Doy plans to export piano hits to China

New Zealand is known for exporting milk powder, timber and seafood to China and now pianist Carl Doy is hoping to try music.

Doy, best known for his Piano by Candlelight albums that sold more than three million copies worldwide, has just made the finishing touches on a new album, aimed at the booming Chinese marketplace.

The album, tentatively titled East West, is scheduled for a May release to coincide with the opening of the World Expo in Shanghai.

It features Doy, and members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, performing Chinese pop classics by best-selling Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng, who died, aged 42, in 1995. Doy says Teng sold more than 200 million copies of her albums.

To put things in perspective, between 300 and 750 million Michael Jackson albums have been sold worldwide.

East West also features a Bollywood hit and popular classics from New Zealand and Australia.

Doy says the idea to make an album for China came to him last year while promoting another album at shopping malls.

"The one thing we immediately noticed was the fact that the majority of people stopping to listen were Chinese," he says.

Doy said his internet research showed some astonishing figures. "There's nearly 200 million Chinese taking piano lessons ... that's staggering - it's a fifth of their population."

Murray Thom, owner of Thom Music, the record company behind the East West project, says that when popular Chinese pianist Lang Lang made a performance on Chinese television 800 million people tuned in to watch - 70 per cent of the country's population.

Sony Music New Zealand has already bought the rights to the album's sales in New Zealand, and Universal for Australia.

Says Thom: "They latched on to it so fast it wasn't even funny."