Apparently, Singapore Is Trying to Tell Me Something, But What Exactly?

“Apparently, Singapore is trying to tell me something…” is not my typical style for a title. This time around though I wanted to express freely, ignoring defaults and conventions — at least for this piece.

Quite recently, I checked my analytics like I sometimes do and couldn’t help but notice Singapore consistently showing up in my traffic breakdown. At a particular time, the country accounted for 64.5% of my website’s traffic; more than every other country combined, and roughly twenty-four times the share coming from Nigeria, the country I write from.

Essentially, I write about music composition, publishing, and getting placed, i.e., the strange, patient business of getting a piece of music into a film, a show, a game, or an ad, and helping artists get the most return from that placement.

Ordinarily, Singapore was not a country I’d expected to see near the top of my reader traffic. The top countries for my traffic typically rotate somewhere among US, UK, Canada, Australia, sometimes, the Netherlands. So instead of scrolling on, I sat with the question for a while. Who is visiting me from Singapore, and what is leading them here?

At that point, I had no inclination whatsoever, but the longer I sat with it, the more I started to wonder whether the traffic was less a mystery and more a signal, pointing toward something already happening in Singapore and its music scene that I had not been looking at.

What I Knew About Singapore

Before the experience, I actually knew little about Singapore. I knew of Lee Kuan Yew, the Asian Tigers, Singapore Airlines and the fact that the country is a busy tourism hub. The interest in my content however made me curious to want to learn more about it, so I spent a good amount of time doing just that, and some of what I found reshaped how I see the country entirely.

Is Singapore a Country, and Where Is It, Exactly?

Digging through my own site’s search data, some of the questions that lead people here are wonderfully basic, and I say that with no judgment, since I have typed worse into Google. Is Singapore a country? Yes, fully: a sovereign city-state, not a city tucked inside someone else’s nation. Whether you search it as “singapore is country” or “is Singapore a country,” the answer does not change.

Where is Singapore country located? At the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia, linked to Malaysia by a causeway and separated from Indonesia by the narrow Singapore Strait. And what language is spoken in Singapore? Officially, four: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, with English carrying most of the weight in business, government, and nearly all music, sync-related conversations.

The top countries for my traffic typically rotate between US, UK, Canada, Australia and sometimes, the Netherlands.

The Strange Stuff

Singapore, nicknamed the Lion City from the Malay “Singapura” has almost no natural fresh water and no natural lakes. Much of its drinking water is imported from Malaysia, alongside the sand it uses to build new land.

The country has grown its own landmass by roughly a quarter since independence, using imported sand to reclaim coastline from the sea, a trade that has caused real friction with neighbouring countries. There is something almost cinematic about that image, a small nation quietly buying its own edges into existence, piece by piece, out of the sea.

Names You Would Recognise

A few Singapore connections surprised me. A couple sit closer to my work than I expected. The country’s national dish, Hainanese chicken rice, is a hawker-stall staple that Gordon Ramsay himself once lost a cook-off over.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018), the Warner Bros. romantic comedy, was filmed largely on location in Singapore. It became one of the highest-grossing romantic comedies of its decade. That is a reminder that the city itself has already stood in for a story the whole world watched.

And Singapore Airlines’ “Singapore Girl” campaign, running continuously since 1972, is one of advertising’s longest-lived brand identities anywhere in the world; a masterclass, honestly, in the kind of sustained emotional branding that composers spend whole careers trying to score a few seconds of.

It got stranger still when I checked the tool I had used to research parts of this very piece, Ahrefs, the SEO platform I reach for alongside Semrush, was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Singapore. I had used it for years without once registering where it was built. The country was running in the background of my own workflow long before it showed up in my analytics.

I knew of Singapore belonging to a small, storied club: the “Four Asian Tigers” (Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan). These are economies that grew at exceptional speed from the 1960s through the 1990s. It is not a detail I would have gone looking for on my own. But it explains something about the confidence with which sync licensing in Singapore now moves in industries, like ours, that reward scale as much as talent.

Perhaps, the one that mattered most was musical, and it sits right at the intersection of music production and sync licensing and everything this blog is about. Singapore is the headquarters of BandLab, one of the biggest music-making apps in the world, used by tens of millions of creators.

Most people outside Singapore assume BandLab is American. It is not; it was built and is run from Singapore, by Meng Ru Kuok, under a company now called Caldecott Music Group. I sat with that fact longer than I expected to. A place I associated with airports and skyscrapers turns out to be quietly running one of the world’s largest music technology platforms, the kind of infrastructure a lot of composers frequently use without ever wondering where it’s sourced.

