Live in the Philippines

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Walay Tunes

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Walay Tunes.  What does that mean?  Well, the translation (from Bisaya) of “Walay” is none.  So, there are no tunes.  What am I talking about?  Read further and you will not only understand what I am talking about but also see a little pun there.

The kinds of music that are available for purchase at music stores in the Philippines is limited.  You can buy OPM (Original Philippine Music).  You can buy things like Rap music, and the latest top hits from countries all over the world.  But, you can’t buy the types of music that I enjoy in stores here.  I don’t blame them for not selling it, after all, there would be very little market for the tunes that I enjoy, because it is not popular here.  However, given the situation where the music is not available in stores, it makes it hard to get ahold of if you live here.

The first thing that people will suggest is to buy it on iTunes.  iTunes sells all kinds of music.  I enjoy country music, and that sort of thing, which is mostly only popular in the USA.  So, yes, iTunes has country music available.  Only one problem.  iTunes does not sell to people in the Philippines.  You can log in and browse around the site, but you can’t buy anything.  This is why I entitled the article “Walay Tunes” because it rhymes with “iTunes” and means “No tunes” which is what you can get from iTunes here!  So, it’s a pun, a little joke, yet also based in fact.

When I lived in the States, that was back in the days when if you wanted some music, you went to the store and bought a CD.  Yes, people still do that, but there are many other methods these days.  It was after I moved here that Napster became very popular with plenty of free music downloads.  That was taken down by the courts (Napster is back, but with a different business model), and other types of music sites popped up.  Mosly these days, you can download songs for 99 cents or whatever price, and I would suspect that these sites are a major way that people buy music nowadays.  I am not sure that the majority of music is sold that way, but I would think that it is a significant amount.  But, not in the Philippines.  Most of these sites simply will not deal with us here.

So, if you live in the Philippines and want any kind of specialty music that is not available in stores here, you have only a couple of choices:

  1. Download music illegally
  2. Order CD’s from somebody like Amazon.com and wait for it to get here.

For me, these are not really acceptable solutions.  Firstly, we have become a society of instant gratification, where you buy something and you have it right away.  An order from Amazon can take 3 or 4 weeks to get here.  Perhaps there are some download sites where you can make the purchase in the Philippines, but if there are such sites, I am unaware of them.

How do you get your music these days?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Download Newsrover and setup a Giganews Account for Newsgroups. Newsrover is $29.99 to register and has an MP3 search feature. Because you are downloading from newsgroups there's no country specific lockouts. Is it illegal? This has never been addressed. I feel as long as the music is for personal use then I have no moral issues with downloading from the newsgroups. Yes it's very much like the old napster used to be, except instead of peer to peer the person posts the mp3 file. The thing is, you are not limited to music. I have found audiobooks, soundsnaps (audio files for movie editing) et al. Most Mp3 files have a royalty code embedded which prevent them from being used in videos, etc. If you try to upload such a file to youtube the video will be blocked (yes I had it happen). At any rate, this is the method that I use to get music. Most of my collection is 80's New Wave music so Impossible to find even in the states.

  2. Hi BrSpiritus- Actually, everything that Newsrover does for $30 you can do for free using a Bit Torrent program. For Bit torrent, I use Azureus (now called Vuze), and it's great. Unfortunately, downloading of music through that method is not legal, though. You are certainly correct, though, that there are no blockages based on your geographic location.

  3. Bob

    I use that bit torrent and vuze method, illegal? no way ooops maybe you are right, ok, Bob, keep it quiet shhhhh

  4. Hi rick b- It is not illegal to use bit torrent, there are a lot of things that you can legally download on bit torrent. Commercial music, though, is not one of them. 😉

  5. Hi Bob
    You can go to any mall and download music on a mp3 or I-pod player for 3-10 pesos per song. Of course you are limited to the songs on their computer which can be limited. I dont think they will have much country music available. I think ordering from Amazon there is a good chance that it will never arrive.

