Inside the K-pop hit machine: how South Korea’s music industry has gone global
From Kim Jong-un to the United States, South Korean pop music’s worldwide fan base is growing fast, thanks to bands like BTS. We look at the reasons behind the phenomenon
The popularity of South Korean pop culture in other parts of the world is nothing new. In the early 2000s, Chinese journalists were so baffled by the local obsession with South Korean television shows such as Winter Sonata and singers from that country that they dubbed the phenomenon the “Korean wave”.
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The term has been widely used by Western and Eastern media since then. But K-pop – the genre that practically dominates the entire South Korean mainstream music industry – has amassed such a global following that it has outgrown the general term and become a phenomenon in itself.
The K-pop act with the biggest global success so far are BTS. The seven-member boy band have managed not only to have two tracks certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America – a first for a Korean act – they also became the most retweeted musical act on Twitter in 2017. Last year, the BTS EP Love Yourself: Her – containing the hit US single Mic Drop – also hit No 7 on the US album charts, the highest ever for a Korean act.
So why is K-pop achieving a level of worldwide fame denied to other Asian pop scenes? The educated guess – according to Professor Lee Dong-yeon, who teaches cultural theory at the Korean National University of the Arts and has written a book on the industry – is that South Korea’s relatively small music market results in telecom companies controlling a large proportion of revenues, meaning they have extra incentive to look abroad for profits.