While local music websites are content with making loads of money from views and ads and turn their back on the fee collecting bid, several foreign companies have jumped in or are eyeing the local digital music market.

Amidst the stagnant fee collection in Vietnam, several multinational companies have eyed and made silent forays into the lucrative market.

iTunes, who holds over 70% shares of the world’s digital music, officially entered the lucrative local market late last year, along with those in Thailand and the Philippines, after a long time eyeing the market.

According to Pham Thanh Thuy, Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright (VCPMC)’s lawyer, VCPMC earns 8% of iTunes’ song copyright selling revenues in the first few years.

Within the first six months after the contract was signed, iTunes paid local composers VND160 million (US$7,587) through VCPMC.

“That means iTunes’ revenue within that period amounted to some VND2 billion (US$94,829), which may be insignificant in the world but is quite a surprising outcome in Vietnam. Though it charges $6-10 for each downloaded album, people are willing to pay,” Thuy noted.

Some other multinational music websites such as Deezer.com and Spotify.com are also working on deals to enter the local market.

“They have indicated their intention to join long ago, the thing that hasn’t been worked out is the ratio of dividing the earnings. Though a small market, the local digital music is highly promising,” Thuy noted.

Meanwhile, after the song copyright selling pilot policy, local music website owners only earned a mere VND20 million, and they have grown increasingly less enthusiastic about the task. MV Corp, who led the bid against copyright-infringing downloading also gave up halfway.

The reason is simple. The tighter the control is, the more clients switch to other free websites, which causes considerable losses due to plummets in views and ads. Website owners thus don’t easily give up on their huge revenues from ads, said a source.

Meanwhile, the upgrade of the online payment system and making clear statistics costs quite a lot and the proceeds will have to be shared with composers, singers and recording crew.

The owners of the websites which don’t rely on ads are silently observing their clients’ attitudes and can’t help worrying that their clients may walk away.

“We can’t expect to change users’ free downloading habits overnight. That would take at least two to three years. We’re considering collecting downloading fees but still allow clients to listen to songs for free. Later we would restrict listening to brief parts only as foreign websites usually do. The number of clients will certainly drop, and we can’t tell if we’ll earn more profits or suffer losses,” shared manager of a music website.

Meanwhile, local composers and singers are outraged that their songs and albums are alarmingly publicly available for free online, sometimes even before they are officially released.

“I think fee collection is merely a way to legalize the website owners’ wrongdoings, as most of them just show pro forma support for the anti-free downloading bid, and wait till things get back to normal,” said composer Quoc Trung.