Thirty musicians gained full membership in Korea's largest music copyright organization for the New Year, including S.Coups of boy band Seventeen, singers Younha, Lee Mu-jin and Tukutz of hip-hop trio Epik High.

Every year in January, the Korea Music Copyright Association (Komca) grants full memberships to musicians who have collected extraordinary sums of royalties from their music. Musicians' genres vary from K-pop, indie music and hip-hop to children's songs, known as dongyo, and traditional Korean music, gugak.


Members get a voting right at the association's general meeting but their full memberships are revoked if they fail to attend the meeting more than four times in a row.

This year's list of 30 new members included S.Coups, who became the third Seventeen member to achieve Komca's full membership following bandmates Woozi and Vernon, Younha, Lee Mu-jin, Tukutz, rapper The Quiett, Lee Hwi-min of producer duo GroovyRoom and singer Maybee.

Singers who gained membership last year include BTS’s Jungkook, (G)I-DLE’s Soyeon and Seventeen's Vernon. Jungkook became the fourth BTS member to join the Komca roster, after bandmates Suga, RM and J-Hope.

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]