IJ Lobby Lounge alumnus Nick Lopez scores a mega hit — in China

It feels good to be able to start the new year with a column about a talented young singer-songwriter from Marin who seems on the verge of breaking through in the glossy world of Los Angeles pop music.

Just before the holidays, 25-year-old Nick Lopez performed his new song, “Mean It,” a collaboration with Dutch DJ San Holo, before a packed house at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

“It was so cool because I grew up going to concerts at Bill Graham in high school,” the 2014 Redwood High graduate says by phone from his apartment in Beverly Hills. “So to be able to perform there for a sold-out crowd was pretty exciting for me.”

I admit to feeling a swell of pride when I heard all that he’s been up to since I’d last seen him perform seven years ago. When he was a 17-year-old high school senior, he was the first teenage musician we featured when we started the IJ’s Lobby Lounge video concert series back in 2014.

He had already released a debut album and was about to finish another when he came on the show, singing a set of his original songs for the video cameras we’d set up in the newspaper’s lobby.

I wasn’t the only one who saw this young man’s budding talent. A year later, local music entrepreneur Chuck Johnson signed him to his Sonoma County-based indie label New Vintage Artists.

“The kid is truly gifted,” Johnson says. “He has a distinct sensibility for pop.”

I was pleased to hear that Lopez didn’t just move to L.A. after high school, vowing to make it in music. He had the good sense to get a degree in business from Cal Poly Pomona first.

His promising career got an unexpected uplift when a song he wrote and recorded, “Pink Champagne,” soared into the stratosphere in China after it was released in 2019. Over the past two years, it has been played an incredible 550 million times on the streaming service NetEase, the Chinese equivalent of Spotify.

“It’s still getting 7 million plays a month,” Lopez says. “It’s still going strong.”

Because the track had been pirated in China, he didn’t know he had a mega hit on his hands until someone congratulated him on Instagram. Pure ear candy with an irresistible and much-covered acoustic guitar accompaniment, “Pink Champagne” first blew up on Chinese TikTok with 200,000 people using it in their video clips.

“It’s annoying because if that had been a worldwide thing, instead of just in China, I’d be living in a nice house in Beverly Hills right now instead of an apartment,” he says and laughs.

As it turns out, he hasn’t done too badly. Johnson says that against all prevailing wisdom, he was able to cut a deal with NetEase that resulted in Lopez getting income from the song, enabling him to devote himself full-time to his music.

“They paid me, thank God,” Lopez says. “Until recently, that’s been my most significant source of income. I’ve been very grateful to have that. It’s been quite a blessing.”

Capitalizing on the runaway success of “Pink Champagne,” Johnson sent his eager star to Beijing with a camera crew to shoot video of him introducing himself to his Chinese fans, many of them young women.

“We got to play a club and went on MTV in China,” he says. “We ate a bunch of weird food. It was a super cool experience.”

He was all set to embark on a club tour of several Chinese cities when COVID-19 shut it down. Since then, he’s been collaborating with Moroccan and Dutch DJ Fadi El Ghoul, who performs as R3hab, and 21-year-old Israeli guitarist Omer Fedi, a prodigious talent who produced and performed on “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” by Lil Nas X and “Stay” by Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber. Lopez gets songwriting credit, along with Lady Gaga and two other cowriters on “Radio,” a track set to drop early this year.

He sees himself following the lead of his friend, singer and rapper Arizona Zervas, who rocketed to the top of the pop charts in 2019 with the hook-heavy hit “Roxanne,” the first track by an unsigned independent artist to top the Spotify chart since 2017.

“I’m grateful for where I am right now, but I want to reach those heights, too,” Lopez says. “Obviously I have a long way to go. But I like to work with my friends and see my friends succeed, which inspires me to do the same.”

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net