The nice folks at Eat You Kimchi have bravely waded into the muddy waters that are K-pop contracts. And their answers are more than a little depressing — a large “break even point” for training costs that artists must repay, while getting 40 percent or less of their revenues, all the while more expenses pile up, and there’s little transparency.

It’s a good overview, but I will add a couple more points:

  • Bad K-pop contracts have been in the news since long before 2009 (even if the JYJ/TVXQ problem took it up a level). In fact, Time magazine did a big takedown on the K-pop industry in 2002 — here (about payoffs and corruption, free) and here (about contracts and salary, but you need to sign in)
  • While the K-pop artist contracts are pretty sketchy, it is worth remembering that a lot of these companies have many trainees they are working on at any given time, which can be quite a cash-eater.
  • K-pop “stars” aren’t really stars the way we think of them (at least in accounting terms), but are more like employees. And pretty much everyone in the Korean entertainment industry works crazy long hours for terrible pay.

So, I guess to me the problems with K-pop are not because working conditions are so atypical for Korea; but for too many people, they are all too typical. Or typical of a kind of Korea that much of the country has outgrown — and it’s way past time for K-pop to catch up.

With more artists fleeing their production companies than ever, certainly the time is right for a big shift in the industry. In the past, though, when artists became moguls, they usually just repeated the same terrible business structure. But I’d like to think that sooner or later, some visionary will see the many, obvious weaknesses and try setting up a label that works for the artists.