Just about any anime fan worth their salt will have a reasonable familiarity with J-Pop, a genre that permeates anime soundtracks as readily as VD at the Playboy Mansion. But Japan is not the only East Asian country to put its own spin on Western music.

China has an equivalent genre in the aptly named C-Pop, a subgenre of which is HK-Pop (short for Hong Kong Pop), otherwise called cantopop. It amalgamates traditional Chinese music with the Western styles of jazz, blues, rock, and pop and performs the results almost exclusively in Cantonese.

One of the unique challenges faced by cantopop songwriters is lyrics. Cantonese is a very tonally sensitive language, and the meaning of the lyrics can be affected by the relative pitch of the notes, which is especially problematic when using the Western scale, which doesn't allow some of the tonal fluctuations Cantonese relies upon.

While cantopop's true roots lay in the 1920s, the advent of communism saw it migrate underground or disappear completely after being labeled pornographic. It wasn't until the 1960s, when knowledge of Western culture became a marker of education and sophistication, and a preference for traditional Cantonese music became “old fashioned” that the genre truly began to grow.

While its popularity was shaken during the 1997 sovereignty handover when Mandarin was made official by language ordinances, it has recovered and actually started to spread beyond Hong Kong. It has become part of pan-Chinese culture and recently has gained ground internationally.

Twins: comprised of two young women who aren't actually related, Twins got together in 2001 and enjoyed near immediate success with the hit Girls' School, Boy Student off their self-titled 2001 EP. In 2005, rumours that the group was going to split began to circulate, and eventually proved true when Gillian Chung left the group under pressure following a sex scandal.

Stephy Tang: formerly the lead singer of cantopop group Cookies, Stephy Tang splits her time between her career as a solo singer and her acting career. One of her biggest hits, Let it Flow, featured on the compilation album All About Women that includes tracks by a half dozen female cantopop artists.

Edison Chen: a multi-talented, multi-lingual tabloid darling, Edison Chen's career is spread across acting, fashion, modeling, and music in multiple genres. He was among the first to bring rap to Hong Kong, and made headlines in 2008 when explicit photos of Chen and many of Hong Kong's top starlets were leaked to the public. His short 2005 album Hazy: The 144 Hour Project features fellow cantopop artists Stephy Tang on the track Blue Skies.