IN FOCUS: Can Singapore produce a music icon who commands Taylor Swift's levels of success and adulation? (2024)

SINGAPORE: The year was 1990 and the explosion of indie music in Singapore sucked in one 18-year-old, who made up her mind that music was going to be more than her hobby.

She was determined to make a living as a performer.

But the plan wasn’t quite viable in Singapore. After releasing her debut album in 1993, she made only S$6,000 in her first year as a recording artiste – just about enough to feed herself, she said.

So she moved to Taiwan under the advice of her then-label, Ocean Butterflies, who wanted to introduce her music to the region.

They released her second album to the competitive Mandarin pop (Mandopop) market in 1994 – it became a hit and the artiste, a household name.

Today, Kit Chan is arguably best known for the song Home, at least in Singapore. First presented to the Sing Singapore festival committee in 1997, she performed the classic at the National Day Parade the following year. The song has taken on a life of its own, enduring through generations.

Chan, now 52, remains one of Singapore’s esteemed pioneer generation singers who made their mark abroad, paving the way for younger Singaporean artistes.

Others have since found international acclaim – from Mandopop stars Stefanie Sun (Sun Yanzi) and JJ Lin to Sezairi Sezali, who became the first Singapore artiste to have a song, It’s You, hit 100 million streams on Spotify.

Yet, they command a fraction of the commercial and cultural domination by the likes of US megastar Taylor Swift, or K-pop groups such as BTS and Blackpink.

Blackpink became the first K-pop group to headline popular US music festival Coachella last April, amid their record-breaking Born Pink world tour. The band then brought the tour to Singapore in May, performing two sold-out shows, which saw Blinks fly in to catch their idols.

Similarly, scores of Swifties travelled to Singapore in early March this year when Swift made it her sole Southeast Asia pitstop in The Eras Tour.

One economist projected that the six shows by Swift would contribute up to S$400 million to Singapore’s economy in the first quarter of the year, benefiting the country’s retail, hospitality, and food and beverage sectors.

What would it take for Singapore to produce a superstar of similar magnitude? It is not just talent, industry practitioners told CNA – Singapore has no shortage of that.

Instead, a host of other factors may limit an artiste’s trajectory before they can even begin.

GEOGRAPHY AFFECTS "CRITICAL MASS"

For a start, Singapore is small. No matter how popular you are here, you cannot hit "a critical mass", Chan said.

“But if you have a regional market, then somehow that critical mass does generate a sort of buzz and energy,” she told CNA.

A country’s geographical location also affects the chances of success, depending on the language an artiste sings in. If they wanted a breakthrough in an international English market, Chan noted, they would probably have a “much bigger advantage” if they relocated to countries such as the US or UK.

Singaporean artistes have geography “working against us” because it hinders their ability to tour, a significant aspect of developing a career as an artiste, added Singaporean singer-songwriter Inch Chua.

The 36-year-old temporarily moved to Los Angeles in 2011 to learn about the music industry on a global stage.

“In Malaysia or Indonesia, if (I am) an artiste who wants to tour, I can, at a scale that is manageable. I can drive three hours away and play in a new town to 50 people, 100 people. Then do that again the next weekend,” she explained.

“I can’t do that in Singapore. If I did a show in Tampines, I would have the same people from Jurong coming. That immediately – on a practical, economic level – makes it difficult, because most artistes will unfortunately feel overexposed after a while … It’s not going to be financially practical for an artiste to then do only one show a month or every three months.”

As a Singaporean artiste, the natural career trajectory would be to go regional, she believes.

Take fellow artiste Sezairi, whose Indonesian fanbase enabled him to embark on a four-city tour in Indonesia in December to promote his newest album Self Soothing.

His song It’s You went viral worldwide in 2021 due to people using it as a soundtrack to TikTok videos, and it was added to Spotify’s Global Viral 50 chart, which tracks songs generating online buzz.

The song also achieved 12-times platinum certification in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and gold certification in Taiwan.

But the 37-year-old Singapore Idol alumnus doesn’t believe he is the musician he “fully wants to be” yet. To him, success means “sustainability”.

Following the virality of It’s You, Sezairi admitted he did not have a plan on how to tour then, even within Southeast Asia, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While he felt it was a waste that he wasn’t able to visit every city where the song was “blowing up”, the experience taught him a lesson.

“To the public, (you have) a number one song, but so what? You’re still sitting in your room. What is music all about?

