Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Man, K-pop has been wild lately, but while most have understandably been busy with the HYBE/ADOR mess and the NCT sex scandal thing, an important bit of news about K-pop contracts dropped as the Ministry Of Culture Sports & Tourism (MCST) announced revisions to the standard contract.
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Part of the changes are focused on trademarks and intellectual property rights.
The revision made it clear that management can use the trademarks of artists only to provide pop culture and art services, preventing management from abusing trademarks.
Terms detailing the surrender of trademarks by agencies can now be categorized depending on whether the artist is a group act or a solo act under the agency.
Honestly, this sounds like a somewhat perfunctory change because companies were losing in court to groups/idols anyway.
There’s also some lip service to the mental and physical health of artists, though it’s still unclear what the guidelines entail.
When performing popular culture and arts services, management must consider an artist’s mental and physical situation and cannot impose a schedule that goes against the artist’s explicit intentions. Artists also can refuse to provide services in situations that have unjustifiable grounds or when management makes unreasonable demands beyond the exclusive contract.
Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it.
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I’d argue the main part of the changes were inspired by two high-profile recent cases.
Firstly, the EXO-CBX situation, as MCST limited contracts exceeding seven years and can’t be extended unilaterally by the companies.
Under the current standard contract, a contract period exceeding seven years is possible, but the termination of the contract can occur at any time after the seven years. Under the revision, the initial contract period cannot exceed seven years. It now requires a written agreement between all parties involved for extension.
This sounds good in theory, though I’m curious to see if whether it’ll work in practice to prevent disputes, as historically companies have found a way to extend control and induce consent.
There’s also the FIFTY FIFTY situation, which is probably what led to the artists being limited for three years in terms of reproducing old material, as it’s aimed at reducing the efficacy of tampering (also related to EXO-CBX, honestly).
When an artist moves to a new agency after the end of an exclusive contract, the ban on the reproduction or sales of similar content by the new agency has been extended from one year to three years.
This clause will likely result in lowering the initial expected profits of the new agency. It is intended to discourage tampering and prevent settlement disputes by specifying the end dates of intellectual property rights after the contract period.
I actually think this might be influenced by what Taylor Swift has done as well, as companies just don’t want a situation like that to repeat in the K-pop industry.
Wrapping things up, the MCST says they hope the new contract stipulations will resolve difficulties and disputes between artists and companies.
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I’m in wait-and-see mode on these changes, though at least there doesn’t appear to be anything that makes things exponentially worse for artists, which is honestly what I was expecting when it was reported they’d be changing the standard contract.
