Imagine waking up one morning to find your playlists decreased by over 100 songs. Well, that was the case for thousands of International K-Pop fans, including myself. On March 1st, we woke up to the removal of over 100 songs by various Korean artists under the company of Kakao M – a company that runs the biggest streaming platform in Korea called Melon. Fans described this situation as the K-Pop Version of Infinity War and the memes for the pain we are going through are too good to not share.
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The details are still unknown but essentially Spotify and Kakao M had a disagreement over their licensing contract expiring which resulted in the songs being removed. A lot of these artists had no say in this and were completely annoyed by the fact that their songs were removed on Spotify which caused them to have a loss in streams. A member named Tablo from a popular K-Hip Hop trio called “Epik High” took his anger to his Twitter:
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A day later, they were able to restore their music on Spotify but their streams were not able to get restored, which left the trio a little heartbroken.
Did all we can to restore our music. Lost the streaming numbers & playlisting. Heartbroken but what matters is that u can hear the music again. Throw us a streaming party.
— 에픽하이 타블로 | Tablo of Epik High (@blobyblo) March 1, 2021
Epik High Is Here 上 (Part 1): https://t.co/R7GuBaRc7W
sleepless in __________: https://t.co/tZVBhrP3dq
This whole situation has led International K-Pop fans to stray away from Spotify since they are paying for premium and can’t even listen to their favourite songs. Most fans who left Spotify have taken a membership with YouTube Music or Apple Music and some have even purchased physical albums for these artists.
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If you are curious to know which artists were affected by this disagreement, this Twitter user has created a thread here.
Waking up to find my playlists robbed of my songs left me confused. I was also upset that the only way of supporting these artists was snatched away from me. I have been a loyal Spotify user for 5 years now and I don’t plan on switching so I hope that despite the loss and frustration the K-Pop industry is experiencing, we can still be hopeful for a re-release of these songs!
Stay safe and stay groovy!