By Park Ji-won The division of labour among professionals unrivalled in their respective fields is considered one of the factors that has led to K-pop’s global success. Entertainment companies focus on seeking out and training aspiring young singers while composers write the songs and recording companies handle production. But several decades ago, there weren’t any specialised workforces in the domestic music industry. All work was streamlined under one single record label – and they wielded enormous power. Notably, the labels recorded master tapes, which were then recorded to vinyl records and other formats. Vinyl records were the preferred choice of industry workers and music lovers, but they gradually disappeared after the introduction of more convenient formats such as cassette tapes, then CDs and now digital music. These early recording companies declined as they were slow to respond to ever-changing technology. They refused to adapt to the fast-changing industry landscape and gradually disappeared. Their master tapes also vanished due to fires, negligence or various other reasons. So the number of domestic vintage vinyl records slowly dwindled after the 1990s when vinyl production shut down. However, there are signs of change as the population of vinyl lovers has been growing. Even though there are no exact figures for sales of vinyl records, the market is showing signs of growth, and both K-pop singers and indie musicians are again releasing music on vinyl for fans and collectors. The boys of BTS accused of delaying service in Korean military More record companies have started expanding vinyl production and reissuing recordings from their master tape archives as a new source of income in the digital era. Oasis Records Music Company is one such company that has been digitising and preserving its music collection. Established in 1952 during the Korean war, it owns more than 10,000 master tapes of Korean music recorded between the 1950s and 1990s, which it claims is the largest collection of its kind, unknown to the public until recently. Claiming to be the oldest surviving Korean record company, it now only operates a master tape business, but in the past it was seen as one of the most popular labels in the nation, rivalling Jigu Records. Renowned singers who worked with Oasis include Nam Jin, Na Hoon-a, Kim Yon-ja, Joo Hyun-mi, Sul Woon-do and Song Dae-kwan. Composers and bands also thrived under the leadership of the label’s second owner, Son Jin-suk, who ran it from 1958 to 2011. Some music experts say they laid the groundwork for today’s flashy K-pop industry. About 70 per cent of its tapes had been digitally processed as of July, which is equivalent to around 50,000 tracks. Of that, 80 per cent are pop songs and the remaining 20 per cent consists of various genres such as traditional music, religious music, comedy sets and concert recordings. “It is our living history of K-pop,” says Oasis Records president Kim Yong-wook. Kim bought the music company in 2013 from Son Jin-suk’s son, who ran the business for two years after his father’s death in 2011. “When you listen to music from the past, you realise that musicians made efforts to introduce various forms of music from the 1950s onwards. The songs surprisingly cover many genres such as jazz, swing, pop, punk and so on.” Until the 1980s, not many labels were aware of the value of the master tapes, so many companies reused them, recording over them multiple times. The company that owns the master tapes also holds the copyright for purposes of duplication, distribution and rental. So when Mino of K-pop boy band Winner wanted to sample the Kim Tae-hee song Soyanggang Girl for his song Fiance in 2018, he had to get permission from Oasis Records. As soon as Kim took over the business, he decided to digitise its entire master tape collection. “I invested a lot of money in the business,” he says. He started with a small number of employees in 2013 and now has six workers on the project. It takes about eight hours to process one master tape even with a skilled sound engineer. Also, the tapes are difficult to handle and easily decay as time goes by, making restoration and digitisation harder. “The materials used in the master tapes vary each decade. The ones used before the 1980s are easily damaged as they are thin. The ones used after the 1980s are thicker but sticky, meaning it is hard to roll them out,” says Lee Hoon-hee, a sound engineer at Oasis Records. However, he says the hardest part is getting the sound right, as he tries to hard to find a happy medium between the original sound quality and a digital reproduction. “Sometimes we don’t know what the originals sounded like because they were too damaged. For some tapes that had severe water damage, for example, I had to add the digital sounds by listening to other songs recorded in a similar period of time. It cannot be done automatically. The process requires my own judgment frequently,” Lee says. Oasis is now starting to press some of its restored master tapes onto vinyl records, with 12 releases expected this year. In January it also launched a YouTube channel to upload recordings, which now number more than 1,100. It will take several more years to finish the label’s digitisation process, but Kim is determined to see it through to safeguard the legacy of the Korean music in his care. “I decided this would be my calling as I didn’t think anyone else would take on this difficult job. I had very little motivation at first. Sometimes I got tired of doing it because almost nobody knew about what I was doing,” Kim says. “But the more I worked on it, the more I discovered valuable and versatile forms of Korean popular music. I hope to share as many songs as possible so many other people can enjoy them and learn more about Korean music.” Read the full story at the Korea Times