It’s been a couple of weeks since Spotify’s launch in South Korea and K-pop fans aren’t happy at all. K-pop fans around the world, myself included, were disappointed and frustrated when hundreds of K-pop songs were removed from the streaming service because of a dispute between Spotify and South Korean distributor Kakao M. According to reports, Spotify is having trouble renewing licenses that allow them to house many popular K-pop songs on their service for customers worldwide. Spotify released a statement almost immediately claiming, “Despite our best efforts, the existing licensing deal we had with Kakao M (which covered all other countries other than South Korea) has come to an end. The fact that we have not yet reached an agreement is unfortunate for their artists, as well as for fans worldwide. It is our hope that this disruption will be temporary, and we can resolve this situation soon.”
This still didn’t really put fans at ease as a lot of us who had playlists of our favorite songs now have big holes in our lists. Shortly after Spotify broke their silence of the situation, Kakao M countered with a statement that placed blame on Spotify. Really and truly we don’t care care whose fault it is, we just want our music back. Artists were also taken aback to find out that their music was gone as they were not informed beforehand. Among those artists are Monsta X, The Boyz, Hwasa, Tablo, etc.
Korean-Canadian hip-hop artist Tablo spoke about how artists and fans always suffer due to labels being greedy.
“Apparently, a disagreement between Spotify and Kakao M has made our new album unavailable globally against our will. Regardless of who is at fault, why is it that it is always the artists and fans that suffer when businesses place greed over art?”
This is a situation that hurts everyone, it hurts artists and all of the hard work they put in, not only making their music but advertising themselves to get their streaming numbers up as it takes an excessive number of streams to make a decent amount of money. It hurts business for distributors because they lose the trust of their artists and their customers. Many fans, specifically Apple Music users, took to Twitter to express that any consideration to switch to Spotify was now nonexistent as they don’t want to lose any music. I really hope this problem gets resolved soon because it isn’t fair to the countless artists who have been affected nor do I like having hours worth of music missing from my playlists. To my fellow K-pop fans out there that wish to make a note of what exactly you are missing from your playlists here is a tip. Go to the settings in your Spotify and make sure the “Hide unplayable songs” option is off. You won’t be able to see the names of the songs but you will be able to see the album cover and know what albums to make a note of so you can attempt to listen and search them for elsewhere while this issue is hopefully being resolved.
