Hit songs of Chinese pop megastars Eason Chan, A-Mei and Joey Yung are among many likely to be removed from karaoke boxes across China due to copyright issues raised by the country's music copyright association.

In recent days, The China Audio-Video Copyright Association (CAVCA) issued an instruction to karaoke equipment and service provider VOD, as well as karaoke box managers, to delete a portion of the songs and music videos contained in their karaoke pools.

Eason Chan's huge smashes "Ten Years," "King of KTV," A-Mei's "Bad Boy," Joey Yung's "Lucky Star" and the music duo Twins' song "Next Station, Tian Hou" as well as G.E.M.'s "Bubble" form part of a list of 6,609 songs to be removed. 

Actually, more than 3,800 songs are from the catalog of Hong Kong-based Emperor Entertainment Group. The label has signed up many famous Hong Kong superstars, but is not yet a member of CAVCA.

However, a CAVCA spokesperson said the hit songs were just very small portion of those to be deleted. Most of the songs are old songs most people no longer care about, so their removal should not cause too much harm to the current karaoke pool.

CAVCA, established in 2008, is the only association of its kind approved by the National Copyright Administration that undertakes collective rights management for copyright and related rights in video & audio works. The Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC) also entrusts CAVCA to collect licensing fees for its songwriting members.  

CAVCA published a long statement on Monday on its official website to clarify why thousands of songs should be removed. "Without licensing, no karaoke boxes should use those songs, otherwise it is copyright violation," the statement explained.

"Now, copyright holders and agents of the more than 6,000 songs are pursuing legal actions against certain karaoke box managers to seek very high compensation. If you don't delete these songs, you may have risk of lawsuits and huge operational losses in the future."

The association said it administers more than 150,000 songs on behalf of MCSC and has more than 300 domestic and foreign music labels as members, including China Record Group, Rock Records, Modernsky Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.  

The CAVCA statement added that the present clean-up is just the first step, and promised it will draw in more members and make the song pool expand in the future, so that they could directly provide licensed and high-quality music works to karaoke boxes nationwide, which will secure the rights and interests of copyright holders and karaoke managers and ensure the music industry gains real prosperity.  

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