Billionaire’s 28-year-old son picks digital music empire over palm-oil riches
KUOK MENG RU didn't spend much time with his billionaire father when he was growing up.
As the third child of an agribusiness tycoon, he was sent off to a British boarding school at 10, graduating later from Cambridge University with a mathematics degree.
His father Kuok Khoon Hong was busy building Wilmar International Ltd. into the world's largest palmoil business, starting from scratch in 1991. His mother constantly reminded him: “Much has been given, much will be expected.”
Yet it was the father who introduced his son to Eric Clapton's music. That led to an obsession with B. B. King and a love affair with the blues guitar.
“I always felt like I had a personal relationship with him,” Mr. Kuok said of the late guitarist.
It's no surprise then that the younger Mr. Kuok, now based in Singapore, chose to go into the music business instead of the family business. The 28-year-old and his partner Steve Skillings are working to turn their startup BandLab into a global cloud-based community for people to create, collaborate and share music.
BandLab is being funded by a group of private investors that include Mr. Kuok's father and JamHub Corp., a maker of audio mixers. Mr. Kuok declined to say how much investment is going into BandLab, but said the start-up is fully funded until 2019. By then, BandLab will probably have about 100 employees, double its number now, he said.
Their approach is similar to Instagram, where there's a thriving community of people sharing photographs. Bandlab is betting that people will want to do something similar with their music. BandLab debuted ( for Web, Android and Apple iOS devices) in August 2015 and is generating millions of dollars in annual revenue, according to Mr. Kuok. The start-up is aiming to be the social network of choice for fans and musicians.
“We want to bring that simplicity and convenience to the people who make music,” Mr. Kuok said in an interview at BandLab's office, where about 40 employees, mostly software developers, work side-by-side.
Unlike SoundCloud, where users share completed songs, BandLab lets aspiring artists seek feedback or collaboration for works in progress, publicly or privately. If a joint effort takes off, it's easy to track contributors, helping to avoid copyright issues. One group on BandLab has 50 rappers and musicians from 15 countries working on a song together.
“Ultimately the two most important things for artist is to make music and have people listen to their music,” said Mark Mulligan, a London-based digital music analyst at Midia Research. A key challenge for BandLab now is to scale the business and amass listeners, he said. “The actual people who create music, there is absolutely a market for this, but it's a much smaller number of people. There's always going to be far bigger audience than contents being created.”