A new chapter for Chinese indie music

A career watershed

Thanks to the show's huge popularity, participating bands have also seen increased traffic to their social media pages, with many bands' followers increasing more than tenfold. Hedgehog's followers on Sina Weibo for example increased from 30,000 to over 1.14 million.

The show's top acts have seen their lives change. Most indie musicians have trouble making a living out of music, so they have day jobs to pay the bills, according to a Beijing Youth Daily survey.

Zhao Zijian, Hedgehog frontman, used to be a programmer.

"Finally, I don't need to go to work anymore," he said in a speech at a recent roundtable organized by Zhihu, a Quora-like question-and-answer website in China.

Shi Lu, Hedgehog drummer, is a single mom who doesn't have a day job but has to moonlight as a drummer in three bands to survive.

Click#15, a dark horse of the show, is a funk band comprising keyboardist Yang Ce and lead singer and bassist Ricky. The duo have confessed that their pre-show gigs draw few people and they only earned about 1,000 yuan ($142.4) a month from music.

Thanks to the show, they're now well on their way to the mainstream. Industry insiders have estimated that the band's ticket sales have increased by at least 400 percent, with tickets for their forthcoming national tour sold out.