K-Pop Beat

ARMY, rejoice with us: after a long and painful absence, BTS’ 2019 performances on Saturday Night Live were rightfully restored earlier this week. Last June, after racking up a collective 39 million views, the performances of “Boy with Luv” and “Mic Drop” vanished from SNL’s YouTube account. This is, unfortunately, a pretty common occurrence, and often happens when labels run into copyright renewal with outlets like NBC. The resurfaced performances have arrived on the heels of similar copyright friction between Spotify and Kakao M, a South Korean music distributor, which resulted in hundreds of Korean artists and songs being removed from the platform earlier this week. In April of 2019, the world of Korean music in Western markets looked quite different. This was long before BTS had secure...