Where Films and Media Composers Actually Sit

Singapore’s population is small. Its footprint in film production, however, is not. The country functions as the regional home for many of the companies that actually greenlight the productions we score for. Netflix, Disney, and Warner Bros Discovery all run their Asia-Pacific operations from there. Gaming studios like Ubisoft, Riot Games, Tencent, and Bandai Namco have built a real presence in the city-state too. Riot’s Singapore office is its full Asia-Pacific headquarters, covering everything from game publishing to competitive esports tournaments.

What that means for someone like me is less about numbers and more about proximity. A film like Crazy Rich Asians did not just use Singapore as a backdrop. It used a place where the regional decision-makers for that kind of film production project already sit. Music supervision in Singapore is not routed somewhere else and left waiting. Increasingly, Singapore is the room where the decision gets made. That is a very different market to write for than one where you simply hope your work crosses someone’s desk eventually.

The Two-Key System Most Composers Don’t Know Exists

Here is where the piece stopped being reflective and became genuinely useful to write, at least to me. The COMPASS Singapore royalties system has a wrinkle that catches even experienced composers off guard. It is the kind of thing music supervisors here live with daily, but a composer sitting in Lagos, London, or Los Angeles might never think to ask about.

Two Bodies, Two Rights

Since the Copyright Act 2021, Singapore has run on two separate collecting bodies instead of one. COMPASS — the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore is the country’s long-established performing rights organisation. It handles the composition side: public performance, broadcast, and reproduction rights in the underlying musical work.

A second body, MRSS — Music Rights (Singapore), handles a separate right entirely. This is equitable remuneration for the public performance of sound recordings. It represents record labels, not composers and publishers.

Where This Trips People Up

A licence with COMPASS alone does not cover the sound recording side. Some businesses using music in Singapore have been approached by both bodies. This can feel like duplicate licensing at first glance. Legally, it is two separate rights, cleared separately.

For composers registering internationally, there is a catch. Not every royalty administration platform has a direct relationship with Singapore’s smaller composer societies. Some registrations still have to be handled on their own, quietly, without anyone flagging it for you.

None of this is a secret to Singapore-based rights professionals. But for a composer pitching into the market from outside, this COMPASS Singapore royalties structure is exactly the kind of detail that slips through the cracks. It is the same quiet-tax pattern I wrote about on a larger scale in The Black Box Trap. Many composers assume one registration covers everything under sync licensing in Singapore. They never learn otherwise. They never find out what they were owed.

A licence with COMPASS alone does not cover the sound recording side.

Where Singapore Sits Beside the Markets I Know Better

Placed next to the industry’s older, more familiar centres, the shape of sync licensing in Singapore becomes easier to see. Smaller, yes, but built differently, and unusually alive in the categories currently pulling the most attention. This is where dual-CMO royalty Singapore rules and gaming muscle both come into focus at once.

What strikes me most, looking at that table, is not the size gap. It is the shape gap. Singapore is the only market here running a split rights structure between composition and recording; the same dual-CMO royalty Singapore setup described above.

The US and UK are fragmented across competing PROs. But neither is split by right type the way Singapore’s is. Its standout category, gaming, sits inside a segment the wider data keeps confirming. It is the clearest evidence of Singapore gaming industry music at scale.

Video games are consistently flagged as the fastest-growing sync category going into 2026. AAA titles now command fees that rival mid-budget film placements. With more than 180 active studios there, Singapore gaming industry music is not a footnote beside film and TV sync. A composer thinking only in screen terms would walk straight past it.

What This Means From Where I Sit

I write this piece and build my sync catalogue from Lagos. I work across film, television, games, advertising, and sport, not any single lane. It is the same range-over-specialisation logic I laid out in Music Publishing vs. Masters. The Singapore traffic did not hand me a name or a reason.

What it handed me was a market built to reward exactly that kind of range under sync licensing in Singapore, almost by accident of its own history. Film production, music supervision in Singapore, and the wider catalogue sit closer together here than almost anywhere else I have looked.

So from everything written so far, what do I think Singapore is trying to tell me? I think it’s basically suggesting that composers who work in just one lane, film or television alone, are already behind. Singapore rewards range: gaming as much as movies, advertising and sport as much as broadcast, composition rights kept separate from recording rights.

In essence, my ‘Singapore signal’ isn’t necessarily noise, but a preview of where media composition, sync licensing and the markets around them are heading.