Red Star Productions I, an album that collects hits performed by singers under the label. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Red Star Productions was the brainchild of a veteran Hong Kong band manager, Leslie Chan, who established Kinn's Productions in Hong Kong in 1985 and signed a contract with one of the most successful rock bands, Beyond. Later, he helped Beijing-based singer Faye Wong and rock band Black Panther launch a successful career in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the early 1990s.

Chan saw great potential in music talents from the Chinese mainland, so he founded Red Star in 1992. He emigrated to Australia with his family around 2000.

As Zhan recalls, Chan had built houses on a hill near Lao Mountain in Shijingshan district, in the western suburbs of Beijing in 1995. Nearly all the singers under the label and staff members lived there together.

"It was a certain kind of utopian impulse. We were of similar ages and had great passion for music. It was an incredible and surreal period of time in my life," recalls Zhan, who adds that by that time, several other indie music labels also achieved success and led music trends, including campus folk music.

"It's almost a pilgrimage," says Hao Yun, a Beijing-based folk singer-songwriter who performed on the album Red Star Productions 20. "A fair number of high school and university students grew up on those songs and were influenced by them."

Zhan says the success of Red Star cannot be repeated, because the music environment has changed dramatically in China today.

Traditional record companies cannot make ends meet by releasing albums because of the wide influence of the Internet and reality TV shows. A long pattern of violation of music copyrights also forced many talented songwriters to leave the industry.

"More and more boring and meaningless songs are brainwashing listeners and gradually they lose their ability to judge good music. Many people complain that there is no music as good as 20 years ago. It's true, unfortunately. There is no generation-defining music anymore," Zhan says.

He says that the next 10 years of the Chinese mainland's music industry is unpredictable, but he hopes to keep on spreading the legacy of Red Star Productions to remind people of the golden eras of music in China.

"I want to guarantee the music quality and content as much as I can," he says. "Hopefully, it can become a trend."