Saudi Arabia worst for music piracy in Gulf

Saudi Arabia is the Gulf’s worst offender for music piracy, a senior player in the world’s second largest music label has said.

Kevin Ridgely, managing director of Sony Music Entertainment Middle East, said the kingdom’s rampant black market in music has caused more than half of its legitimate record stores to close.

“Our biggest challenge is in Saudi Arabia. Piracy is an issue there, much more so than it is in the UAE,” he said. “There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of legitimate record stores in Saudi Arabia over the last three to five years, and that’s hurting us.”

He estimates that 60 percent of record stores and half of the kingdom’s legal music trade have been lost to online piracy and counterfeit stores, which operate openly in malls.

“[Stores] cannot compete with pirated products,” he said. “If you want to be a legitimate record store and people are selling pirated products next door, you just can’t do it.”

Sony, which opened its first Dubai office earlier this year after a two-year hiatus from the Middle East, now plans to throw its weight behind legal download sites in a bid to curb the piracy that Ridgeley says is bleeding the music industry dry.

“Historically our biggest business has always been [CDs] but the main reason we’re here now in the Middle East has to do with digital sales,” Ridgely said.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, digital music sales hit a record $3.8bn last year.

“The biggest hitch we face is that there are very few legal download sites in the Middle East. Our challenge is to convince the commercial powers to invest in that infrastructure and those opportunities,” said Ridgely.

In the Middle East the paid download industry is in its infancy. iTunes, which processes 90 percent of online music sales, has yet to open a digital store here, likely dissuaded by the region’s toothless copyright laws.

Digital media site Getmo Arabia is the newest challenger for the Middle East’s untapped download dollars.

Billed as an integrated media shop, the site will sell the full range of digital downloads; from music to mobile games, on its launch later this year.

Getmo, which has more than a million tracks, will initially sell chart tracks such as Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ for around $0.79 each.A range of singles will be available from $0.49 to mobile and net users, compared with the lowest price of $0.79 charged by iTunes.

The site is planning to have 25 million registered users within the next two years, said Simon Rahmann, director, Getmo Arabia.

The biggest battle for Getmo and sites like it will be drawing music pirates away from illegal file-sharing sites and back towards the pay-per-song model.

“We are the first in the market and that is where the opportunity lies,” Rahmann said. “The government can clamp down once there is a legal way to download.”

Ridgely is hopeful that the fallout from high-profile court cases will work in the music industry’s favour, to dissuade would-be pirates.

 “There is a PR angle that hurts us a fair bit, but in the longer term it raises the idea that this is a problem. The net impact of suing, say, a grandmother is that we are protecting our rights and reminding people it is not a legal thing to do.”

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