According to the RIAS (Recording Industry Association of Singapore), "pirate sales and downloads alone amounted to S$7 million".

Not wanting to let their guard down, RIAS launched a frenzy of campaigns and programmes designed to portray buying CDs as being cool, and emphasize the extent of the wrongdoing one commits when illegally downloading music.

Among the campaigns initiated was the "Value The Music You Love" movement, launched by popular artiste Jacky Cheung. More memorably, there was the HIP (Honour Intellectual Property) Alliance, which was launched in collaboration with the organizations in charge of music, movies, video and computer games, and computer software. It is currently in full swing, with RIAS inviting several famous artistes in the region to promote the original articles.

Some record labels and artistes have tried out copy-protected CDs, which have raised a big fracas, as demonstrated on 1 July 2005, when a iPod owner won a 'Coldplay: X&Y' CD, which was copy-protected, in a competition organised by Apple Computers. He found that he was unable to rip the music into his iPod, and infuriated, he wrote in to The Straits Times, stating that the copy-protect function was essentially defeating the very purpose as Apple was giving the CD out: to put in the iPod, yet it is impossible to do so because of the copy-protect function.

The authorities have also implemented new rules and laws, stating that the linking and downloading of music files (in mp3, wma, ogg, wav, aac formats) is strictly prohibited. Singaporeans do not seem to take these laws seriously, judging by their response in last year's survey.

This may be a result of the authorities only implementing the rules, but not initiating the sentence of a jail term and/or a heavy fine. Many people have received letters of warning from their ISPs (Internet Service Providers), but the sentences have not been actually meted out to anyone asofar.

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Sale of MP3 Players

In the past few years, sales of mp3 players have rocketed sky high. Among the more popular players are the Apple iPod and the Creative Zen Micro. Both these players have a massive capacity of memory to store songs, of about 20GB each, which amounts to about 27,000 songs, compared to a CD which can store about 15-20 songs. However, how does one obtain the sheer number of mp3 files in order to fill these players up? Definitely not by buying CDs. Obviously, to many of us, the simplest way out would be to download the songs, and then 'drag n' drop' them into the mp3 players which operate on a plug and play basis. This is considered one of the reasons that music downloading has become so insanely popular in recent times.

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Last Year's Survey

According to a survey carried out last year, the average teen in Hwa Chong Institution has about 5GB of music and mp3 files in his computer. He has an mp3 player, and either is ignorant or does not care about the new that the government has implemented to curb illegal music downloading.

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Target Audience

One of the reasons that this project is absolutely relevant to current context is beacuse of its target audience.

This study's target audience is basically the teens in Singapore who download music (almost all) and inform them of what they are doing, and the possible repercussions that their downloading might have on the music industry, and perhaps they themselves.

Other target audience would include those working in the music industry, and the parents of teens who download music, as a new law passed in the US stated that parents would be responsible if their child (under 15) downloads music.