Saudi Arabia worst for music piracy in Gulf

Friday, 5 June 2009 8:22 AM

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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Posted by: alwaleed Wednesday, 30 June 2010 4:37 AM[UAE] - KSA

the only solution for that is to make your prices reasonable. 70SR for an Audio CD is to much!!! All the local record labels are doing that, they are selling their CDs for 15SR to face the black market. bottom line LOWER YOUR PRICES PEOPLE WILL BUY!!

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Posted by: Mohammad Thursday, 6 May 2010 4:15 PM[UAE] - Saudi Arabia

I am an avid music buyer living in the Middle East. I think the music industry destroyed itself. If pop music was not so bad, sales would have differed. Sadly, most artists (Arabian or not) get songs, not even bothering to write them, and pick a good hit single to release. After that, the single (keep in mind that the term 'single' is not understood by the average Arabian to this day) is released and promoted (which is, in Middle East, making a music video.) No sales for singles, no digital sales. Had they made truly good records, less people would hesitate to buy CDs. I myself download a lot of pirated music, but I also buy 2-5 CDs monthly & even buy from the USA iTunes. I buy what I think deserves to be bought. When people think of music as "needs" rather than "entertainment" & "fun that lose its taste soon", then change will happen.

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Posted by: Juan Alejandro Sunday, 7 June 2009 5:39 PM[UAE] - Argentina

It is different when you steal a car, that is stealing property, when you have access to music that someone else purchased and gives you a copy that is not stealing a property, the author has the right to sing or not to sing his song, its art, THE BUYER of the music has the right to do what he wants, share, lend, copy..... with your defenition or SONY's defenition we would not even be able to download a picture of someone else into our computers... before you download a song someone already paid for it, if you buy a copied CD you buy a copied CD, if you copy a CD and sell it to shops then you are infringing, SONY wants to stop something that its impossible to control, just because its ILOGICAL to control... its a worldwide thing... doctors give up their rights as how to cure someone in someway, imagine if we would have to pay rights to doctor Favaloro, inventor of the heart bypass, he never saw a penny from other doctors, thousands of humans walk these days, the comparison comes because there is no differenece between a singer and a doctor...... we the people give the rights, SONY lobbies the rights....... means they pay for there own laws...

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Posted by: EAD Sunday, 7 June 2009 4:36 PM[UAE] - Bahrain

it is no different than theft.. you are stealing someone elses property and using it for free. By comparing the issue to doctors you are missing the whole point and is the wrong analogy. Humanity is best served when rights are protected. There are no levels to rights. A right is a right whether is a doctor, a poet, a singer or an angry commentator like you ..

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Posted by: alejandro vairo Saturday, 6 June 2009 4:33 PM[UAE] - argentina

would they now cut of your ears for music piracy? why are we obligated to buy music? why are we forbidden to copy music? thus for why should we be forbidden to buy copied music? we give the author the rights, who will give us our rights to choose what to do with music we want, we are still paying for lesser quality, when you buy a CD just 1 song is good and the rest not even the author cares if we don't listen to it, in a way, why are we able to return a CD if we don't like what we hear? its why Apple makes millions selling the music you like, buying many of some CD these days is a rip off by the artist, I don't see anything wrong if we take action and try not to be ripped off by the artist, why protect SONY? why do singers need to make millions?? if there are doctors and researchers who save lifes and get paid almost nothing........ lets serve humanity, not SONY and big companies who control what we choose to do.......

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