  6. Hi neil- Yeah, the problem for me is that the stores in the malls really have no music that is of any interest to me. Like you say, shipping into the Philippines is unreliable (not the fault of Amazon). It leaves few options to get the music that I want. 😥

  7. i never got into the bit torrent thing. I guess I'm a bit of a rebel when it comes to these things. Singers and Stars make plenty of money… way more than anyone would ever need in their lifetime. So I just laugh to hear the recording industry complain about the loss a few million $ when it's a multi-BILLION dollar industry.

  8. Hi Bob – how does that work with iTunes? Is it based off your IP? I have an account now, if I moved there (or visited) would I be able to download or not? I should have tried it when I was there.

  9. Bob: I download from Itunes usig my US credit card with no problem. You can also try http://www.emusic.com which is lesser-known bands but lots of country music to. Finally, there are a number of Russian web sites of questionable legality (outside of Russia) where you can also download.

  11. Hi Randy C- I believe that once you have an account, you can download from anywhere in the world. However, I am not 100% certain. I know that if you are in the Philippines and don't have an iTunes account, you can't sign up for one from here. I suspect that by the time you are likely to move here things will probably change and it will open up for all, but that is just my personal expectation.

  12. Hi John Miele- I think on iTunes, as long as you sign up for an account outside the country, then you can use it. That is my understanding.

    I used to use one of the more well-known Russian sites and bought music from them. It was cheap – entire albums for just pennies. However, the site has been shut down, except for those inside Russia. I kind of liked using them, because they had basically every album you could imagine, and at least you were paying something for the music, in which case I believe you could at least claim that it appeared that it was legal! 😉

  13. Bob: try setting up an account using one of your business adresses and your ATM visa card with the US address. It should work ok. This is how I set up my I tunes in the UAE. (Also, with the iphone being sold here now, they should open it up now… I think they even have an RP site now)

  15. h bob,

    you can actually buy from iTunes even if you are in the philippines, the trick is you must use a proxy server in the states or a vpn connection from the states, iTunes identify the user's location based on IP addresses, so if you have a u.s. base hosting service ask them if they have a proxy server or a vpn service. of course don't forget to use your stateside credit card too.

  16. Hi dans- thanks for your suggestion. Actually, I have my own proxy server in the States that I use for many such instances. I wrote the article more for the average person, as most people would find such method a little big complicated. I even wrote a column last year on how to set up and use a Proxy server for this.

    I appreciate your input.

  17. I read that ring tones had the largest share of music sales – which is really sad as far as I'm concerned. Music is so underappreciated these days. Here in the States people are obsessed with getting knocked off their sofas from their home theaters, but nobody seems interested in shuttin' off their hi-def and listening to music with the same aural quality. Music is just background while we exercise, drive our car, browse the net or (Lord help us) alert us to an incoming call from our BFF. Long live live music!!!

  18. Hi Gary- I agree, I have always been a big music fan, and continue to be so until this day. I consider music to be a big part of my life. I used to be a musician, by the way, which I think is something that I've never shared here before. 🙂

  21. Hi Bob , here in the Netherlands it is legal to download music for your own , and it us free,
    I download FrostWire [ searching side ] and whit that i can find all i want.
    I just baught a new autoradio , it has a USB and SD connection.
    Then i get a 8 Gb usb-stick .
    Search for music [ country , R&B , oldies etc. download to my PC and then to the
    usb stick,
    Every day 1 hour , it took me 4 weeks to download 2000 songs , that i now can play in my car .
    I can allso play them on my LCD TV through my laptop .
    I hope you can get FrostWire in the Philippines ,
    because , when i come to retire ,
    i sure need it .

  22. Hi Anton- I have heard that the European countries are a little more liberal when it comes to things like Music downloads. Your system sounds great! happy listening!

