Mint : How K-Pop Thrives on Its Global 'Fandustry'

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MINTING THE FANDOM

Come March, V Live will integrate with Weverse as part of a merger deal that was signed between the parent companies, Naver and HYBE, last year, making the integrated Weverse app the largest fandom platform of its kind. International fans comprise 85% of their combined userbase, as per company statements. An NFT platform is set to be launched soon, as per multiple media reports. In an interview with the news site Asia Today, Park Ha-kyung, a researcher at Korea Investment & Securities, pegged the value of Weverse to be worth 6 trilion won, equivalent to $4 billion, and predicted that "Weverse will strengthen the solidarity of fans based on content, and he NFT platform will increase the number of users based on tangible rewards"

"If HYBE can successfully convince the existing VLIve (30 million) and WeVerse (6.4 million) monthly active users worldwide -- many of whom willingly pay monthly fanclub fees and/or purchase music merchandise items from these apps -- to convert to its newly revamped K-Pop fandom community app, it could very quickly and very disruptively debut as a global top 10 paid music service platform," Seoul-based Bernie Cho tells Mint. He's president of DFSB Kollective, an artist and label services agency that specializes in providing digital media, marketing, and distribution solutions to 1,500+ Korean music artists.

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A TIGHT KNIT COMMUNITY

So what makes these fandom platforms thrive?

"Korean fandom platforms have been able to grow alongside, rather than at the expense of other international social media platforms because they often offer a differentiated, more direct, and far deeper interactive experience between K-Pop fans and artists," says Cho. "In many ways, these apps bundle the best aspects of other popular social media platforms -- live streaming, posts, chats, paid subscriptions, exclusive content, e-commerce, etc -- into a unique music-tech kimbap (Korean seaweed rice roll)."

Ishan Agarwal, a 19-year-old ARMY, agrees with the best-aspects concept. "I love the fact that you are notified about or can access communities of only the artists you want to follow. No other artists are pushed on you by any sort of algorithm," he says. This is what many users expect from Twitter : to only see the tweets of users they've followed. These apps also make fans feel that they are part of a tight-knit community, says a BTS ARMY who goes by the Twitter handle @Diyankilaco.

https://www.livemint.com/industry/media
By Shephali Bhatt

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

The New York Times : Will the Metaverse Be Entertaining? Ask South Korea.

Aiki, one of the “Girl’s Re:verse” judges, during a taping outside Seoul. Like the K-pop singers competing on the show, she was immersed in a virtual world. [Credit : Jun Michael Park for The New York Times]In the world’s testing ground for tech, K-pop singers are being spun up out of pixels and doing battle in a virtual universe.

In a vast studio outside Seoul, technicians huddled in front of monitors, watching cartoon K-pop singers — at least one of whom had a tail — dance in front of a psychedelic backdrop. A woman with fairy wings fluttered by.

Everyone onscreen was real, sort of. The singers had human counterparts in the studio, isolated in cubicles, with headsets on their faces and joysticks in both hands. Immersed in a virtual world, they were competing to become part of (hopefully) the next big Korean girl band.

The stakes were high. A few of their competitors, after failing to make the cut, had been dropped into bubbling lava.

This, some say, is the future of entertainment in the metaverse, brought to you by South Korea, the world’s testing ground for all things technological.

“There are a lot of people who want to get into the metaverse, but it hasn’t reached critical mass, users-wise, yet,” said Jung Yoon-hyuk, an associate professor at Korea University’s School of Media and Communication. “Other places want to venture into the metaverse, but to be successful, you need to have good content. In Korea, that content is K-pop.”

On the set of “Girl’s Re:verse.” Contestants are isolated in cubicles but interact as cartoon avatars onscreen.[Credit : Jun Michael Park for The New York Times]In the metaverse — whatever that is, exactly — the normal rules don’t apply. And the Korean entertainment industry is delving into the possibilities, confident that fans will happily follow.

