South Korea new rules for music | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 Something interesting. This showed up on Music Business Worldwide dot com, one of my favorite sites for music industry news. This is something that I do not believe would work in the United States, but and I don't know if it will necessarily work there either, But South Korea. Something interesting they're doing there. South Korea. Bill would require music distributors to screen tracks for content harmful to minors before release. And again, this is something that would not work here, which is part of why for a number of reasons, which is part of why I find this so interesting that they're doing this.

0:33 But and this is the first I've heard of this. I didn't even get a chance to preread this, but let's look at this quickly. It says 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 sixth by Representative Kim Huen of the ruling Democratic Party of Career, alongside nine co sponsors, lodged with the National Assembly as Bill Number two two one nine seven seventy five.

1:08 It would require distributors to check whether a recording is harmful to youth before release. Applying the review criteria to the country's Youth Protection Act. Oh, what could go wrong? And again this is something that would not work here for several reasons. Continuing on with the article, if a track is judged harmful and its creator is under nineteen, 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.

1:42 According to the Korea Times, South Korean arts outlet News Art News Art that's the name of the publication examine the bill as filed with the National Assembly and reported that it carries no criminal penalties. Distributors that breached the screening rule would instill dead face corrective orders or warnings from local governments. Corrective orders that sounds ominous. Under the current system, the Youth Protection Committee under the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family reviews songs after release and bars miners from those it designates harmful.

2:18 That designation can take weeks or months. The bills backers say leave in a window and which a track can spread online before any Youth Protection Committee ruling. Kim has cast a measure as a response to hateful and crime glorifying content spreading through music. Quote artistic. This is from Kim. 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.

2:53 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. Unquote. An aid 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 towards peers, which then circulated widely across music platforms. Oh that's interesting. I've never seen anything like that happen in the US. Not that it, I mean, maybe it hasn't.

3:29 I just don't know. But the bill has drawn sharp criticism from within South Korea's music community. Rapper E Sends was among those pushing back on social media. Quote, 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? Unquote, That would be my argument. A coalition of ten cultural and arts groups has voiced similar concerns. Culture and arts workers a solidarity set in a statement quote, 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 unquote right, and that's the immediate problem you're going to run into,

4:24 they went on to say, in a statement quote, the idea that strong censorship can prevent hate is nothing more than a fallacy. If this law is underlying logic were correct, then discrimination and hatred should have disappeared under the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung Lee and tuned out one when censorship was at its most powerful in modern Korean history. Unquote, I apologize if I butchered those names. Um, so there's more to this. We don't really have time to go through the entire article, but I would tend to say, I mean if something and maybe there is something like this that has been introduced in the United States and just didn't get very far.

5:04 I don't know, but I guess I would say, you know, again, the obvious problem is, you know, it is it is subjective, and in the United States it wouldn't work too in the sense that you would have you know, everyone would be going nuts about, you know, the First Amendment. But also, you know, in the United States, these platforms, and this is something we talk about a lot on the show, these platforms, any any platform that distributes music, you know, they can they can police that themselves. They can make decisions themselves, and you know, and they may they may make those decisions as a result of public pressure, but they are able to make decisions and police themselves in terms of what is and is not permissible on their platforms.

5:54 So the example used in the article of what happened in South Korea with these these kids at the school who made this apparently horrible, hate filled track, you know, Spotify can say, well, we're not going to allow that on our platform. Again, I'm talking about in the United States, dist ro Kid. You know, if they signed up for a distro Kid account, distro Kid can say we're not going to distribute this song. You know, this is not Okay, YouTube would would probably ban it, somebody would report it, it would get removed.

6:25 So I'm just saying I don't think that would work here, and I'm very skeptical that it is going to work there