2 (2020)

Season 2 leans on nostalgia and reunion. Joyside, formed in 2001 and broken up in 2009 after producing a hit-drama director, a bar owner, and an agricultural entrepreneur among its members, reunited in 2019 and took the stage with "Cosmic Vagabond"; director Xin Shuang, a former Joyside drummer and guitarist, called them the most rock'n'roll band of all.²⁸ Wood Horse, formed in 1998 and, in their own one-line bio, "the sons of a doctor, a poet, and a train driver," played their new song "King of the Old City," its lyric about a careless, scrawled-over era read by critics as mourning for disappearing Beijing neighborhoods.²⁸ Not every legend thrived: Carsick Cars of the Maybe Mars label failed to reach the top 20, to the open grief of indie fans.²⁸

The season belongs, though, to two opposite poles. Re-TROS, the severe, precise post-punk trio, treated every performance like an art installation and took the crown. Wu Tiao Ren, the chaotic folk band from Haifeng singing in dialect, became the season's folk heroes through sheer unpredictability, stumbling into eliminations and rescues while never changing who they were. The October 10, 2020 finale ranked Re-TROS first, Wu Tiao Ren second, Dada third, Big Wave fourth, and Joyside fifth.²⁷

Season 3 (2023)

After a three-year gap, the show returned in August 2023 with a new crop of bands competing through the same placement, battle, and ranking rounds, concluding on October 20, 2023.²⁵ The season scored lower with audiences than its predecessors but was later named an outstanding program in the 2024 "Chinese Dream, New Journey" Original Online Audiovisual Program Collection.²⁵

Characters

Ma Dong (host and creator): the former CCTV anchor turned variety mogul, whose banter with stubborn rockers, most memorably Miserable Faith's lead singer, supplies much of the show's comic spine.
Zhang Yadong (super fan): the veteran producer, the show's quiet conscience, often moved to near-tears by a good arrangement.
Gao Xiaosong (super fan): the talk-show intellectual who narrates three decades of Chinese rock history between performances.
Wu Qingfeng (super fan): the Sodagreen singer, the most emotionally transparent of the panel, reacting as a musician rather than a judge.
Peng Lei of New Pants (Season 1): the slacker-poet frontman whose refusal to age gracefully made him the season's unlikely star.
The members of Wu Tiao Ren (Season 2): folk troubadours whose dialect songs and total indifference to variety-show decorum turned them into the internet's favorite underdogs.

Interpretations and controversies

The show sparked a running debate about what "punk" even means on television. Da Zhangwei, himself a former punk, delivered the season's most-quoted line: "Real punk can't get on this stage," a paradox fans still argue over.²⁹ Critics also split on the format itself. The Beijing News argued that Miwei Media's talk-heavy habits, carried over from its debate shows, diluted the music and left Season 1 short of its potential.²⁵ Defenders countered that the talking was the point: the show was a history of Chinese independent music as much as a contest. At the August 2020 Beijing International Film Festival, iQiyi announced a film adaptation was in development.²⁴

Format and judging

The show departed from the standard music-competition template in two ways. First, it had no judging "mentor" seats; the vote was given to the guest "super fans," a panel of professional music fans, and the live audience, and the only criterion was whether they liked the band's music.³ A commentary in Shengping World argued this suited the band scene, in which acts had grown organically with their own fan bases and were unlikely to accept celebrity verdicts.⁶

Second, the show deliberately lowered the entry barrier for general viewers. Ma Dong, who describes himself as knowing little about music, served as one of five super fans and asked amateur questions, giving variety-show audiences a point of entry; the first episode was described as a band version of U Can U Bibi, with a similar studio set.⁵ The stage kept the colorful U Can U Bibi visual style rather than the austere look of shows such as Sing! China, and performances were staged without seats so the audience could stand, dance, and shout, reproducing the atmosphere of a livehouse (small club venue for live band performances) or festival.⁷^•⁶

The production team was candid about its outsider status. Total producer Mou Di said that of the 31 bands finally selected for season 1, she had heard of fewer than four before the project; directors spent half a year following the bands through rehearsals and gigs to build trust.⁸ She framed the casting philosophy as opening a door first: the 31 bands covered styles from jazz and funk to hard rock, but the lineup mirrored the market, in which traditional and pop rock bands predominate.⁵

