The UnSub

This article is about local record labels whining to the gahmen that they are making loses due to parallel imports blah blah blah…

Gary See, Managing Director, Universal Music Singapore, says: “We’ve done a lot of lobbying with the government telling them the impact of parallel imports, how it will hurt the business in Singapore, for record labels, for the vendors and for the industry itself.

“Basically they have told us they will not sanction parallel imports. They want fair competition. But we ask, ‘what is fair competition? We invested so much to set up office here, give employment to Singaporeans here but the thing is, we have to basically survive on making a profit here and not making losses.”

The statements made by Universal Music Singapore MD reminds me of the past when we were students whining “Sir, the paper so hard lah… make it easier lah.. somemore so many foreign talents here taking the paper.. we sure cannot make it one…” Then the way he said as if like Universial Music is like Changi Airport, giving so many people pay check to take home each month.

“I’m telling you, I’m generally collecting less than S$2,000 a month from downloads from Soundbuzz,” says Mr See. Soundbuzz is a major digital music vendor in Asia, Australia.

It’s a puzzling since more Singaporeans are downloading legal songs so how come collect so little? This Ong Pang Soon dude is paying $200 a month buying online music. I am sure there are alot more rich OPS paying a few hundred bucks.

But let’s look carefully at the present situation for record labels like the one in question. Do artiste really need them? Yeah maybe like decades ago when digital technology is not cheaply and widely available, when media was working on scarcity model, when studio were privileged, when airtime and publicity was controlled. My impression of record labels are just fat ancient giants whose value is seriously undermined by the fasting moving digital age.

Nowadays when i step into CD store, I just get the feeling that I am stepping into a museum… CDs are just historical pieces of our not too distant past.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Internet, Opinions, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.