There are arguments afoot in South Korea this week due to a proposed amendment to the country’s Music Industry Promotion Act by the ruling party.
“The bill would require music distributors to pre-screen all tracks to determine whether they contain content harmful to minors before release,” reported the Korea Times.
“If any song is judged harmful and its creator is under 19, the distributor must block the track from release altogether. If the artist is an adult, the distributor must notify them that the track may be designated harmful to youth in advance, which would restrict it to adult listeners only.”
This would be a change from the current system, where songs are reviewed by a government committee *after* release to decide whether they are potentially harmful or not.
As the report notes, musicians and their representative bodies are concerned about the plan, which they see as an unwanted return to the kind of “pre-release censorship that the country moved away from decades ago”.
While labels and distributors rather than government bodies would be responsible for the pre-screening now, there is also concern about the vague definition of ‘music that is likely to cause clear and serious harm to youth’ contained in the bill.