K-pop groups have had virtual counterparts for years. Karina, a real-life member of the band Aespa, can be seen on YouTube chatting with her digital self, “ae-Karina,” in an exchange that comes off as seamlessly as late-night TV.

The Korean company Kakao Entertainment wants to take things further. It’s working with a mobile gaming company, Netmarble, to develop a K-pop band called Mave that exists only in cyberspace, where its four artificial members will interact with real-life fans around the world.

Kakao is also behind “Girl’s Re:verse,” a K-pop-in-the-metaverse show, whose debut episode on streaming platforms this month was viewed more than a million times in three days. For both projects, Kakao is contemplating album releases, brand endorsements, video games and digital comics, among other things.

Compared with their Korean counterparts, media companies in the United States have only engaged in “light experimentation” with the metaverse so far, said Andrew Wallenstein, the president and chief media analyst of Variety Intelligence Platform.

Countries like South Korea “are often looked at like a test bed for how the future is going to pan out,” Mr. Wallenstein said. “If any trend is going to move from overseas to the U.S., I would put South Korea at the front of the line in terms of who is likeliest to be that springboard.”

Another “Girl’s Re:verse” host, the singer Bada, prepared to don a headset and enter “W,” the show’s virtual universe.[Credit : Jun Michael Park for The New York Times]South Korea’s experiments with virtual entertainment date back at least 25 years, to the brief life span of an artificial singer called Adam. A child of the ’90s, he was a pixelated creature of computer graphics, with sweepy eye-covering bangs and a raspy voice that tried a bit too hard to sound sexy. Adam disappeared from the public eye after releasing an album in 1998.

But digital creations like him, or it, have been a hallmark of Korean popular culture for a generation. Today, Korean “virtual influencers” like Rozy and Lucy have Instagram followings in the six figures and promote very real brands, like Chevrolet and Gucci.

The influencers have been purposely made to look almost real, but not quite; their near-human quality is part of their appeal, said Baik Seung-yup, Rozy’s creator.

“We want to create a new genre of content,” said Mr. Baik, who estimated that about 70 percent of the world’s virtual influencers are Korean.

A few of the many worlds of “W.”[Credit : Kakao Entertainment]According to McKinsey, more than $120 billion was spent globally on developing metaverse technology in the first five months of 2022. Much of that came from companies operating in the United States, said Matthew Ball, a tech entrepreneur who has written a book about the metaverse.

The highest-profile recent example was when Facebook renamed itself “Meta” in a multibillion-dollar attempt to embrace the next digital frontier, only to see its stock tumble and its earnings decline.

The South Korean government is investing more than $170 million to support development efforts here, forming what it calls a “metaverse alliance” that includes hundreds of companies. Mr. Ball said it is one of the most aggressive programs of its kind. But while South Korea may be “leagues ahead” when it comes to synthetic pop stars, whether its companies are likely to take a leading role as the metaverse evolves “is an open question,” Mr. Ball said.

Government backing for new technologies has paid off for South Korea in the past. The country built its modern economy over the past few decades on the backs of tech conglomerates and placed a winning bet on the cellphone industry, laying the groundwork for it to become what Bernie Cho, a music executive in Seoul, called “the most wired and wireless country.”

Teenagers here scroll through comics on phones, consume countless hours of Korean dramas without a cable box and zealously follow K-pop stars on social media and new platforms. On Zepeto and Weverse, fans interact with each other, sometimes as customizable avatars, and with their favorite bands.

Son Su-jung, second from left, with other “Girl’s Re:verse” producers. The show’s use of avatars lets K-pop singers be judged by their talent, not their looks, she said. [Credit : Jun Michael Park for The New York Times]Kakao Entertainment — an arm of Kakao, South Korea’s do-everything tech company — is billing Mave, its artificial band in progress, as the first K-pop group created entirely within the metaverse, using machine learning, deep fake, face swap and full 3-D production technology. To give them global appeal, the company wants the “girls” of Mave to eventually be able to converse in, say, Portuguese with a Brazilian fan and Mandarin with someone in Taiwan, fluently and convincingly.

