A proposed new law in South Korea would force music distributors in the country to review lyrics before releasing any new music in order to label or even block songs that contain content that could be harmful to minors. However, various cultural groups have criticised the proposals.
Politician Kim Hyun is among those backing the proposals. According to The Korea Times, she says, “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”.
Unlike in the UK, where the industry operates the voluntary ‘parental advisory’ labelling system to identify tracks with lyrical content that may not be suitable for children, in South Korea tracks are vetted by a government committee.
According to the Times, the Youth Protection Committee can restrict the distribution of tracks that contain sexually explicit, violent or hateful lyrics so that children can’t access them.
However, that review process begins after a track is released and can take several weeks or even months to be completed. By which time tracks that the committee considers unsuitable for younger music fans will already have been heard by many such fans.
The new proposals, made via an amendment to the Music Industry Promotion Act, would put the responsibility to review tracks onto the industry pre-release. Which would be a little like the ‘parental advisory’ system, except it would be mandated, defined and enforced by law rather than being a voluntary scheme run by record industry trade organisations.
Under the proposals, if a song was considered harmful and had been created by someone under the age of nineteen, the track would be blocked from being released entirely. If it had been created by someone over the age of nineteen, it would be labelled so that only adults could stream or buy the music.
Critics see the proposals as a backwards move towards the kind of censorship that used to exist in Korea but which has long been rejected.
In a statement, a coalition of eleven organisations representing the country’s arts and cultural communities says that the proposed amendment to the Music Industry Promotion Act talks about “music that is likely to cause clear and serious harm to youth”, but “doesn’t provide any concrete criteria which would allow subjective judgments of what is harmful”.
They also add that “the idea that strong censorship can prevent hate is nothing more than a fallacy”, stating that if censorship did prevent hate “discrimination and hatred should have disappeared” during the decades of authoritarian rule in the country prior to 1988, when censorship was extreme, and yet it did not.