Who Counts the Streams?(Part 2)
Part 2 — Measurement, divergence, and what policy actually transfers
Part 1 established that local repertoire is genuinely taking Southeast Asian charts, and that the celebrated share statistics have two blind spots: they do not measure ownership — Universal acquired Thailand's RS Music catalogue in 2024, making it holder of the country's second-largest domestic catalogue — and they do not measure how consumption is distributed across an artist roster, where K-pop's dependence on 48 acts for 39% of its foreign streams is roughly two and a half times more concentrated than American R&B and hip-hop.
This second part turns to a problem of a different order. Not what the instrument omits, but who owns the instrument — and what follows for policy.
Who does the counting
There is a further dependency, less discussed and arguably more consequential than either of the two set out in Part 1.
The instruments that certify the localism turn — IFPI, Luminate, MIDiA, and the platforms' own dashboards — are all external to the region. They define the reporting periods, set the threshold for what constitutes a stream, and, critically, decide what counts as a genre.
The region is no longer entirely without infrastructure here, and the development deserves more attention than it has received. In January 2025, IFPI launched the Official Southeast Asia Charts, a regional hub carrying weekly singles charts for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The Philippines and Vietnam received industry-backed charts for the first time in their history. The charts are compiled by BMAT, run on a Friday-to-Thursday tracking week, and — importantly — weight streams according to the differing economic value of free and paid tiers, so the rankings reflect value rather than raw volume. National bodies including ASIRI, RIM, RIAS and TECA support the operation.
This represents real institutional progress. It also warrants precise reading, as three design choices carry consequences:
Governance. The charts are managed by IFPI — a global industry body whose Asia Regional Executive Board is chaired by a major-label executive — and compiled by a Spanish data company. This is the recording industry counting itself. That is the norm worldwide and not in itself improper, but it is not equivalent to public or regional authority over cultural measurement, and its reporting priorities will reflect rights-holders' interests.
Depth. Each chart publishes a top 20. In Indonesia the predecessor ASIRI chart ran to 50 positions and Singapore's RIAS chart to 30, so in those two markets the new regional standard is shallower than what it replaced. A top-20 chart is architecturally incapable of showing a mid-tier. The very depth that the ASEAN localism thesis depends on falls below the resolution of the instrument built to measure it.
Weighting. Value-weighting free against paid streams is a defensible methodological choice that systematically privileges paid-tier listeners. In markets where the paid tier is small and skews affluent and urban, the chart will under-represent exactly the regional and non-metropolitan repertoire that the localism story celebrates.
Genre taxonomy compounds this. "Música Mexicana" became a reporting category and subsequently became a market: once a label exists, playlists, editorial slots, awards categories and advertising inventory organise around it. T-Pop, P-Pop and Indo-Pop still circulate largely as marketing shorthand rather than as measured units with agreed definitions and auditable figures.
The practical costs are concrete rather than theoretical. Royalty flows cannot be audited against data the region cannot independently verify. Collective management maturity varies widely across the ten member states. Public funding decisions, export targets and bilateral negotiating positions are all built on a foundation the region does not control.
A region can dominate its own charts and remain metrologically dependent. Both things are currently true.
"ASEAN" is doing at least two different things
The localism literature, including the source material this piece began from, tends to treat Southeast Asia as a single bloc executing one manoeuvre. Luminate's midyear market-diversity analysis makes that untenable.
Measured by the share of streaming going to international rather than domestic artists, the ASEAN markets sit in two distinct groups. Thailand and Vietnam are genuinely local-majority: domestic repertoire takes roughly 55–60% of streaming. Malaysia and the Philippines are not. International artists still account for something in the region of 70–80% of streaming in both — placing them closer to Australia and Chile than to Thailand.
This matters for three reasons.
First, it means P-Pop's undeniable visibility — BINI, SB19, chart-topping Filipino-language tracks — coexists with a Philippine market where imported repertoire still carries most of the listening. Both things are true. A story built only on the first is not wrong, but it is a story about the top of the chart, not about the market.
Second, it inverts the usual export logic. Luminate's own reading is that the most insular markets are India, Japan, South Korea and Brazil — with 83.6% of Indian streaming going to local artists — while European markets like Switzerland, Belgium and Germany are the most open. South Korea appears on the insular side of this analysis, not the outward-facing one. The country that exports most successfully imports least.