The idea, said Kang Sung-ku, a technical director for the project, is that once such virtual beings can simulate meaningful conversations, “no real human will ever be lonely.”

Kakao’s singing show, “Girl’s Re:verse,” has a familiar reality-TV “survival” format: 30 singers, eliminated over time, until the last five standing form a band. But the contestants — all members of established K-pop bands or solo artists — compete, banter and hang out as avatars, in a virtual world called “W.” Their real identities are not revealed until they leave the show (in some cases, by way of the lava) or make it to the end.

Several people, one wearing a penguin mascot costume, sit at a table on a stage, as rows of people with laptop computers sit facing them. A logo, mostly in Korean script but including the English word “Re:verse,” is on the table and on a backdrop behind it. On a big screen next to the penguin are four cartoon women in different cartoon settings. A news conference to promote “Girl’s Re:verse” in December. The penguin, a popular mascot called Pengsoo, is one of the judges.[Credit : Jun Michael Park for The New York Times]There are few limits to the imagination in “W,” which whisks its contestants from the open sea to a Versailles-like palace to a desert landscape. One avatar is a chocolate princess, born in a cocoa tree; another has red devil horns. Pengsoo, a blunt-talking penguin mascot popular in South Korea, is one of the judges.

The contestants were involved in creating their avatars, said Son Su-jung, a producer for the show. She said part of the point was to give K-pop singers — “idols,” as they are called — a break from the industry’s relentless beauty standards, letting them be judged by their talent, not their looks. (Though the avatars, it should perhaps be said, all have big eyes and heart-shaped faces.)

The show also lets them drop their polished public personas, relax and crack jokes. “Idols in the real world are expected to be a product of perfection, but we hope that through this show, they can let go of those pressures,” Ms. Son said.

At a recent taping, glitches were still being ironed out. Support staff popped in and out of cubicles to help singers fiddle with their equipment. At least one mishap made it into the first episode: “I can’t hear you!” a contestant yelled as a judge repeatedly asked her the same question.

Contestants in their cubicles. The show doesn’t reveal their identities until they are eliminated or make it to the end.[Credit : Jun Michael Park for The New York Times]But some things about reality TV hadn’t changed. Even avatars, it turns out, are encouraged to snipe at their competitors.

“Look at the green light,” a producer intoned through a microphone to a contestant, whose avatar stared back at him from the screen.

“Who do you think did the worst?” he said. “Talk as if you’re gossiping about someone.”

https://www.nytimes.com
By Jin Ju Young & Matt Stevens

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

The New York Times : ‘Gangnam Style’ Brought K-Pop to the World, but Haunted Its Creator

Psy during an interview on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of his hit “Gangnam Style,” at his office in Seoul (specifically, in the Gangnam area).Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn 2012, the song took over the internet, and it helped pave the way for the global success of Korean pop. But Psy, the artist behind it, spent years trying and failing to replicate the phenomenon.

SEOUL — He may not look it, in a spiffy double-breasted suit and a coiffure secured with enough hair gel to reflect the ceiling lights, but the 45-year-old music executive confides a secret as he rubs his temples: He’s hung over.

But he doesn’t mind nursing this headache, at well past 2 p.m. on a Thursday in Seoul. Some of his best songwriting ideas come to him, he said, in the malaise that follows a night of hard drinking.

The man doing the creative suffering is Psy, the onetime global internet sensation whose 2012 viral music video and earworm of a song, “Gangnam Style,” became the first-ever YouTube offering to surpass one billion views and had the world galloping along with him.

The outlandish but irresistibly catchy song and accompanying video — which has Psy doing the tune’s signature horseback dance move in and around Gangnam, an upscale Seoul neighborhood — achieved the breakthrough, worldwide success that had mostly eluded Korean pop acts, or K-pop, before then.

