Lawmakers in South Korea have introduced a bill that would require music distributors to screen tracks for content harmful to minors before those tracks are released.
The amendment to the country’s Music Industry Promotion Act was filed on Monday (July 6) by Rep. Kim Hyun of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, alongside nine co-sponsors.
Lodged with the National Assembly as Bill No. 2219775, it would require distributors to check whether a recording is harmful to youth before release, applying the review criteria in the country’s Youth Protection Act.
If a track is judged harmful and its creator is under 19, the distributor must block it from release. An adult creator would instead be notified that the track may be designated harmful to youth, restricting it to adult listeners, according to The Korea Times.
South Korean arts outlet News Art examined the bill as filed with the National Assembly and reported that it carries no criminal penalties. Distributors that breach the screening rule would instead face corrective orders or warnings from local governments.
Under the current system, the Youth Protection Committee under the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family reviews songs after release and bars minors from those it designates harmful.
That designation can take weeks or months, the bill’s backers say, leaving a window in which a track can spread online before any Youth Protection Committee ruling.
Kim has cast the measure as a response to hateful and crime-glorifying content spreading through music.
“Artistic freedom must be respected, but we cannot stand by and do nothing while hate- or crime-promoting songs are distributed online freely, harming peer communities, classrooms and ultimately society as a whole.”
Kim Hyun, Democratic Party Representative
“Artistic freedom must be respected, but we cannot stand by and do nothing while hate- or crime-promoting songs are distributed online freely, harming peer communities, classrooms and ultimately society as a whole,” Kim said.
“Because culture and the arts are the spiritual assets of society, any attempt to abuse them as a means of spreading hate speech must be corrected.”
An aide to Kim told The Korea Times that the bill was partly prompted by a recent case involving Incheon middle school students who released a track filled with violent, hateful expressions toward peers, which then circulated widely across music platforms.
The bill has drawn sharp criticism from within South Korea‘s music community.
Rapper E SENS was among those pushing back on social media. “You shouldn’t bring censorship back. Who sets the standards and who gets to decide?
“If a particular song is uncomfortable to listen to, isn’t it enough for that person to simply choose not to consume it?”
“If a particular song is uncomfortable to listen to, isn’t it enough for that person to simply choose not to consume it?”
E SENS, Rapper
A coalition of 10 cultural and arts groups has voiced similar concerns.
“The bill’s reference to ‘music that is likely to cause clear and serious harm to youth’ doesn’t provide any concrete criteria which would allow subjective judgments of what is harmful,” Culture and Arts Workers Solidarity said in a statement.
“The idea that strong censorship can prevent hate is nothing more than a fallacy. If this law’s underlying logic were correct, then discrimination and hatred should have disappeared under the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, when censorship was at its most powerful in modern Korean history.”
Culture and Arts Workers Solidarity (via The Korea Times)
“The idea that strong censorship can prevent hate is nothing more than a fallacy. If this law’s underlying logic were correct, then discrimination and hatred should have disappeared under the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, when censorship was at its most powerful in modern Korean history.”
The group urged the ruling Democratic Party lawmakers to withdraw the bill.
Not all voices have been critical: pop-culture critic Jeong Deok-hyun told Kyeongin Ilbo that a minimum safeguard is needed for developing teenagers exposed to music that glorifies hate or crime, while adding that freedom of expression matters.
The debate is playing out in one of the industry’s larger markets, with South Korea ranked the world’s seventh-largest recorded music market by IFPI.
Its streaming market is led by YouTube Music and Melon, the latter operated by Kakao Entertainment, with Spotify and Genie also among the services on which flagged tracks have surfaced.
The bill speaks to a problem that reaches beyond South Korea, with streaming services elsewhere having repeatedly grappled with hateful content surfacing on their platforms.
A companion amendment to the Network Act (Bill No. 2219778), filed the same day, would let a central agency ask the country’s broadcasting and communications regulator to suspend or restrict a track’s distribution before a formal review concludes.
The News Art review also noted that South Korea abolished an earlier pre-release screening system for records after the Constitutional Court ruled it an unconstitutional form of prior censorship in 1996.
The legislation remains at an early stage, having been referred to committee on July 7 before entering a public-notice period, meaning its wording could still change.Music Business Worldwide