Interview With a Musician/artist about.... Music! 02/29/12

        One of the most famous, yet slowly fading away from his primitive period and becoming an old age song writer, Baek young kyu, performed at a small music caffe in Seoul. Also, I got to interview him about his difficulties of writing music and law that helped or made it hard for him to make music during his first step towards becoming famous.
        During his era, Korea was into one particular style of music called Trot. Trot, pronounced teuroteu, is the oldest form of Korean Pop music. Also, the name derives from a shortening of "foxtrot", a ballroom dance which influenced the simple two-beat of elements of the genre. It was developed in the years before and during World War II around the early 1900s. One of the people who broke this trend and started a new style of music was Mr. Baek.

        The question about, "What were the difficulties of writing music?" he said, "The difficulties were trying to come up with the right melody, right lyrics, and the right mood of the song that I am trying to portray certain meanings to my audience." In that sense, I quite agreed with him because it is really hard to make your audience feel the same way or get the music the same way as you would try to share and empathize about it. For instance, when I get all the beats done and try to come up with the lyrics for the song, it sometimes took me more than the time I spent making the beats and eventually just left the music as only instrumental.

        Nonetheless, I asked him another question saying, "I know many people won't ask you these kind of questions but what were some laws that helped you or prevented you from producing or legalizing your intellectual property, in this case your music?" To tell you the truth, he was very surprised of me asking this question. So, we went off course and talked about my current situation of taking a research project about music and law. He was so glad and even praised me that youngsters like me should be more passionate and ask good questions like these! Anyhow, he thought deeply and answered, "It happens very rarely but it happens to every professional singers/songwriters. What happen is that when it was a early stage of my style of music, other same style song writers didn't sue each other and sometimes actually helped each other out to make really good music, so our songs were very similar. But, as soon as our style of music became a hit and everybody started to listen to our music, it became a race. People started to steal a music and legalize it before the real songwriter actually shows it to the public, and sometimes the person who actually wrote the music got blamed for copying a different song." Listening to his story, which this quote is very shortened into a summery, I thought of how can we detect or protect of intellectual property being stolen during the process of preparing to show it to the public.
        This question made me very unsatisfied with my current knowledge of intellectual property and decide to learn more of its protection and try to come up with a solution. On the other hand, it was a very interesting and once in a life time moment to interview and listen to one of my dad's idol.