AMS envisages unified Asian music market.

Asia easily has the potential to become the world's biggest music market, according to record label impresario, producer and saxophonist Chika Asamoto. Such is Asamoto's confidence in the prospects of a unified Asian music market aided by the information technology revolution that she set up her own label, Asian Music Standard Records (AMS), in 1999. To date, AMS has a roster of artists from several Asian countries, including South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan. And with CD sales reaching more than 300,000 in individual countries such as Indonesia, Asamoto's young enterprise looks set for a bright future.

Asamoto first started exploring the Asian music market back in the late 1990s. Her desire to look beyond the borders of Japan reflected, in part, her interest in finding out more about Asia as a Japanese-Korean who felt completely divorced from the country of her grandparents. She …