  23. Hi Bob,

    I hadn't realised that the choice of music was so limited…most of the music types I enjoy are available there, though you do have to go to specialist shops that sell more classical music for some of it.

    iTunes is no great loss to you actually. I don't know if you realise this, but the music downloaded from iTunes is very very very low quality, at a bit rate of only 128k. This means that around 92% of the information on a cd is lost. It might sound just about okay on a really cheap hi-fi system or an iPod with standard cheapo headphones, but as soon as you try to play it on decent hi-fi, it sounds like a cheap transistor radio. This has been a long running issue, and Steve Jobs himself has admitted that he buys cd's instead. It's all about compressing the information so much that lots of music can be stored on a relatively small amount of flash memory. However, if you can accept this, then why not have a us based aol account, and use that as the billing agent for iTunes, which then won't know where you are in the world?

    So the real solution for you is probably to send a list to someone who is coming to the Phils shortly and have them bring them for you!

  24. Hi Jim Hannah- Thanks for your information and suggestions. I thought that iTunes had some higher quality music available, but since it is not really available here anyway, I had not checked that closely.

  25. Hi Bob ther is another site called limewire and you can get free down loads I have been using it for a few years now not to sure if it's legal or not.

  26. Hi andyp- I'm familiar with Limewire, I even used it a number of years ago. Unfortunately, it is illegal. I am looking more for a legal means of downloading music from here in the Philippines. From what a number of people say, it seems like it might be possible with iTunes.

    I do appreciate your suggestion, though. 🙂

  29. Here's an update folks. I just found this site which features a page detailing digital formats and their relative qualities in excellent and intelligent detail. One keeps finding information on the web which says that MP3 offers "cd quality". This is one of my personal hobby horses I guess, but that statement is inaccurate and frequently untrue. The actual quality of the MP3 music depends on the compression ratio, and on most download sites, the compression is very very very high, taking the bit rate right down to 128k which produces a quality which is really very low, and despite what some say, the difference is easily heard by the vast majority of people. I have personally experimented at length, and I can say that I can not normally hear the difference of an MP3 file which is compressed to a bit rate of 320k when comparing with a cd. What's important is that once the file is compressed to 128k as with most download sites, the information is lost permanently, and cannot be regained. That's the part that most people don't realise, especially when the price you pay to iTunes or others is not really as low as it should be given the quality they are selling you.

    Bob, my apologies for sidetracking your thread. (I did wait until it was a couple of days old and on the back burner a bit). It's just that I rarely see information warning people that when they download 128k bit rate music, they are really buying (or sometimes stealing) very poor quality produce that will always be poor quality, unlike the cd which will always be high, even if you rip it down to 128k for your iPod, and the amount of misinformation on the subject is quite astounding. Now I'm sounding like I'm having a good rant. lol. Sorry folks!

  32. A place you might least suspect to find the music you enjoy is on Youtube ! The audio quality will vary depending on who put it on youtube but some of it can be quite good. What has really surprised me are home made music videos to 50's and 60's rock n roll that never existed when the original hit versions of the songs were on the charts. For example, there is a home made video of " Pink Shoe Laces " done to the original hit version of the song by Dodie Stevens back in the late 50's I believe. A title or artist doing the same song may have several posts on youtube. Try each one for best sound quality and you might be pleasantly surprised.

    Although I check certain songs / artists primarily out of curiousity to see if there is a video on it, you might find this as one source of music. Just about any of the music I would want I already own on original 45 RPM Records ( remember those ? ) as I still have my lifetime accumilation of them. The very few songs I have recorded and saved from youtube, I take the Line out from the PC and connect it to the Line in of a dedicated CD recorder and burn the audio signal to disc. I am sure there are other ways this can be done with just the PC but my method works best for me.

    Give it a try Bob, type song title / artist in the search box and you may find some surprises.

  33. Hi Bob New York- Thanks for the tip! I would expect that most music on YouTube would be low quality, but I will check it out and see what I find.

  34. u can download all the songs u want using some technic from this site…imeem.com ..the way it works is like youtube, user upload their music files for online listening…i'll post the procedure here how to DL a song if anyone is interested…