It is predicted that a price to use digital songs will increase up to 33% next year, where a cost that used to be $0.51 (600 KRW) to download one song will go up to $0.67 (800 KRW).
According to Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) and music industries, copyright organizations recently submitted a revised plan about regulations on collecting copyright fees to MCST. This reflects different industries’ opinions that were collected by coexisting music copyright consultative group, which has been managed since last year. New revised plan has information such as increased song copyright fees, adjustment of distribution ratio and others.
An area that is expected to increase the most is when a person downloads songs from digital equipment.
According to revised plan, one has to pay up to $0.43 (511 KRW) per song for using copyright when he or she downloads a song. It will increase 41.9% compared to what it used to cost to download a song in the past, which was $0.30 (360 KRW). By sales standard, copyright organizations take about 70%, which is a 10% increase from 60% that used to be previous percentage, of total amount. Percentage for music service business will decrease to 30%.
A discount that is applied when a person buys songs in bundles will not be applied if he or she buys less than 30 songs. But when he or she buys 30 or more songs, 50% of discounted fees to use copyrights will be applied and it increases to 75% when he or she buys 65 or more songs.
A cost to stream songs, which is a current trend among customers in music industry, will increase about 16%. When it used to cost 7.2 KRW to use copyright per song, it will increase to 8.4 KRW. As a fee per song increases, a discounted price when a person streams bundles of songs and applied to flat rate will also increase at same ratio.
As it is expected that it will be more expensive to use copyrights of songs, it is inevitable that this will also apply to cost that consumers spent on songs next year. A change is also expected on flat-rate streaming products that are in the center of consumers’ spending. Because a cost will increase about 16%, it is highly likely that change will be applied. Although number of uses decreased currently, it is expected that a cost to download a song will increase up to $0.67 and it will be $10.11 (12,000 KRW) if a person buys 30 or more songs.
It is also interesting that copyright organizations included advertisement streaming method, which was nonexistent previously, into their revised plan.
Until now streaming songs based on advertisements were not included into regulation plan, which collects usage fees that regulate music service, because it caused friction with copyright organizations about services such as Milk Music, Beat and others that are based on advertisements.
As streaming business based on advertisement is included into newly-revised plan, it is expected that streaming products based on advertisements will also rapidly expand.
However there are some people that are worried about consumers breaking away due to increased price.
“Although revised plan is an action that was taken to give more shares to lyricists and composers, performers and agencies that made contributions to create songs, increased price can instead lead to reduction of music markets due to consumers breaking away.” said one person that is affiliated with music industry.
MCST is going to listen to opinions about a newly-revised plan that was submitted by copyright organizations until the 2nd of October and adjust it accordingly.
“Newly-revised plan that copyright organizations submitted is not going to be implemented right away. We are planning to announce revised plan by end of this year or early 2016 after listening to many opinions from different industries.” said a person that is affiliated with MCST.
Staff Reporter Lee, Kyungmin | kmlee@etnews.com
