Relaxing

My Thuan Bridge

Anecdotal: Piracy As An Insight To Consumer Needs

A few years ago I was fulfilling my civic duty and looking at pirated DVDs, when a guy came up to the store and asked, "Hey, is the new season of [something] TV series complete yet?" (I forgot what TV series he was asking about).

The girl at the store replied, "No, we don't have any of the new season yet."

To which the guy replied, "What? WHY? Why is it taking so LONG??"

I may not remember the TV series he was talking about, but I do remember thinking, that the TV series in question was off-season hence did not have any new episodes at all,  so obviously there was no pirate DVD available.

Pirate DVDs in Asia is a fact of life and people buy it not because they want to infringe copyrights, but simply because they want to buy entertainment, and that it is just cheaper to buy a pirate DVD. But the example above shows, that most people simply don't understand the work and process that goes behind creating music, movies or TV series. They just want their entertainment NOW, and CHEAP. The quality of the entertainment (i.e. sound quality, picture quality), though, differs and is more a matter of taste or priority.

So the question is, do we attempt to educate the market about the effort needed to create entertainment products and thus increasing appreciation (and willingness to pay for the real product), or do we shift our businesses to consumer needs?

I think many have answered this question already. Example: Lady Gaga goes to Farmville.

Waiting For Breakfast at Garden Cafe, Sky Garden, Phu My Hung

Donut's Donuts. Yeah.

The Lighter Side Of Nguyễn Tấn Dũng

So it started a few days ago. I was browsing for Vietnamese Twitter users (which was relatively easy as there not so many yet) and I found the Twitter account of the Prime Minister himself, Nguyễn Tấn Dũng. So I followed him. And here's what happened next:



I'll never be sure if it is really him tweeting (so far I think it really is him) but among his tweets, there are rare comedic gems that would be unexpected from a head of state.

Here's a compilation of "greatest hits":

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Reflections on Sony Music vs Universal Music Business Strategy

Until up to a year ago, I worked at this little company called Universal Music Group International - not so little; it is to this date arguably the largest music company in the world. UMGI, as the official abbreviation was called, owned the largest catalog of music in the world (this would mean, UMGI owned the rights for commercialization of that music, having a de facto ownership on the recording master). UMGI also owns one of the largest music publishing companies in the world, Universal Music Publishing, and owns - get this - one of the largest merchandising companies in the world, Bravado. UMGI is owned by Vivendi, formerly a utilities company in France, which sold off their utilities business to dabble into media - now owning, among others,  SFR (telco operator in France), Canal+ (cable TV operator), and Activision (of Guitar Hero fame, which I wrote about in another blog post). They also own All The Worlds, which is an event-organizing company which manages F1 Rocks and recent Singfest events. So basically, your basic run-of-the-mill giant multinational corporation. I spent most of my professional life so far at UMGI Indonesia and loved working there, and probably would have still worked there if not for the fact they only needed me in Indonesia, when I wanted to gain some more direct experience working abroad (and thus one of the reasons I am currently working in Vietnam).