Is it? Maybe in shopping malls and bars, then I agree. I live in Singapore and a lot of Singaporeans who I meet listen mostly to either Chinese or Indian music. It might be different though in Thailand or Malaysia.

Remember though, that SEA is just part of Asia. China and India are huge music markets. Additionally, Japan and Korea have very strong, local music scene as well.

I would actually call out Japan first, they still have the 2nd largest market by revenue with quite a distance [1]. It's more than half of what the US music market makes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_music_industry_market_s...

Last I was in Shanghai, about 3 years ago, there were Maroon 5 posters all over the subway.

It seems to me that, strangely enough, Chinese pop culture actually aligns much more to the USA than the Japanese one. Japanese tend to prefer everything domestic first, especially so in games and music, movies a bit less so but it's still a much larger purely domestic film market compared to EU (if you don't count US financed films made in EU countries).