The video, which now has some 4.6 billion views, was so culturally pervasive in 2012 that Barack Obama was asked about it on Election Day. NASA astronauts recorded a parody, and a North Korean state propaganda site evoked the dance move to mock a South Korean politician.

But for several years in the aftermath of all his viral fame, Psy said, the song’s success haunted him. Even as he was thrust overnight into a Hollywood existence, getting chased around New York City by paparazzi, signing with Justin Bieber’s manager and releasing a single with Snoop Dogg, internally he felt the pressure mounting for another hit.

Psy performing “Gangnam Style” live on NBC’s “Today” show in New York, in 2012. At the time, the video for the song had more than 200 million YouTube views; it now has more than 4.6 billion. [Credit : Jason Decrow/Invision, via Associated Press]“Let’s make just one more,” he says he kept telling himself.

He moved to Los Angeles in an effort to get a global career going in earnest, an ocean away from his native South Korea, where he was both a fixture of the music charts and a source of comic relief on silly television variety shows. But none of the attempts came close to replicating the formula that made “Gangnam Style” a global success.

Psy wasn’t alone in trying to figure out how to reproduce the phenomenon. In South Korea, not only the music industry but government officials and economists, too, were studying just what it was about the tune, the lyrics, the video, the dancing or the man that had vaulted the song to such singular levels of ubiquity.

And in the decade since the song and video first put South Korea’s pop music on the map for many around the world, K-pop has become a cultural juggernaut, expanding out from markets in East and Southeast Asia to permeate all corners of the world.

Artists like BTS and Blackpink command devoted fans numbering in the tens of millions, and the bands wield an economic impact that rivals a small nation’s G.D.P. The fervor has spilled over beyond music into politics, education and even Broadway.

Some say Psy deserves much of the credit.

“Psy single-handedly placed K-pop on a different level,” said Kim Young-dae, a music critic who has written extensively about the industry. The song was a “game changer” for the Korean music scene and paved the way for the groundswell of interest and commercial success that the South Korean stars who came after him experienced, Mr. Kim said.

Now, 10 years on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, is back home in South Korea, where he has started his own music label and management company and is trying to recreate the magic with the next generation of K-pop talent as one of the industry’s tastemakers.

“Let’s make just one more,” Psy said he kept telling himself after “Gangnam Style” became a phenomenon. [Credit. : Chang W. Lee/The New York Times]“One of the things I love most about this job is that it’s unpredictable. We say among ourselves we’re in the ‘lid business’ — because you don’t know what you’ve got until you open it,” Psy said in an interview at the offices of his music label headquartered in — where else? — the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. “You don’t know which cloud will bring the rain.”

With 10 artists under his wing, including a newly minted six-member boy band, TNX, Psy says he feels immensely more pressure shaping and stewarding other people’s careers compared to when he was responsible for his alone.

And while he can give his budding stars advice based on decades of industry experience, what he can’t do is offer them surefire instructions on making a hit record.

For all the years he has spent thinking and talking about “Gangnam Style,” he remains just as mystified as anyone by its success.

“The songs are written by the same person, the dance moves are by the same person and they’re performed by the same person. Everything’s the same, but what was so special about that one song?” Psy said. “I still don’t know, to this day.”

Psy performing on the grounds of Korea University in Seoul in May. [Credit : Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]In global terms, Psy and his “Gangnam Style” are the epitome of a one-hit wonder. But in South Korea, he had been well-known as a rapper and musician for a decade before, carving out a path that differed from many of his fellow performers, in that he didn’t count on a boost from his physical appearance or shy away from courting controversy.

He never had the chiseled look sought after in South Korea’s pop music industry, and from the release of his first album in 2001, he became notorious for his blunt, profane and at times ribald lyrics. “I Love Sex” was one of the tracks on his debut album, “Psy from the Psycho World!” which was slapped with a ban on sale to minors at the urging of the country’s Christian Ethics Movement.