“It’s a multi-faceted thing – now you got a hit song, you got to go and promote it, you got to play in front of people, you got to make people spend money to see you, so that they will lock in this bond they have with you,” he said.

LACK OF INDUSTRY INFRASTRUCTURE

Being able to develop a “touring circuit” would entail proper industry infrastructure for artistes to build their career, Sezairi believes.

This could mean more money being put into places that encourage community building through music, so local artistes can hold at least one show a month, he suggested.

Sezairi’s peak seasons tend to be May and June, as well as the fourth quarter of the year. But gigs are “very seasonal” for the star who sings in English, Malay and Bahasa Indonesia; he sometimes performs one show every three months, and other times, four to five times a month.

His Indonesian counterparts with the same number of monthly listeners as him perform 15 to 20 gigs a month. If he could do the same, he would be able to hire, for example, a road manager and five musicians who would then also be working 15 to 20 gigs a month, creating a “trickle-down effect” on the industry.

“Being in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines has taught me that (Singapore) always looks to shoot for A-tier,” he added.

“But our industry doesn’t have the B-, C- and D-tier to be able to sustain the growth underneath this A-tier artiste – and that’s why we haven’t produced an A-tier artiste yet.

“We start from E and want to go to A immediately.”

These tiers are not measured by “financial gain” as D-tier artistes can earn a lot of money and sometimes more than those in the A-tier, such as by being a cover band, Sezairi clarified.

“Rather, the metric is what kind of music you want to do. Because the hardest kind of music is your own music; when you want to be an A-tier artiste, you have to be ready to say, okay, this is me.”

The support wasn’t always scant, according to industry veteran and founder of Snakeweed Studios Leonard Soosay, who has produced Singaporean bands he believes were “on par” with those from the West. These include indie acts Electrico, Ronin and The Great Spy Experiment.

“There was nothing for a long time until Electrico came out and people listening didn’t know whether it was a British or American band that the radio was pushing so much. Then when they found out it was actually Singaporean, I think a lot of Singaporeans felt that sense of pride,” he said.

“(These bands) really believed in the scene and in creating music that could take the scene further. They went to America and performed at SXSW (South by Southwest, a major US media and music festival) and did American tours. They did Japan, the UK … they spread Singapore music to these places.

“And I thought, okay, they’ve opened the doors for more people.”

The only drawback was money, added Mr Soosay. Many of these bands didn’t have the funds to sustain a “long, drawn out tour” in these bigger countries.

The National Arts Council (NAC) then stepped in and started giving grants to these bands, which saw a “whole wave of bands”, like indie rock band Pleasantry, going to play overseas, he recalled.

Mr Soosay had hoped this would continue for the next few generations – but he was told that funding would focus “more on the Asian region”.

“Because (of that), I felt like the music couldn’t go to places that were actually the champions of this kind of music,” he said.

From September 2014, NAC and the Media Development Authority (MDA) consolidated their grant schemes for musicians. This meant MDA’s previous funding support – for the production of music albums and EPs, participation in music festivals and joint efforts with industry partners for specialised training – fell under NAC’s purview.

"CONSISTENT" FUNDING TO CREATE OWN CULTURE

In response to Nominated Member of Parliament Usha Chandradas’ parliamentary question in March about government expenditure on local artistes over the past five years, Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Edwin Tong said the NAC supports various aspects of a musician’s work through a suite of grants and initiatives.

These aspects include content production, international export, capability development and audience development.

For example, the Market and Audience Development Grant supports musicians to “tour overseas and showcase at international platforms”, Mr Tong said.

But more can be done, singer-songwriter Chua said. She admits to being a big believer in “artificial pumps”, such as the “concerted effort” to support and rally around local content during SG50 in 2015, then again in 2019 during the Singapore Bicentennial.

She remembered feeling genuine love and support for local music before the pandemic “robbed” artistes.

“During this short window of four years, it was a really great examination of what artificial pumps can do in terms of creating a culture or building a story. So, it’s about consistently doing it,” she said.

Where such “artificial pumps” are needed, Chua noted that Singapore could learn from the global explosion of K-pop in the last decade. The grip that K-pop has on the world proves it is possible to transcend linguistic barriers.

“When I first went to SXSW in 2010, K-pop was not a thing then. But I remember watching (South Korean multinational entertainment agency) SM Entertainment at a conference there, and they were heavily supported by their government in funding. Pushing (them) was like an economic investment in their country,” she shared.

