South Korean Music Industry Targets Gen AI With New Committee

Seoul, South Korea. Photo Credit: Lee Seunghyub

Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl is lauding artificial intelligence’s perceived ability to unlock value. But the technology is eliciting a far different response in South Korea, where industry orgs are coordinating to address the “unprecedented disruption” ushered in by gen AI.

Technically, the group behind the initiative, the K-Music Rights Organizations Mutual Growth Committee, formally set sail on February 26th – one day after Lee Si-ha started leading the Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA).

However, South Korean outlets only recently shed light on the alliance, which also features brass from the Recording Industry Association of Korea, the Korea Entertainment Producers’ Association, the Korean Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the Federation of Korean Music Performers, and the Korea Music Content Association.

According to the Maeil Business Newspaper, all these members intend to jointly develop “a new music copyright order that the world can follow.” And while the order will target four main areas – more here in a moment – reining in AI certainly stands out as the chief objective.

On this front, the committee’s members outlined an “aggressive survival strategy” to counteract AI’s music-space rise and signed a declaration proclaiming “the noble sovereignty of human creativity,” the mentioned outlet relayed.

Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, one presentation slide shown during the committee’s initial sit down framed the event as “a declaration of war” as opposed to a meeting, per Google’s translation of the Korean-language text.

In keeping with the signed declaration as well as the distinct declaration of war, the committee will first look to tackle unauthorized training, maximize training-data transparency, and establish labels for AI outputs on digital platforms.

(The group needn’t worry about the registration of machine-made music; it’s been nearly a year since KOMCA implemented a 0% AI policy.)

As for the other areas of interest, the entity is further working towards a “blockchain-based infrastructure” that, according to the translated summary, will attempt to bridge the data gap between ISWC, ISRC, Content ID, and UCI identifiers.

And the final two focus areas directly relate to those highlighted above: The K-Music Rights Organizations Mutual Growth Committee will seek to halt the international “outflow” of South Korean music revenue and to reshape the wider “platform market.”

All in all, it seems safe to describe the push as a stark contrast to Kyncl’s authorization- and licensing-geared AI approach. That said – artificial intelligence slop’s very real commercial consequences aside – some South Korean music execs are nevertheless harnessing AI to capitalize on superfan support.

Among the execs is SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man, whose Blooming Talk app houses AI clones of A2O Entertainment artists. Concerningly, the Tencent Cloud-powered platform offers “seamless, real-time exchanges between artists and their fans,” including both text and voice conversations, per its website.

On one hand, giving diehards 24/7 access to digital replicas seems like a recipe for disaster (or at least a good dose of social harm). On the other hand, as explored by DMN Pro, fringe communities are already using unauthorized bots to mimic talent – a disconcerting reality that, besides being bad for the individual and probably society, steals away fans, streams, and revenue from the artist.