UPDATE: As of Mar. 10, the dispute between Spotify and Kakao M has been cleared up. As reported by Variety and Naver SK, both companies announced that the songs that were pulled off of Spotify will be returning in the next few days after further negotiations. Thankfully, K-pop fans did not have to suffer for too long without their favorite songs.
Mar. 1 is a day that will live in K-pop history forever. Many international K-pop fans woke up on Feb. 28 (due to time differences) and saw so many of their loved songs greyed out and unplayable on Spotify. I woke up and checked my own playlists. Almost all of them had half of the added songs removed, and in the case of my playlist for “ONEUS,” all of the songs but one was gone.
Before I went onto my Spotify, I logged onto Twitter. As a member of K-pop stan Twitter, I go onto my account every single day to check any posts my mutuals and loved K-pop artists made throughout the night. My timeline was filled with tweets of my mutuals angry over their songs being removed. It was chaos.
For some background information, Kakao M is a large music distribution company in South Korea. They distribute nearly 40% of the songs featured on the “Top 400” Korean chart for 2020. They have their own streaming service called MelOn, and it is only available in South Korea. Spotify was recently launched in South Korea on Feb. 1, and it was starting to gain users very quickly.
Many fans were theorizing that Kakao M was not happy with the sudden decrease in MelOn users, so they pulled the music they distributed off of Spotify in South Korea. This lead to the belief that this was not giving them the outcome they wanted because Spotify was still pulling in a lot of Melon users so they did the ultimate petty move—they pulled a Thanos snap and pulled hundreds of songs off of Spotify International.
Spotify and Kakao M both released statements explaining the sudden removal of the songs. Spotify, in their statement, explains that it was due to “its licensing agreement expiring on Mar 1” and that they “are no longer able to provide its catalogue…” Kakao M released their statement later and claimed that Spotify was the one who chose not to renew their licensing agreement.
Their statement refutes Spotify by saying, “Due to Spotify’s policy that they must proceed with the domestic and global contracts at the same time, our global contact has currently expired.” Spotify and Kakao M were previously negotiating on the grounds of a domestic contract for the supply and distribution of music.
No matter what the cause of the issue was, the ones that got hurt were the artists and fans. It is unclear whether the companies of affected artists were informed of the removal. Artists that were affected artists include “MONSTA X,” “LOONA,” “IU,” “The Boyz,” “Sunmi,” “(G)I-DLE” and many, many more.
Tablo, the leader and producer of hip-hop band Epik High, sent out this tweet expressing his disappointment and surprise of the removal of their most recent album, “January’s Epik High Is Here (Part 1),” and stated, “…why is it always the artists and the fans that suffer when businesses place greed over art.”
Boy group “SEVENTEEN,” who debuted in 2015, had all of their music that was released before 2019 removed, and it caused their total Spotify streams to drop from 1.260 billion to 297 million. In the cases of girl group “MAMAMOO” and “ONEUS,” who are both under RBW Entertainment, their entire discography was removed.
The list of impacted artists and the damages done by this dispute is endless. This Twitter thread compiled by user @lemonphobic lists artists that had music removed from Spotify, and it’s almost never-ending. I scrolled through this thread and saw so many artists I loved listed.
It is so frustrating and heartbreaking as a fan to have this dispute happen and fall victim to it. Kakao M kept all their distributed songs of MelOn, but it isn’t even available for international fans. Tell me how that makes sense? To take away the song catalog from international fans to try and further your own monopoly in South Korea when you can earn more profits worldwide?
If they were to make MelOn available worldwide, fans won’t need Spotify to listen to their favorite artists. All the streams on Spotify were done with the hard work and dedication of international fans who otherwise could not listen to the music, with the exception of subscribing to Apple Music.
To delete the songs and their streams shows that you don’t care about the international recognition that artists you distribute for, and frankly, it’s a slap in the face. Spotify is a tool that can be used by smaller artists to gain recognition, and now they got hurt by this dispute the most.
Spotify creates some hope by saying in their statement that they hope the song removals are temporary and that hope is the only thing international fans, artists and entertainment companies can cling to.
KaKao M and Spotify: give me back my music or else.