Third, it means a single ASEAN cultural policy on music would be misdirected in at least half its target markets. Thailand and Vietnam face the questions this piece has been describing: who owns the catalogue, who counts the streams, how does a thick mid-tier get financed. Malaysia and the Philippines face a partly different question, closer to how domestic repertoire wins share it does not yet hold. Those require different instruments.
One caveat on this figure. Indonesia — the largest ASEAN market and the anchor of the entire localism narrative — does not appear in Luminate's plot. The single most-cited ASEAN case is absent from the most rigorous comparative dataset available, which is worth stating plainly rather than filling the gap with the single-analyst estimate discussed in the note on sources in Part1.
Back to France and Japan: what actually transfers
Part 1 introduced two national responses — the French streaming levy and Music Awards Japan — without evaluating them. That evaluation needs the material above, and can now be made.
The French levy is redistributive, and its preconditions are demanding. A 1.2% charge works because France has a single tax jurisdiction and a mature collecting society capable of administering disbursement. Neither exists at ASEAN regional level. National versions are entirely feasible in the larger markets — but note that a levy redistributes streaming revenue, while the RS Music case in Part 1 showed that the durable asset is the catalogue. A levy that funds new production while ownership of the back catalogue continues to move offshore treats the symptom.
The retaliation carries a second and more transferable lesson. Spotify's French managing director stated that the company could absorb the tax but would choose to disinvest in France and direct the money to other markets; it then cut festival sponsorships and, months later, raised French subscription prices. Structurally, a levy captures regulated revenue at a fixed rate. It does not capture, and cannot compel, the platform's discretionary spending: festival sponsorship, emerging-artist programmes, editorial marketing, local staffing. That discretionary layer is precisely what a developing music ecosystem most needs, it is entirely unregulated, and it can be withdrawn as leverage the moment the regulated layer is touched.
For ASEAN markets where platform discretionary investment is currently doing much of the work of ecosystem-building, that asymmetry is the central design problem. A levy introduced without an accompanying commitment mechanism on local investment risks trading a small guaranteed sum for a larger voluntary one. The counter-case exists too: France's live-music association welcomed the levy as the only means of putting the CNM on sustainable footing, and the CNM publicly disputed Spotify's characterisation of the facts. But the question — what happens to the unregulated layer when you regulate the other one — has to be answered before the instrument is copied, not after.
The Japanese awards body is a measurement instrument with a ceremony attached. This is the sharper of the two, and its logic only becomes visible after the section on who does the counting. An awards system creates a domestically controlled certification authority: it decides what counts as a category, what counts as excellence, and which year's repertoire enters the record. It is far cheaper than a levy and it addresses metrological dependence directly.
That is also where it can fail. If the certification runs on fandom mobilisation — voting volume, hashtag counts, engagement metrics — the instrument measures mobilisation rather than music, and public money subsidises the intensity of consumption rather than the production of work. An awards body built that way becomes an expensive amplifier for whatever the platforms were already surfacing, which is precisely the dependence it was meant to correct. The value lies entirely in the independence and transparency of the criteria.
Why Japan encountered no comparable resistance. France's levy drew coordinated opposition, a sponsorship withdrawal and a price rise. Japan's awards body drew none of that. The reason is structural rather than diplomatic: an awards system takes nothing from the platforms. There is no revenue transfer, no compliance cost, nothing to pass through to subscribers. Platforms may even benefit, since award cycles drive listening.
That is precisely its appeal and precisely its limit. The instrument changes who confers status without changing who captures value. France moved money and met resistance; Japan moved legitimacy and met none — because legitimacy was not what the platforms were defending.
The lesson for ASEAN is a sequencing one. Cheap instruments are cheap because they do not touch the contested thing. An awards body is a genuinely good first move against metrological dependence: it builds domestic authority over categories and criteria at low political cost. It will do nothing whatever about catalogue ownership or royalty flows, which is where the RS Music problem actually sits. Choosing the awards route because it is frictionless, and then describing it as a response to foreign ownership, would be a category error — and a tempting one, because it looks like action.
And neither is a regional instrument. Both are national responses in markets with one language, one collecting society, one tax authority. The divergence data above shows ASEAN is at least two different markets. A single regional adaptation of either would be misdirected in half its targets.
From export corridor to regional grid
The strategic conclusion in the underlying data is that the unidirectional export frame is weakening — not for ethical reasons, but for market ones. IFPI's own Southeast Asia chapter supplies the illustrations: Zack Tabudlo's Pano, sung entirely in Filipino, travelled across the region and into Hong Kong; a Thai act's breakout track reportedly performed better in Latin America and Europe than at home; and Thai Boy Love drama series have produced music stars now playing large venues in Latin America, Japan and China. None of these routes ran through an Anglophone feature or a US chart placement.
