Unveiling The Issue Of Music Piracy

It was in 1998 when it all began for Marisse. Fresh out of college with a degree in B.S. Pharmacy, Marisse knew in herself that she'd rather put up a small business of her own than pursue a career in pharmaceuticals.

After noticing the all too sudden mushrooming of pirated video and audio CDs in tiangges, bangketas and in stalls in many malls, Marisse, didn't have to think long and hard about what kind of business to go into.

Taking great interest in music and being an avid collector of records of her favorite artists herself, she knew exactly what made these illegal copies so hot to students and underpaid yuppies. It was the idea of not having to shell out 375 to 400 bucks for an original CD and just getting a pirated copy with almost the same quality for as low as P60 to P80.

"Sa hirap ng buhay, imbis na ipambili mo ng orig yung P400, ipambili mo na lang ng makakain mo, diba?" she reasons. "Yung pirated na lang bilhin mo. Mayayaman na din naman mga singers na yan e."

So together with her undergraduate husband, she opened up a stall selling pirated audio CDs, right beside one of the Centro Escolar University buildings, located along the University Belt, with high school and college students as their target market.

Finding wholesale distributors of these pirated CDs wasn't at all difficult then too, since manufacturers and distributors of these pirated records were practically everywhere that time.

"Karamihan sa kanila (suppliers), mga Instik tsaka Muslim. Dati ini-import lang ng mga suppliers naming yang mga CDs galing sa Malaysia at Hong Kong," she explains, "pero ngayon, sila-sila na rin mismo gumagawa."

Money from the business was okay at first. But it wasn't until two years after that sales started skyrocketing and the couple began raking in more profits than they had expected.

The distributors would deliver the CDs in tubes, with each tube containing 100 discs and five titles, and with each CD being sold at P20 each. She and her husband would then sell these for P60 to P50 a disc and earn as much as P3000 on peak days and around a thousand bucks on slow days that come very seldom that time.

It was just the mainstream foreign titles at first-Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, The Corrs, U2, Limp Bizkit and other chart-topping artists.

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