In June 2016, Serene Cheam flew to Miri, Sarawak, to serve as a judge at the Borneo Voice Star Singing Competition. Sixty-one contestants had come from across East Malaysia, from Sarawak, Sabah, and Brunei. Watching them, she described what she saw to reporters in a phrase the Borneo Post printed at the time: “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” The talent was real. The question she kept returning to was what happened to it afterward.
That question is what Serene Music Group Sdn Bhd, incorporated in Malaysia in 2015, was built to answer. The company operates under the brand name Musicpreneur, a compound of musician and entrepreneur that says plainly what it is trying to develop.
Cheam grew up in Kepong, a neighborhood in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area. Her formal musical training began in childhood through Yamaha coursework and continued through the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music, where she completed Grade 8 qualifications in both practical performance and theory, according to biographical material she has made available publicly. She went on to the International College of Music, where she earned a Bachelor of Music with honors in Professional Music. The years that followed included performing, teaching piano, working as a vocal instructor, and building up a working knowledge of what the industry actually asked of people trying to live inside it. The gap she kept encountering was not between good musicians and great ones. It was between musicians with ability and musicians with a usable career on the other side.
The company she founded runs on two tracks that are meant to reinforce each other. The first is a commercial music production business. According to Serene Music Group, the production arm covers songwriting, sound design, voice talent and dubbing, music arrangement, film and animation scoring, advertising jingles, and what the company describes as sonic branding, the development of original audio identities for corporate clients. The company reports working with more than 600 brands across its years of operation, and client logos displayed on the Musicpreneur website include names from Malaysian broadcasting, financial services, retail, and consumer goods.
The second track faces musicians rather than businesses. The Musicpreneur platform provides an education joint-venture program that connects with music schools and academies across Malaysia, supplying curriculum content, instructor development, and online learning infrastructure. According to the company, its programs are registered with HRD Corp, Malaysia’s national human resources development body, making certain courses eligible under the corporate training levy system. Beyond the formal training, the platform operates as a membership community, hosting events, publishing video courses, and creating structured access to working music professionals that would otherwise take years to develop through informal networking alone.
The logic connecting the two sides is not complicated. Commercial work generates the revenue and institutional credibility that make a musician development network possible to sustain. A pool of commercially trained musicians generates a more reliable source of talent for production clients. Whether that loop closes cleanly depends on execution, but the model at least represents a more complete account of what the industry actually requires than most music schools are organized around.
Cheam also documented her position in a book she authored, available on the Musicpreneur platform’s online store. The title translates from Chinese as I Use Music to Earn a Living. Getting good at music and making music pay are treated in most professional training as a single problem. Her argument, and the premise of the business, is that they are two distinct ones, and that confusing them is precisely how talented musicians end up without careers.
By 2026, Musicpreneur was marking nine years of operation. A World of Music Tour program had reached its fourth edition, adding a Hong Kong stop to a regional circuit that had previously been focused on Malaysia. Active competition programming and new workshop formats, including roleplay sessions simulating the working lives of arrangers, AI music producers, and live performers, had expanded the catalog.
In 2022, the company co-produced Malaysia Gemilang, a music video project assembling 31 artists from across the country, reported at the time by DPI Media as the launch of a wider music-based social impact initiative under the Serene Music Group umbrella.
The Borneo Post described Cheam, back in 2016, as a “singer-producer-turned-vocal instructor.” The phrase still fits, if incompletely. What the decade since that filing has produced is closer to a music industry infrastructure firm organized by someone who spent years on both sides of the studio door and got tired of watching what fell through the gap in between.
