Forward Music

Forward Music (Forward Music) is a Taiwanese pop music record label founded in 1995. The company’s founder, Peng Guohua, was formerly a founding member and key executive at another legendary Taiwanese record label, “UFO Records.” After UFO Records was fully acquired by the multinational giant Warner Music, Peng Guohua led a group of key planning and production staff in leaving the company and founded Forward Music. This background meant that from its very inception, Fenghua brought with it extremely mature experience in the recording industry and extensive connections within the music scene, successfully attracting top artists such as Su Rui and Zhang Yusheng to join the label.

The most significant mark Forward Music left on the Mandarin pop music scene was discovering and shaping the “Diva” aMEI (aMEI). In 1996, Forward Music released aMEI’s debut album, *Sisters*. Under the personal direction of music director Zhang Yusheng, the album perfectly blended traditional indigenous chanting with modern pop styles, completely overturning the landscape of the Taiwanese music scene at the time, which was dominated by female singers performing melancholic ballads. The subsequently released *BAD BOY* went on to set one of the highest physical album sales records in Taiwan. This series of successes not only cemented aMEI’s status as a superstar but also rapidly propelled Forward Music into the top tier of Taiwan’s music industry.

In terms of production philosophy, Forward Music adhered to a “people-oriented” approach, rarely engaging in blind, assembly-line-style trend-chasing. In addition to aMEI, record label has also successfully discovered or rebranded artists such as Zhang Qingfang, Zeng Baoyi, Fan Yichen, and Huang Lei—artists with distinctly different styles—and has produced crossover works such as Bu Xueliang’s *Zi Yue*, which achieved remarkable commercial success. At the same time, record label has maintained a high degree of respect and support for behind-the-scenes creators.

After Peng Guohua’s passing in 2001, Forward Music was taken over by his widow, Zhang Xiaoyan, a renowned Taiwanese television personality. In the late 2000s, as the physical music market was in full decline, Forward Music continued to release high-quality studio albums and distributed a large number of overseas film and television soundtracks. In 2017, due to changes in the market environment, the operating rights and extensive music copyrights of Forward Music were transferred in their entirety.

Industry research and historical documents generally agree that Forward Music exemplified the strong vitality and localization advantages of Taiwan’s local record industry as it competed against the five major multinational record company. The physical album master tapes it released from the late 1990s to the early 2000s constitute an indispensable audio archive documenting the transformation of Mandarin-language pop music as it crossed into the new century.