Lucky number seven, at least it is for us this time. Dragon Radio has it’s first interview with Lao hard-rock stars, the Cells!

Our star reporter, Thanapa, caught up with the Cells at their Bangkok show this past weekend for what might be their first interview in English.

The guys were gracious enough to give us a bit of their time as they tour Asia promoting their last CD “Cells”. It was surprising to me to find out that their tour is being sponsored by a big-name beer company, seems that corporate sponsorship is everywhere these days, even in Laos! Check out the video clip (no audio) too, looks like any other live band in the US, right?

Additionally, as you may know, I am an MBA student (http://www.onemba.org), so my marketing professor should be happy to learn that I am actually reading the book assigned and getting some useful information out of it. I cam across some statistics (some which I can not reprint here) that have reinforced my belief in what I am doing.

The first fact was from a 1996 survey that listed the top ten countries arranged by percentage of domestic and international pop music consumption. Here is a sample:

Nation / Domestic / International
——————————————-
Turkey / 95.7 / 4.1
China / 92.6 / 0.5
Japan / 77.2 / 17.8
US / 75.0 / 21.0
HK / 64.9 / 28.3

So what this tells us is that Turkey and China mostly consume local music from local artists, Japan and the US are still heavily local consumers, but are buying imports and Hong Kong leads the pack as far as consuming imported music (most of which comes from China and Japan interestingly).

The next set of statistics shows the percentage of the worlds music consumption by country.
As you can see this is from 1997 (unfortunately the latest I could find for free on the web) what is striking is the size of the lead that the US has over it’s nearest competitor. I am sure these numbers have evened out over the last 8 years, but also note that Japan is #2 at double the share percentage of the UK and Germany.

World Leading Markets Shares 1997 Music Retail Sales (US$m)
1. USA 11,906.0 / 31.3%
2. Japan 6,261.7 / 16.4%
3. Germany 2,836.8 / 7.4%
4. UK 2,729.7 / 7.2%
5. France 2,119.5 / 5.8%
6. Brazil 1,180.5 / 3.1%
7. Canada 977.5 / 2.6%

Thank you to all those listeners that provided me with helpful feedback every week, I really appreciate it…and I need MORE

If you have questions/complaints please email me at info@dragonradio.asia; likewise if you have some music you would like to share send it along as well using the “Send Me Your MP3″ link on this page.

Today’s playlist:
Song / Artist / Album – Country

Milk Tea / PLUS-TECH SQUEEZE BOX / Fakevox - Japan
Be Myself 作自己 / David Tao 陶喆 / The Great Leap – Taiwan
ໃຜ(ທີ່ຜຶດ)-ເຊວສ Who’s Wrong / Cells / Cells – Laos
農村出事情 / Loh Tsui Kweh Commune / “LTK Commune/Live 1997; 2001 Remix” – Taiwan

Click here to listen:
DragonRadio007.mp3 – Dragon Radio – Week 007

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