Last time I went to Singapore I was struck by how it was impossible to buy any local music. I associate by music, so I always buy local music when I travel. But in Singapore's tiny music stores, I couldn't even find a Dick Lee CD for sale, and his music wasn't available through Australian iTunes.
(In the end I emailed his website asking which stores to try, and instead they sent one of his personal assistants to my Singapore hotel in person to hand deliver one of their remaining CD copies. For which my family were deeply grateful, we had discovered him 25 years earlier on a cassette we bought of The Mad Chinaman, and as a little Aussie kid I'd learned all the words of Rasa Sayang: "Everything we have has to be the best of the fabulous east and the wonderful west".)
Lately I've started to find Singaporean bands on Bandcamp, so things are improving. But it wasn't like I could walk into Starbucks and find CDs from a bunch of emerging local artists at the counter. I'm heartbroken that the 100th Starbucks store near The Fullerton Waterboat House has apparently closed too.
Despite throwing money at tech salaries are still poor. Everybody gets that money except the developers.
Tech salaries are not poor if you compare them to other South East Asia countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc). If you compare them to other professions in Singapore... then I can't say (I don't know).
Edit:- to counter your example, devs are not as highly paid for the living costs of Singapore. And they don't even form part of the upper bracket, which is largely populated by people in finance and management.
That's just Asia. I don't think a developer is considered "high status" anywhere in Asia.
Singaporean here. The central touristy area is artificial, but the public housing areas surrounding it are slightly more organic — with a fair share of homeless people who sleep on benches at night, too.
And of course, for an actual taste of SG culture, one has to visit the hawker centres and the HDBs to actually get a feel of the city's life. But they seem so staid and artificial still, almost Soviet-esque, compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Even if I take a locality in Dubai (the other culprit here), the Dubai Marina is still vastly more lively than MBS, and the less fancier residential colonies in Old Dubai are still more lively than the average HDB complex. Shenton Way turns into practically a ghost town on weekends in comparison to its counterparts elsewhere.
Singapore feels so artificial, just like another Dubai. Going to London and now a smaller city in Germany was like a breath of fresh air. Startups grow "organically", as in without the government machinery shoved up their arse, people are freer to pursue whatever interests them, and since you can actually see the good and the bad in the city, you actually feel that the city is a living entity. Compare that to SG or DXB, where the homeless are stashed away/deported so that the tourists don't see them.
Recently Singapore has been making a push for the arts, yet it's clearly evident how inorganic the output is - one can clearly notice the wannabeism.