“(South Korea) was really smart. Their strategy, even from a political, government level, was to create cultural equity in the world. It was not about building a superstar; it’s an even bigger macro picture.”

The South Korean government was “very consistent in supporting their culture for more than a decade”, added Chua.

“And SM is now the juggernaut that it is today, bleeding into commercial goods in a variety of other ways.”

Support of such magnitude might make it possible for Singaporean artistes to eventually crack the code in the international English market. This is the hope that record producer Josh Wei still holds.

“I don’t think we’re there at the level where our pop songs are truly competitive with the best English songs in the world. We have glimmers of hope … but on the whole, I think there’s a lot to be done just on the creative (front),” he said.

“We’re in competition with the whole West – you know, US, UK, Canada – all these top music markets. It’s hard to sustain a peak when the Singapore general population has all this choice to listen to whatever they want.”

Mr Wei is convinced that the local music industry is “not developed enough to support past a certain point”: The point of export.

“An act can become big – we’ve seen this – in Singapore and when it’s finally time to become big in America, or even in Malaysia, that’s the point of failure. We can’t seem to figure out the export part of local music,” he said.

This inadvertently bleeds into conversations among upcoming artistes. Sezairi was told after winning Singapore Idol in 2009 that “English music cannot; you go Malaysia, you follow in the footsteps of (Malaysia-based Singaporean actor) Aaron Aziz”.

“This is what they’re telling Chinese kids too. ‘You just look at JJ (Lin)’,” added Sezairi, a LASALLE College of the Arts graduate.

“I spent four years in an arts college where this was the topic of conversation – who’s going to sell out and how we’re going to do it. Like, let’s listen to their music, let’s think about who’s their manager.”

While it’s not entirely the fault of Singaporeans who have been “conditioned” by “post-colonial cultural imports”, it means “we have always wanted Western success because that’s the (art) we know and consume”, Sezairi noted.

Another local singer Shareefa Aminah, better known as Shazza, recently spoke to CNA about reactions to her songs, after a video of her duet with Canadian pop duo Crash Adamswent viral on social media, garnering over 20 million views on TikTok.

Netizens expressed their surprise in the comments section of some of her songs that the songs were not by an international artiste, the 23-year-old shared.

“That's great (and) I'm really glad they liked it. But also, why does it have to be international for it to be good?”

Sezairi admitted to once harbouring this unconscious bias, but has since realised his blindspot made him neglect the power of Southeast Asia’s population.

Top Indonesian artistes hit 10 million to 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify, matching the streaming numbers of US artistes, he pointed out.

Chan, too, feels the tide has changed since the 90s when she first made a splash. Back then, Singapore was not yet “confident enough” in its talents, culture and even taste, unless it “got the nod from other countries”.

“But we have no issue (now). We don’t need someone from another country and culture telling us what’s cool,” she said.

AN ALTERNATIVE LENS OF SUCCESS

In the long run, this might mean redefining success on Singapore’s own terms, rather than trying to measure up against the Taylor Swifts and Blackpinks of the world.

Sometimes, the story that an artiste chooses to tell only resonates with a niche and small market. They don’t need to have “super mass market” popularity to be commercially viable, stressed Mr Kevin Foo, general manager of Sony Music Entertainment in Taiwan.

Mr Foo, who is Singaporean, describes commercial viability as being able to finance one’s passion or art through an audience who will pay.

He pointed to Singapore non-profit, The TENG Company, as one such example, calling it a “great cultural icon”. The arts company that reimagines Chinese music recently partnered with Shangri-La Singapore to produce music for in-room headsets under the hotel’s Music for Mindfulness experience.

The music business, like any creative business, is foremost about “emotional connection”, added Mr Foo, who is also managing director of RCA Records, owned by Sony, in Greater China.

Having worked with various Singaporean artistes like Linying and Charlie Lim, among others, at every stage from recording to distribution, he admitted to once thinking that all he needed was to get such artistes to sing in Mandarin to make it big in Taiwan.

But he has since learnt otherwise.

“There are all these cultural nuances. How you say one sentence, just because of the vocabulary (and) the words you choose, means something different to different people in different parts of Greater China … It’s not just about speaking the language; it’s about how you connect with the audience,” he said.

Remaining authentic also means being clear about one’s career expectations, said Singapore independent rock band Cashew Chemists.