The three seasons

Season 1 (2019). Thirty-one bands competed over roughly two and a half months. The finale on August 10, 2019 placed New Pants, Miserable Faith, Hedgehog, Click#15, and Penicillin in the HOT5, spanning three generations of bands: New Pants and Miserable Faith had been active 21 and 20 years respectively, Hedgehog formed in 2005, and Click#15 and Penicillin in 2015 and 2012.⁴^•⁵ The season's widely shared moments included New Pants' cover of Wang Feng's "火花" (Fireworks), Hedgehog's line "一代人终将老去，但总有人正年轻" ("one generation will grow old, but someone is always young"), and the Hakka-language song 《莫欺少年穷》 by the Guangdong band Nine Linked Realms (九连真人).⁵

Season 2 (2020). Thirty-three bands took part, with 20 advancing from the first group stage.⁹ The lineup added established acts including the campus-folk veterans Shuimu Nianhua (水木年华), the post-punk band Re-TROS (重塑雕像的权利), Wu Tiao Ren (五条人), Wild Children (野孩子), Dada, and Muma.²^•¹⁰ The production team responded to the criticism that season 1 gave too much airtime to guest talk by emphasizing backstage rehearsal footage and live audiovisual presentation.¹¹ The season's first episode passed an iQIYI heat index of 7,400 and took 77 hot-search slots across platforms, with the band Wu Tiao Ren topping Weibo's hot list.¹²

Season 3 (2023). After a two-year pause, the third season premiered on August 11, 2023 and ran until October 20.¹ It adopted a one-person-one-vote rule in which the guest super fans counted the same as ordinary audience members, a change that commentators said disadvantaged niche acts: the math-rock band Ghost Is Clear (鬼否) was heavily edited down and the distinctive band Absolutely Pure (绝对纯洁) was eliminated early.¹³ Reviewers found the season less discussed than its predecessors and noted the absence of a breakout act comparable to New Pants or Wu Tiao Ren.¹⁴

Reception and impact on the band scene

Season 1 reversed the record of earlier band-themed shows. Jiangsu Satellite TV's The Band of China had scored 4.9 on Douban, and CCTV's Super Band passed without enough attention to receive a Douban score at all; The Big Band climbed from 7.4 to 8.7 during its run.⁵ By the finale it had accumulated 366 hot-search entries, more than ten band songs topping major music charts, and the highest single-day Baidu search index, 845,825, of any new variety show in the first half of 2019.⁴ "乐队的夏天" appeared among Baidu's 2019 year-end keywords alongside "流浪地球" and "中国女排".¹⁵

Commercial effects on participating bands were immediate. New Pants' Weibo followers grew from around 100,000 to 1.17 million; Hedgehog, which had considered disbanding before the show, reached 1.16 million followers, doubled its performance fees, and began planning a tour; Click#15, whose members had earned about 1,000 yuan a month from performances, saw fees rise several times over.¹⁶ Hedgehog went from fewer than five shows a year to at least two a week, and Queen Sea Big Shark's ten-city tour sold out.¹⁷ The show also drew attention to the wider industry: in late 2019 Taihe Music joined with nearly 40 independent labels and about 600 acts to form the Indie Works alliance.¹⁶

The effect beyond the headliners was more limited. A Hangzhou independent musician interviewed in 2019 judged that the show's benefit was confined largely to the competing bands, and most musicians on the program held day jobs and played in their spare time.¹⁸ Livehouse operators later said the show mainly converted new listeners for top acts rather than the scene as a whole.¹⁹ Imitators fared poorly: 一起乐队吧 scored 4.2 on Douban, and 我们的乐队 fell from 7.3 to 6.4 during its run in 2020.²⁰

Criticism

Commentators debated what the variety format did to rock music. A Beijing News piece at launch asked whether rock's unruly, independent character could survive a format that must be popular and accessible.²¹ The first episode drew criticism for giving the five super fans too much screen time at the expense of performances and for planting two idol bands with visible scripting; the show responded in later episodes by letting the musicians' own personalities carry the entertainment, with running jokes such as New Pants singer Peng Lei's habit of blocking WeChat contacts becoming trending topics.⁵ Tensions between niche credibility and mass appeal surfaced within the show itself: in the season 1 "goddess collaboration" round, the band Traveling Group's pop crossover with Zhou Jieqiong received the lowest score of the night and triggered an on-stage argument between guest Da Zhangwei and the professional music fans.²² A 2023 Jiemian discussion argued that as the show's judging moved toward mainstream taste, bands with larger name recognition and more accessible music tended to advance, narrowing the range of what television audiences see of the band scene.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Reality and competition franchise editions › Got Talent and other variety talent-show franchises

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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