Much depends, he says, on whether record labels win their appeal of a potentially precedent-setting April decision by a US federal judge who ruled Grokster and other file-swapping networks were not liable for what their downloaders are doing.
"The opinion is that they will probably win that. If they do win that, then obviously they can start encroaching on file sharing networks," he said.
Music copyright lawsuits are also flaring around Asia. Taiwan's music industry has taken legal action against two Taiwanese sites -- www.kuro.com.tw, which has about 500,000 subscribers, and www.ezpeer.com with 300,000 members.
South Korean free music site www.soribada.com, which counts 6 million members and gets about 1.5 million hits a day, is also being sued. A court told Soribada to shut its server in February but it switched to new servers and is open.
"Record companies all over the world are struggling with this," said Terence Phung, managing director of Sony Music Entertainment Singapore Pte Ltd. "It is hurting all of us. There is no solution available to stop this. It is a huge problem."
Although copyright infringement is a crime in Singapore, a 2001 government survey showed 500,000 of its four million people used the Web to download music. Internet service providers are sending letters to downloaders of pirated music on behalf of the recording industry but they do not initiate legal action.
"We encourage our customers to feed back to us on these allegations by the copyright owners. We will then advise the copyright owners accordingly," said Mervin Wang, a spokesman at Pacific Internet Ltd, a Singapore Web service provider.
Sarronwala says the opening of Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store this year was a turning point, spurring labels into releasing quality music online. Though he doubts piracy will vanish he reckons legal online music can thrive alongside it.
As sales fall across the industry, Soundbuzz went profitable on a quarterly basis this year after growing revenues for the past four years, said Sarronwala.
Swee Wong, senior vice president at BMG International based in Sydney, said the appetite for legal music downloads in South Korea and Taiwan was growing.
"They are ahead of the game," he said. "But it's not happening as fast as I would like.
"China remains the wild west," he adds. But even if just 10 percent of China's sales are legitimate, that is still a huge market, he said. "The potential market in one city could be as big as or bigger than Hong Kong or Singapore."
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