The band’s guitarist Brian Chia told CNA that while they may not have found outstanding commercial success, it was because members had pursued goals outside of music, like full-time jobs.

“Music was only one part of each of our lives. We don’t think any of us seriously envisaged us becoming a professional rock band,” said 35-year-old Chia, a freelance sound engineer.

“We never felt like we were competing with other bands. We always felt free to experiment with our sound. We just wanted to play music that we would enjoy listening to.”

Artistes like Cashew Chemists may stand to benefit the most from social media, which has “made music a lot more egalitarian” and “really changed the game”, said Chia.

Music lovers now have more choices and have developed more unique tastes too.

While the comparatively low barrier to entry could result in “many more Stefanie Suns and JJ Lins”, it also means fewer artistes “taking a whole market and more artistes developing their own niches and each having a more unique following”.

On the other hand, singer-songwriter Chua believes the ease of self-publishing has also removed grinding in a more tangible way – a muscle that she calls “performance stamina”.

Even though a good musician can come from anywhere, not everyone can be a good musician, she noted. In many ways, social media has amplified an artiste’s inborn tendencies, from a love for hard work to the desire for quick fame.

Audiences must also become more discerning to see through the noise, but she sees this as a positive outcome. When audiences are challenged to figure out what they really want and like, they will eventually have a “deeper understanding of what they like and who they are”.

Chua hopes to see a hunger for local content from people who desire to hear stories that are more relatable, as well as from artistes who want to create work “more contextualised to who we are as Singaporeans and to this part of the world”.

And, she added, “for people to receive that very well”.

BALANCING AUTHENTICITY, COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

This is why big labels remain relevant today, suggested Mr Foo from Sony Music Entertainment and RCA Records.

Major labels have lived through the evolution of the music industry, so they know what worked, with the commercial success to prove it. And despite the changing medium, the goal remains to tell similarly resonating stories.

“The label still plays a part with sieving out (talent), with the experience of A&R (artistes and repertoire), with developing artistes and helping them tell and magnify their stories … With a company as big as Sony, it’s really about being prepared to invest,” he added.

For a Singapore artiste to break through in bigger markets abroad, it’s a bonus but not a necessity to have a Singaporean like Mr Foo heading such markets.

Instead, it’s just about having somebody believe in their talent, said Mr Foo.

Sezairi added that it’s “very important that the people who are most like you champion you”, so that when the artiste then gains momentum, they wouldn’t have to be someone else to succeed.

And if Chan’s career is proof, commercial success should not be at odds with staying true to oneself. While she now considers herself “culturally, emotionally and mentally richer” for having chosen to sing in Mandarin, the decision wasn’t always so clear cut.

“I was asked (by my first label, Ocean Butterflies) to reflect on this: Okay, you want to sing in English? Do you want to just be a part-time singer or sing as a hobby? Or do you want to be a professional and make a living, make a name, create your own brand as an artiste? Then you’d have to do it in Chinese,” she recalled.

“Of course I couldn’t be 100 per cent sure, but that was what was offered to me. Literally, it was like, if you don’t sing in Chinese, we’re not interested in signing you.”

Even though Chan wouldn’t describe herself to be “very ambitious”, entering Mandopop was the more practical choice if she wanted to make a living – which aligned with her goals and values.

“I am a very principled person. It wasn’t really about how high or how far I could go. It was about the fact that I believe my work has value … and one of the ways to measure value is whether somebody is going to pay to watch me perform, to buy my CDs. It gives you a very practical edge,” she said.

“We can all dream and it’s great to dream, but that (practicality) sort of anchors me and makes it possible for me to go on and on and on.”

Chan noted it was initial commercial success – “extremely important when you’re starting out” – that enabled her to now enjoy the later part of her career.

“I’ve paid my dues many times over. I’m very happy to say that I’m at this point in my career, in life, where I really work on projects that I just want to do, that interest me as a person, that still move me forward as an artiste; things that pique my curiosity, things that make me feel I could grow and learn,” she said.

While Chan acknowledged she doesn’t have a “huge mass market” now, she has managed to retain a loyal fanbase in the region that has kept her career going.

“I think being true to who I am and picking the right projects for myself has also defined me as an artiste. That is also important – being able to differentiate yourself from everyone else,” she added.

“It eventually paid off for me to just sort of march to the beat of my own drum, because I think that is a reason for the longevity of my career.”