March 12, 2008

At what cost, Stardom?

Alvinology said:

by2.jpg

This pair of twin sisters by the way, are the latest artistes to be rolled out by Ocean Butterflies International (ob-i), founded by famous local musician, Billy Koh (许环良). ob-i is also the recording company that successfully made JJ Lin (林俊杰) the big star he is now, in case you don’t know.

The twins were talent-spotted by ob-i from its music school when they were 13 years-old. Marked for stardom, they were sent to Taipei, Tokyo and Beijing for grooming for 6 months since June 2007, last year.

After taking time to read through their older blog entries today, I finally realised what was wrong - ob-i made the girls dropped out of secondary school to pursue a music career with them.

You can read what the girls have to say about this in their own words on their blog:

"We need to hand in our application to drop out of school to our form teacher today. However, ob-i requested us to keep the reason for dropping out a secret. Hence we were very frightened. We were worried our teacher will ask too many questions. We went to approach our teacher after school with a group of friends. We lied that we were dropping out in order to purse our studies overseas. With the help of our friends, our teacher did not discover we were lying."

Recommended by Anonymous Coward: "Recording company can like that one meh? Make 15 years-old girls quit school, lie to their teacher to pursue a singing career?"

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Submitted by Anonymous Coward on March 11//1:06am and published by mb, shianux :: 19 comments | 5502 reads | trackback (3)