VietNamNet Bridge – Music albums are a hot item at this time of year and unclicensed businesses are taking advantage of a largely unregulated market, reports the magazine Thoi Trang Tre (Young Fashion).

Pirated: Music albums are a hot item at this time of year and unclicensed businesses are taking advantage of a largely unregulated market.

Smuggled and pirated CDs that have flooded the market in Ha Noi and HCM City have caused the purchase of original CD's to fall by as much as 80 per cent in recent years, the report says.

Manufacturers, artists, and shopowners in HCM City are struggling to get their CD's heard.

"Our sales have dropped by half," the report quotes Nguyen Thi Thuan, owner of a CD shop on Huynh Thuc Khang Street in HCM City's District 1 as saying.

"CD piracy has reached such a scale that producers launch a new CD in the morning and pirated copies are available in the market in the afternoon," she said.

CDs and DVDs featuring music and comedy skits performed by pop stars My Tam and Dam Vinh Hung, as well as well-known artists such as Hoai Linh and Xuan Hinh, are copied illegally and sell like hotcakes in the market.

Worse still, the pirated CDs have the same packaging as the legitimate product even down to the stamps issued by the Performing Arts Department under the Ministry of Culture and Information to fight CD and VCD piracy, Thuan said.

But experts say one reason that local CD manufacturers lose out in the fight against pirated CDs is that their products cost up to ten times more.

The price of a CD released by the Sai Gon Audio-CD Company is around VND100,000 (US$4.5). This compares to a pirated CD that sells for only VND5,000 (25 cents).

To compete with illegal products and attract more customers, manufacturers and their artists have worked to diversify their range of products and lower prices.

They also have called for stricter enforcement of copyright laws by authorities.

Nevertheless, illegal CD are widely available in HCM City, even on main streets like Huynh Thuc Khang, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Nguyen Thien Thuat, Hung Vuong and Tran Quang Khai.

The report also cited an unnamed CD expert as saying smuggled and pirated CDs are of low quality and can damage CD players. Though an illegal CD normally features 10 to 12 songs, many of them will not work for long, he warned.

Source: VNS