Scottish distributor of controversial 2019 Hong Kong protest song says high cost of legal advice forced it to pull city-banned tune from catalogue
- Glasgow-based EmuBands says ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ removed from music platforms due to cost of legal advice after court issues interim injunction banning song
- Dgxmusic, the team behind protest anthem, says it opposes move and hopes to have song reinstated as soon as possible
Ally Gray, the managing director of EmuBands, based in Glasgow, said on Monday the company was not part of a “conspiracy” and had not made a political statement with its decision to remove “Glory to Hong Kong” from most music platforms last week.
“We are not experts in the issues involved and would not wish to insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending that we are,” Gray told the Post.
“Nobody has pressured us into this decision nor paid us for doing so – we are just a small business based on the other side of the world for whom the cost of hiring relevant legal experts to analyse and monitor what is an evolving and complex situation – that may or may not have resulted in legal issues for our company – far outweighs the fees we have received for distributing the song, which we are refunding,” Gray said.
He dismissed censorship allegations and added that the artists involved were “obviously free” to find another distributor to work with on “Glory to Hong Kong”.
The worldwide removal of the song came little more than two weeks after a Hong Kong court ruled in favour of the government and granted an order to ban the song’s circulation.
Dgxmusic, the Hong Kong music group and production team behind the song, said last Friday it had been told by EmuBands that the distributor would take down the song from all platforms “due to an injunction order by the Hong Kong court”.
The production firm added it had voiced its opposition to EmuBands’ move and that it hoped to have the song reinstated as soon as possible.
Dgxmusic said it had also argued that the Hong Kong injunction did not have extraterritorial jurisdiction.
The track was no longer available on Apple Music, Spotify and KKBox by last Saturday, with the block apparently not limited to Hong Kong.
The Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the government and granted an interim injunction after the administration took the matter to court last year.
The ruling said that the song had become a “weapon” that could be used to arouse anti-government and separatist sentiment in the city.
The injunction bans people from “broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing [the song] in any way” with the intention to incite others to separate Hong Kong from the rest of the country, commit a seditious act or insult the national anthem, “March of the Volunteers”.
The court document listed YouTube videos of 32 versions of the song said to be in breach of the injunction, including instrumental renditions, as well as performances in Mandarin, English, German, Dutch, Japanese and Korean.
YouTube, owned by Google, said earlier this month that it had complied with the order and blocked access to 32 clips for viewers in the city.
But searches of the site found that, apart from the specified clips, many renditions of the song, including versions marked as “backup”, were still available.
The action by EmuBands was considered by some observers to be a breakthrough for the city’s government.
