Music

One of the challenges of blogging is doing it regularly. For the last couple of weeks, I have been laboring under a fair amount of guilt for not blogging. I had a couple of days when I felt meh (not good) and there were other days when I had to focus on getting client work out the door (good).

But there has been one thing on my mind for a while and it has to do with the music industry and how it needs to seriously re-invent itself. I love music in most forms. I still have my first LP (Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water) and still continue to purchase physical media. Paying for music is a given for me but clearly I am in the minority these days.

The Internet has clobbered many industries hard and the music industry is no exception. To my mind music piracy is so prevalent that the sharing of music files, in the minds of many, is not considered a bad thing ie an act of copyright infringement act.

In my past, I managed software anti-piracy programs in numerous Asian countries, and know the challenges of taking out legal suits against infringers. It’s one thing to sue businesses for using unlicensed software but it’s another thing, on a totally different scale, suing millions of downloaders of pirated music. There has to be a better way for the industry to increase revenue. The old top down approach doesn’t work anymore.

Having read Sting’s recent op-ed in the New York Times where he advocated that ISPs should monitor the downloads of their customers gave me an uncomfortable feeling. No one likes the idea of their ISP monitoring their use of the Internet.

Artistes have to realize that the Internet has changed the music industry and they must take control of how their music is distributed and marketed. Which is why I agree wholeheartedly with this excellent article by Jon Pareles where summarizes the evolution of the digital age in the context of music and how it was the canary in the digital coal mine (love that metaphor).

I see the Internet as a benign tool. Those artistes who have embraced it and used it to market their music have been able to reach an audience they would never been able to before. For example I discovered this band on the Internet via a NPR podcast and they are in my own Seattle backyard!

Visqueen, and yes, I am going to buy their CD!

 

Opening of the Singapore Legal Year 2010

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The Opening of the Legal Year in Singapore is a tradition inherited from Singapore’s colonial past. I attended the Opening of the Legal Year on 9 January 2010.

In the past there was a fairly elaborate ceremony preceding the speeches including a march-past by the police. Unfortunately I cannot link photographs from the National Archives but to view photographs from the 1966/1967 Opening of the Legal Year, go here and in the search term type “legal year”, for the year range, insert “1966” to “1967” and check the box for photographs. You will be presented with photographs of the Opening from those years.

Below is a photograph taken at the 1966 Opening of the Legal Year (to the best of my knowledge). From left to right are Messrs Goh Heng Leong of Allen & Gledhill, Tan Boon Teik of the Attorney-General’s Chambers (who would become Attorney-General), Abdul Wahab Ghows also of the Attorney-General’s Chambers (my uncle who would become a High Court judge) and Abdul Manaf Ghows of Allen & Gledhill (my father). Unfortunately I don’t know the identities of the police officers to their left.

This photograph was taken a year after Singapore obtained full independence as a sovereign nation, and what fascinates me about this photograph is that within it one can see not only the last vestige of Singapore’s colonial past but also the transition of the legal profession to Singaporeans.

 

After the Opening, I reflected on the speeches made and felt a sense of optimism about how 2010 would turn out for the business providing legal services. 2010 will no doubt be a year of change for the local Bar as the Qualifying Law Firm Practices will have had a full year to make their presence felt. The fact that foreign law firms want to practice Singapore law must indicate that there are business opportunities. I cannot disagree seeing the success of practice areas such as arbitration, admiralty, intellectual property and general commercial work. It’s only a matter of time before corporate finance and banking work pick up.

As an aside, in his speech the Chief Justice made the comment that the high academic requirements required to be admitted to the local law schools and together with the minimum academic requirements required to be admitted to the Singapore Bar has resulted in a highly qualified legal profession. It was a simple statement of fact but that truism stuck in my mind as I had previously just taken the quality of work of my colleagues

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for granted.

Y2K

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I read this article today and it brought back vivid memories from ten years ago. I was in IBM at the time and as the CFO of the division, I was responsible for ensuring that our business and customers didn’t crater when the clock struck 12.01 on 1/1/00.

The amount of work IBMers put into averting catastrophe was Herculean. There were layers of project teams remediating software, and when the software couldn’t be remediated, there were mitigation teams and so on. In many ways, it was IBM at it finest in marshalling its thousands of employees to focus on an urgent task.

Y2K was not viewed as a potential catastrophe but as a for sure event. We just didn’t know the extent of the catastrophe. If anyone knew about the Y2K problem, it would be IBM since they have been making computers since forever.

All our legal teams and outside counsel were alerted waiting for the flood of litigation. So there I was at a New Year Eve’s dinner at the Ritz Charlton. I was pretty anxious as the clock approached 12.00 and when it finally did, I was expecting my mobile phone to light up (we didn’t have smartphones ten years ago!). Nothing happened. Silence. In the end, I had to call the “war room” and there was a deflated voice on the other side. After a year of feverish preparation, nothing happened!

In the end, the outcome was good and it re-affirmed everyone’s trust in technology. To this day, I don’t know whether all those hours spent were wasted or not. Oh well, the world as we knew it didn’t end. All is good with the world.

Updated 1/14/10

I guess I spoke too soon as a Y2010 bug seemed to have impacted some 30 million users in Germany and Australia. Commentaries refer to the bug as the Y2K bug but I am not sure it had anything to do with Y2K other than poor coding.