KBO | Gocheok Sky Dome, 1 May 2018 — The Day the Entrance Songs Stopped

Every batter in a KBO lineup has his own song. One through nine, his name in the lyrics, a call for 안타 or 홈런 at the end, learned off the club app before you ever get to the ground. On 1 May 2018 they stopped. The trigger was 저작인격권, moral rights, which is not the same thing as the copyright the clubs had been paying for. The KBO had been paying royalties to the Korea Music Copyright Association since 2003 and to two further bodies from 2011. Moral rights protect an author's personal interest in the integrity of the work, and rewriting a pop song's lyrics so that thirty thousand people can chant a shortstop's name is precisely the sort of alteration they cover. Songwriters sued Samsung. On 30 April the KBO and all ten clubs announced they would jointly suspend player entrance songs from the following day and fight the cases together. Contemporary reports disagree about how far the silence actually went. The league's marketing arm told Sports Seoul that cheer songs and cheerleader routines would carry on and only the entrance music was going; other outlets reported the wider repertoire stopping as well. What nobody disputes is that ballparks which had never in their lives been quiet suddenly had quiet in them. Nexen, the club that played here, had to replace all but one of its twenty-seven player songs. Entrance music returned partially in 2021, and since 2022 clubs cap it at fifteen seconds for a batter and one minute for a pitcher to stay inside the licence terms. The photograph above is this cheer platform at Gocheok in 2018: the 응원단장 facing the stand rather than the field, cheerleaders performing to the crowd instead of watching the game, a drummer in an 응원단 shirt behind a bass drum. Next time you hear a KBO stand sing a batter's name, you are hearing the negotiated version. Photo: Trainholic / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0