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Business News Digital Labels & Publishers
Universal denies liability for K-pop cut off
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 27 March 2013
As if the South Koreans haven’t got enough to be concerning themselves with at the moment, what with increasingly tense relations with the North, YouTube only went and cut off non-domestic access to a chunk of popular K-pop videos last weekend.
The videos that were suddenly unavailable on the video site came from artists signed to South Korean label Cube Entertainment, and included the likes of 4Minute, HyunA, B2ST, and G.Na. While it was K-pop fans outside South Korea that were most hit by move, various conspiracy theories soon emerged that this was a racist attempt to stop the country’s pop stars reaching their international fans.
Universal Music quickly became the enemy of the story, because Cube has a distribution deal with the mega-major’s South Korean division, and it is responsible for distributing the label’s music beyond the country’s borders.
Once Universal had been officially accused of being behind the YouTube cut off of Cube Entertainment content, the major was officially labelled racist by some fans for trying to “keep K-pop restricted to Koreans like it originally was”.
Though later, as some conspiracy theorists questioned why exactly Universal would have any desire to stop music in which it has a commercial interest from being monetised around the world, the allegation switched to a more realistic scenario – Universal had taken Cube content off YouTube to force people onto VEVO.com, the music video platform in which the majors has a stake.
But, insists Universal Music, Cube content stopped being available on YouTube because of a glitch, and as soon as it was aware of the problem it put pressure on Google to fix the problem on its video platform. So keen was Universal to convince K-pop fans it wasn’t responsible for the content cut-off, it too adopted the hashtag being used by those angry at the development, #GiveUsKPop.
The good news is, we hear the “glitch’ has been, erm, unglitched, and the flow of Cube-made K-pop to YouTube users around the world has resumed. Phew. If only that other Korean stand-off could be so easily solved.