What that does not establish is that local-to-local collaboration is generally more efficient than the older route — no one has published comparative returns on the two strategies, and the examples above are selected by a company with an interest in the narrative. Treat it as a live and plausible option, not a settled finding.
The obstacles are legal and logistical rather than creative:
No unified regional licensing. A co-produced track clears rights country by country, and the transaction cost frequently exceeds the revenue at stake for mid-tier artists.
Uneven collective management. Split-sheet disputes across jurisdictions with different registration standards are difficult to resolve and expensive to litigate.
Mobility friction. Performance visas, work permits, equipment carnets, and withholding tax on foreign performers remain the single largest cost line in regional touring.
A missing venue tier. There is no continuous regional circuit of 1,000–3,000 capacity rooms, which is precisely the tier at which touring economics become self-sustaining for artists who are not yet arena-scale.
A serious regional agenda would therefore be largely administrative: model co-production and split-sheet agreements; mutual recognition arrangements between collecting societies; a touring facilitation instrument covering visas and carnets; and a shared repertoire and rights database. These measures attract little attention, but they determine whether horizontal collaboration functions as a strategy or remains an aspiration.
A note on Korea's position
For Korean institutions reading this, the useful adjustment is not rhetorical humility about the Korean Wave. It is recognising that ASEAN markets no longer require Korea as an intermediary to global attention — the platforms deliver that directly, and the domestic audiences are large enough to sustain their own stars without external validation.
Two findings sharpen the point. Korea rose to third in Luminate's H1 2026 Export Power Rankings, behind only the United States and United Kingdom — but its three largest importers are Japan, Taiwan and the United States. Southeast Asia does not appear among them. And in the same report Korea sits among the world's least internationally diverse markets, alongside India, Japan and Brazil. Korea currently exports a great deal and imports very little, which is an awkward position from which to advocate horizontal exchange. Acknowledging that openly is more persuasive than waiting for a counterpart to raise it.
What remains genuinely transferable is institutional rather than creative: three decades of experience building rights administration and collective management, the construction of a mid-tier venue circuit, and — not least — a well-documented record of measurement problems, including the errors. Partnership built around counting infrastructure and rights architecture is slower to announce and considerably more durable than co-production headlines.
The distinction to hold onto
Localism is a real structural shift rather than a cycle. But the strongest version of the claim — that ASEAN as a whole has completed a transition from consuming external culture to building independent production ecosystems — is not what the evidence shows. It holds well in Thailand and Vietnam, plausibly in Indonesia, and not yet in Malaysia or the Philippines, where imported repertoire still carries most of the listening. And even where local share is highest, share is not ownership: the Thai case shows both rising at once.
But local share is a claim about attention. Sovereignty is a claim about ownership and measurement. The first is now well evidenced. The second is still mostly aspiration. Keeping the two distinct — in analysis, in policy documents, and in the metrics by which the region agrees to be assessed — is the substantive task ahead.
References
Luminate, 2026 Midyear Report (14 July 2026) — market diversity and non-domestic artist share by country; Export Power Rankings; local share of Indian streaming.
Luminate, Beyond K-Pop: Preserving South Korea's Musical Future (May 2026) — artist concentration in foreign streams.
IFPI, Global Music Report 2026 — State of the Industry (18 March 2026) — Southeast Asia chapter; regional revenue.
IFPI, Official Southeast Asia Charts launch (23 January 2025) and officialseacharts.com — regional chart methodology and governance.
Centre national de la musique — streaming levy design. Contemporaneous reporting on the levy and the platform response from TechCrunch, IQ Magazine, Music Ally and Euronews (December 2023 – May 2024).
A note on sources
International-artist shares for the ASEAN markets in Fig. 1 are read from a scatter plot in Luminate's midyear report; the positions are approximate and the underlying values are not published as a table. Markets under 10 billion year-to-date streams are excluded from that analysis, and Indonesia does not appear in it.
A fuller account of which figures in this two-part piece survived verification, including two widely circulated numbers that did not, appears in the note on sources in Part 1.
IFPI Global Music Report data is subject to the Global Music Report Content Usage Rules (gmr.ifpi.org).
This is Part 2 of two. Part 1 — The Charts Went Local. The Rights Did Not.
