Artists discuss solutions to digital music fee collection

Viettel's Keeng.vn, a digital music site, recently held a seminar to discuss ways to cooperate with Vietnamese singers in collecting fees from users of digital music. The seminar drew the participation of several popular singers and musicians including Quoc Trung, Huy Tuan, My Linh, Thu Minh, Thanh Bui, The Men and MTV music teams.

The seminar was aimed at addressing musicians feelings that they were not being properly compensated.

Currently, there are two major forms of collecting fees from digital music users.  Apple's iTunes store charges fees based on single songs or albums while Spotify.com.vn applies monthly package fees.

However, Vietnamese music users are still unfamiliar with payment for digital music, so the two sides plan to combine the two aforementioned forms of fee collections.

As a result, those who have on-demand digital music services would pay VND20,000 (USD0.94) per month, while those who rarely use the service would pay VND1,000 (USD0.047) or VND2,000 (USD0.09) per song. In some cases, payment may reach hundreds of thousand dong per song. Payment could be conducted via a mobile account.

Digital music is a potential emerging market in Vietnam, as there are around 25 million regular online music users. If they pay VND3,000 (USD0.14) per month, revenues may reach nearly VND100 billion (USD4.73 million) per month in total. To this end, it requires close cooperation between singers, music distributors, copyright managers and clients.

Singer My Tam has paid especial attention to copyright protection. Music fans are allowed to listen to her songs free of charges on her official website otherwise they have to pay via foreign music stores of iTunes and Amazon. This is the first time My Tam has cooperated with a local music site in digital music fee collection.

To date, over 100,000 subscribers of Keeng.vn have agreed to pay fees and the number of payers is expected to continue to increase in the time to come.