Why Filipino Music is Dying

The Organisasyon ng Pilipinong Mangaawit is a joke and does as more damage to the local industry in the name of helping out.

Earlier this year, President Ogie Alcasid announced that OPM will be pushing for higher taxes for Foreign acts, in order to protect the so called "welfare" of local acts. Because of this, a ticket for a foreign artist's performance here in Manila would often be at least 20% higher than in Singapore or Hongkong, not even considering the fact that these are first-world countries we are talking about.

While this "might" help out the government in terms of additional revenue, I'm pretty certain foreign acts and local acts usually cater to a separate social status bloc. Putting on more taxes will hardly convince people who would rather see foreign concerts to watch shitty local ones just because they're "cheaper". You know what else is cheaper? Watching TV. If you do it from outside your neighbor's house, it's even for free. People watch concerts not because they can afford it. It's because they actually WANT to see the artist perform.

Killing competition by tax chokes is both underhanded and unsportsmanlike. Instead of trying to improve their acts, OPM pulls this, something tad step short of artistic fascism. So pull out a gun and take us hostage already. To make things worse, OPM refuses to eat its own cooking by SUPPORTING THE FOREIGN ACTS AND WATCHING IN THE VIP AREA OF EVERY FOREIGN ACT CONCERT. If OPM really wanted to compete, they'd take the foreign acts as a challenge to up the ante. If ever, foreign performances might even develop the local industry by inspiring up and coming acts, who might otherwise be too poor to watch it because a certain organization wanted poor people to stop wasting their money on useless concerts of foreigners and waste it on their useless concerts instead.

There's probably some other reason behind this move. Raising taxes on the grounds of fostering the community is a lie. No startups would be threatened by foreign acts. Why would your bar gig be sidetracked because Bruno Mars wants to come here to sing and snort cocaine? Only the ones who've been in the industry for so long would see that as a problem. Think about it.

And why is it that people have stopped watching local concerts anyway? Let's just put it this way. The two highest ranking officials in OPM is Ogie Alcasid and Gary Valenciano. I have a lot of respect for the talent of these two guys. But! Both of which released albums last year that were just 80% covers, a good number of them from foreign artists. While covering is understandable and quite entertaining, let's not forget that the OPM is supposed to stand for ORIGINAL PILIPINO MUSIC. For people who advocate so strongly against piracy, originality seems to be so lowly regarded. Why bother watching covers when you can go for originals?

Ogie Alcasid was nice enough to say this during an interview:

What are his plans for the revival of OPM? “Siguro, we have to assess the problems affecting the music industry before we could offer any solution. Kung ako ang tatanungin mo, ang isang problema ay ang kawalan ng sigla sa bentahan ng music. Wala kang naririnig na bagong music. ‘Yung paggawa ng bagong kanta bihira na. Tapos ‘yung batas na dapat four Original Pinoy Music (OPM) songs ang pinapatugtog every hour hindi na rin nasusunod. Siyempre nariyan pa rin ang problema ng piracy. Then the taxes sa mga concerts,” said Ogie.

So to keep it short. He complained there's not enough originals out there and THEN went on to release covers anyway. Man's gotta earn a living, I guess. Fuck principles. Later in the interview, he went on to propose drafting policies to foster the community through mandated airings of songs and other politically charged bullshit that likely wont solve anything but the OPM's personal problems. You don't solve sociocultural issues with political solutions. It's never worked that way and it probably never will now.

To be fair, to show that OPM does care for artists who AREN'T groomed by the big publishers, they have launched an OPM-Pagcor search for talents. And I have no qualms about this. A lot of good talent are out there just waiting to be discovered. Of course, there's still the fact that even with this contest, you can see where OPM's emphasis lies. Instead of trying to address the issue of not having enough people composing new songs, they're just trying to bring in more people who can PERFORM. From the mouths of the organizers, the objective is to find the next world class performer like Charice and Arnel Pineda, BOTH of which became famous for singing other people's songs. Gone are the song-writing competitions. I can't remember the last time anything like that was even televised. Which is too bad. I thought a lot of the better songs from the 90s came from those competitions.

What we have now is an archaic organization ranting about the clear problems of the industry, while at the same time grossly contributing to the problem and taking steps that are backwards-drunk away from solving the issues at hand.

Since when has the OPM become a part of our government?