Cambodia’s Music Industry Nowadays

In the 1960s, Cambodia was very prosperous. Every sector was very well developed, and what amazes me the most was entertainment industry. At that time, movie and music industry did make many countries in Asian region jealous. We had Sin Sisamuth and Ros Sereysothea, whom Cambodian people of all generations regard as the Golden-Voiced King and Queen respectively. And there were so many talented filmmakers, song writers, movie stars, traditional dancers, and so forth.  What about nowadays? When talking about this, I’m deeply disappointed. If I’m not wrong, 90 percent of Khmer songs are plagiarized from Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, China, or the US. Is it true that today Cambodians aren’t creative enough to compose our own songs? NO, absolutely not. There are a lot talented people out there, but they don’t have chance to show up. Why? Because Cambodia doesn’t have official modern art school that trains people to be the professional song writers, singers, or musicians. All we have is Royal University of Fine Art that is believed to be national conservationists that pay more focus on traditional dance, music, drama, play, and the like, and the new generation are not fond of that. That forces unskilled music composers to illegally copy the melodies from others and write their own lyrics or even translate the whole meaning from the original works in order to please the audience which are mostly youth. Some are happy with those songs without caring where they come from, but some are so sensitive with the act, especially the plagiarism from Vietnam and Thai, the neighboring countries of Cambodia. One of the reasons is no matter how hard they try to make the original songs, they can’t make satisfying amount of money from their hard works. That’s because people don’t buy the original CDs but the copied ones. This should be blamed on the unforceful intellectual property law of Cambodia. In short, without the encouragement and cooperation from the related institutions of the government, Cambodians will never ever hold our heads up high when coming to talk about entertainment industry especially the music.