There is a gap in the music industry that most people outside it never see. A musician can spend a decade developing real skill, perform on national television, score commercial work for recognizable brands, and still have no clear answer to who owns what they create, where the royalties go, or how to structure a licensing agreement. In Malaysia, that gap has been unusually pronounced. Copyright literacy among independent musicians has historically been low, and the infrastructure connecting artistic output to a sustainable livelihood has been thin.
Serene Cheam knows both sides of that problem. She spent years working inside it.
Cheam is the founder of Serene Music Group Sdn Bhd and the creator of Musicpreneur, a music platform based in Kepong, Kuala Lumpur. The platform covers five service areas: production, publishing, copyright and licensing, e-commerce, and education. Its working idea is that music can be run as a business, and that musicians need the training to do it, not just the ability to perform.
Her own background is the test case. She completed her early music studies at Yamaha in Kuala Lumpur, then went to the United Kingdom and graduated with a Bachelor of Music from the University of Westminster. Back in Malaysia, she built a performing career, releasing albums including “I’m Not Serene” in 2007 and the a cappella EP “I’m Not Solo” in 2010, both issued under Serene Music Group. Alongside that work, she was active as a music arranger and production director on commercial projects for Malaysian brands including Maxis, Celcom, and Astro, according to her professional history. That commercial experience gave her a view of the industry most conservatory training does not. She saw how music gets licensed, how copyright gets registered, and how revenue actually moves.
By 2008, she had opened Serene Music Academy, a school specifically designed for independent singer-songwriters. Copyright education was part of the curriculum from the start. Serene Music Group was formally incorporated in 2015, with registration number 1166812-W, and the Musicpreneur platform developed around it.
The copyright and intellectual property arm is where Musicpreneur separates itself most clearly from a conventional production company. It handles copyright management and registration through Malaysian intellectual property channels, and a connected project, PlaySAFE Music, operates as a royalty-free library designed for businesses that need commercially cleared audio for advertising and branded content. The gap the library addresses has two faces: Malaysian businesses that routinely use music without cleared rights, and Malaysian musicians who create music without registered copyright protections. According to the company, the library was built to work on both simultaneously.
Cheam has spoken publicly about what holds capable musicians back. In 2016, she served as a judge for the Borneo Voice Star Singing Competition in Miri, an event co-organized by Serene Music Academy, and told reporters from The Borneo Post that technique, for most Malaysian musicians, is rarely the real obstacle. Purpose matters more. Knowing why they sing and where they intend to go. The same question sits at the center of what Musicpreneur was built to help musicians answer.
On the commercial side, the company lists working relationships with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group, among other brands. In Malaysia’s intellectual property community, Musicpreneur has received the Malaysia Influential Intellectual Property Brands Award and the Outstanding Intellectual Property Elites recognition, according to the company. Cheam was included in Britishpedia’s Successful People in Malaysia in 2020. According to her professional profile, she has also served as a judge for the AIM Best Chinese Album Award, part of the Anugerah Industri Muzik organized by the Recording Industry Association of Malaysia. Invitations to speak at Xiamen University in China followed, as did an interview with CCTV for a documentary examining Chinese music’s reach across Southeast Asia, according to the company.
The Musicpreneur education network includes more than 20 partner music schools and institutes across Malaysia, as listed on the platform’s website. The collaboration model shares curriculum content, links teachers and students across member institutions, and creates shared project opportunities. Serene Music Academy is among the listed partners.
Her book, titled “I Use Music to Earn a Living,” put the premise into plain language before Musicpreneur existed in its current form. That title is the argument the platform was built around: that the question musicians most need to answer has less to do with music than with how a business works.
