World Beat celebrates 30 years on the music trail this month. The column started in Feb 1994 when Chuan Leekpai of the Democrat Party was in his first term as Prime Minister.
It was a time of CDs and VCDs and the tail end of compact cassettes (Japan and the US still use cassettes). Local markets were full of pirated movies and music on these digital formats. Fast forward to today and markets have very little in the way of pirated international popular music, although you can still find vendors hawking DVDs of recent movies and TV series. In Klong Thom Market in Chinatown, an area I like to go to take photographs, most of the popular music available is Thai and comes in pirated compilations of famous luk krung and luk thung acts and singers — an entire career on a digital flash stick.
Most people now rely on streaming services to get their music fix through…
