It’s a beautiful Monday morning, I’m getting ready to begin my day of classes at Duke after getting out of the shower and getting dressed. Before I get ready to log onto Zoom for the day, I’ve got some time to kill. As I’m getting ahead on some work, it’s time to open up Spotify and get my K-pop playlist up and running. I look for my favorite motivational song to get me pumped to keep working, “Butterfly” by LOONA. I go to click play and…
It’s not there…
That’s strange, there must be some glitch in Spotify’s system. Oh well. I can hold off on LOONA for now, I’ll listen to some GFriend instead. I look up GFriend on Spotify and…
All their songs are missing…
What’s going on here? Oh well, surely I can still listen to my IU playlist. As I quickly scroll down through my playlist to find IU, I see hundreds of songs blacked out, sitting there. My K-pop has gone missing.
Let’s pull up Reddit to see what the issue might be.
“As of 12 AM KST March 1st, all music distributed by KakaoM will be removed from Spotify.”
Although I was still able to listen to my music from the major recording labels (JYP, BigHit, SM, YG), a significant number of songs were missing, as at least 264 K-pop artists had at least some portion of their discography removed from Spotify.
To give some context behind the situation: Music streaming service Spotify recently launched in South Korea. One of Korea’s most popular music streaming services at this time is Melon, which is under operations by KakaoM, who is also in charge of distributing music for countless K-pop and Korean music artists. Melon is considered the leader in music streaming in Korea, as 59% of Korean citizens use the software, and is considered the third most influential entity in the K-pop industry according to Soompi.
As Spotify was entering the Korean music streaming market, KakaoM did not renew their contract with Spotify as they were infringing on Melon’s market share upon entry into the Korean market. There was just one problem with that.
Even though Melon has a grasp on Korea, Spotify has their grasp all over the world.
When KakaoM did not renew their contract with Spotify, it meant that most K-pop artists wouldn’t have their music on Spotify in Korea, it meant that they couldn’t have their music on Spotify…anywhere in the world.
This meant international fans could no longer listen to most of their favorite K-pop groups. K-pop idols with large international followings like LOONA and Dreamcatcher were actively losing streams and revenue. KakaoM managed to shut down a massive portion of the international K-pop industry due to their greed.
After massive backlash from both fans and K-pop companies, as well as threats from clients to leave KakaoM distribution, KakaoM quickly worked to give Spotify whatever they needed to get the music back on their platform. After ten days of radio silence, all the music returned back to Spotify’s platform, and all was right in the world again.
Even though the music has been saved, who’s to say something like this won’t happen again at some point in the future? There is a significant amount of greed and capitalistic tendencies in these corporations with such a small market share to pick from within Korea.
On one hand, KakaoM and Melon’s selfishness was very eye opening to believe that they deserved to stranglehold the entire Korean music streaming market. The primary issue was with KakaoM’s conflict of interest between being both a music distributor and owner of a streaming service. In protecting Melon from Spotify’s penetration into the market, they were not fulfilling their duty towards their clients as a distributor.
On the other hand, it was absolutely terrifying to see how quickly Spotify’s corporation could immediately pin KakaoM in a corner and have all the international fans and K-pop companies pin KakaoM as the bad guy in this ordeal. It demonstrated to me how much of a focus there is in K-pop today purely from a monetary standpoint. Although the K-pop idols themselves have been able to express greater creative liberties in songwriting and music creation, the companies are putting profits before art, and it is hurting K-pop in the long haul. Only time will tell how the market develops over time and if there will be a renaissance of K-pop music as art once again, or will companies and groups continue pressing on trying to squeeze as much money out of fans and stans as possible. It’s quite a scary thought to think how K-pop companies see fans as such easy cash grabs, but as long as the market continues to grow, I fear change won’t occur any time soon.
In the meantime, here’s a meme of IU feeling sad about her music being removed. Thanks for reading!
Musings on K-pop by Duke Univ. Students 
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