Today’s Daily Rant is about slave contracts. Now I know using the word “slave” may already be controversial enough because these idols aren’t treated like how slaves back then were treated per se, but are binned with insanely long contracts.
When the lawsuit with DBSK first came out in 2008, the world was brought to the knowledge that they had signed contracts, along with many other artists from SM Entertainment for up to 13 years in length. Of course, they now have this law to prevent artists from getting insanely long contracts, but why did they do that in the past? From what I see, the shorter the contract, the better because they would be more loyal to their company. For example, in Japan, most contracts are only a year or two in length. This helps the artist in their loyalty with their company and allows them to seek their own solo careers with a different company if they wanted to. Jin Akanishi from KAT-TUN did just that.
I’m glad that slave contracts have been lessened now, but I do sometimes wonder what they were going for back then when coming up with such long contracts. Although they had stated that they wanted them to work overseas which is why another 5 years was added to the contract, I don’t see why they did that because when DBSK went over to Japan, they had an entirely different label so it wouldn’t have really done anything for SM Entertainment in my opinion.