Despite — or perhaps because of — his unapologetic, iconoclastic ways, over the past two decades at home in South Korea, the college dropout has consistently logged chart toppers, best-selling albums and sold-out concerts.

“It’s kinda sorta ironic he became so iconic — he went from being occasionally censored to widely celebrated,” said Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based creative services agency that offers marketing and distribution solutions to Korean music artists and their labels. “He irreverently winked his way from being the bad boy of K-pop to the golden boy of K-pop.”

For a pop song, “Gangnam Style” also unleashed an avalanche of deep think pieces and analyses on the various aspects of South Korea and Seoul it was said to be lampooning: the hypocrisy of the nouveau riche, the superficiality of its social standards and the inequality exemplified by the opulent Gangnam neighborhood.

Psy insists the song never intended to deliver any profound social commentary — he was just looking to give people a few minutes of mindless hilarity and a reprieve from reality.

If anything, he said, he was poking fun at himself, because he doesn’t aesthetically fit the bill of a posh Gangnam local.

A decade on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy has started a music label and talent management company. [Credit : Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“It’s funny because someone who doesn’t look like he’s ‘Gangnam style’ says he is,” he said.

Initially targeted for development in the 1970s to expand Seoul south of the Han River, Gangnam has became a coveted address where many of the capital’s wealthy congregate and the best schools are concentrated, an educational disparity likely to ensure that the inequalities symbolized by the neighborhood continue into the next generation.

In the years since Psy made Gangnam a globally recognized proper noun, the neighborhood has gotten ever more unattainable for the average South Korean. Nowhere have runaway real estate prices risen as steeply as in the Gangnam area.

“If you say you live in Gangnam, people look at you differently,” said Jin Hee-seon, a former vice mayor of Seoul and professor of urban planning at Yonsei University. “It’s an object of desire and envy.”

Psy, raised in the greater Gangnam area in a family running a semiconductor business, now lives north of the river with his wife and twin daughters and says he spends little time thinking about the place.

A bronze sculpture in Gangnam by the artist Hwang Man-seok, modeled after the signature “Gangnam Style” horse-riding hand motion. [Credit : Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]What he has recently returned to is his signature live performances.

His concerts are legendary in South Korea for raucous good fun. His music — loud and energetic — is often accompanied by dance moves just as outrageous, requiring him to jump, kick and wave his arms wildly in the air. During his six-city tour this year, his first since the pandemic, he said he was surprised to find his joints and limbs as nimble as ever in middle age.

In his latest album released this April, his ninth, he collaborated with the rapper Suga of BTS on a single titled “That That.” In the music video, Suga comically duels — and kills — the blue tuxedo-wearing Psy of the 2012 video. (That video has accrued 369 million views.)

As for the chase of global fame that once drove him nearly mad, he says he’s made his peace with its absence.

“If another good song comes along and if that thing happens again, great. If not, so be it,” he said. “For now, I’ll do what I do in my rightful place.”

https://www.nytimes.com
By Jin Yu Young & Victoria Kim

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

NBC News Think : Think you know Korea because you love K-pop and watched ‘Squid Game’? Think again.

[Netflix ; NBC News]K-pop idols and certain K-dramas are making unprecedented inroads in the West, but they don’t always reflect the tastes of their home country.

As a Korean American, it’s crazy to see how Korean pop culture has exploded in popularity in the U.S. in recent years. Today, it’s not uncommon to see Korean content and stars grabbing headlines in Western media, whether it’s “Squid Game” being greenlit for a second season or K-pop superstars BTS releasing their latest album “Proof” to commemorate the group’s ninth anniversary.   

But with global demand for Korean pop culture at an all-time high, it feels like South Korea is kind of losing control over its cultural narrative.

Just a decade ago, I was fruitlessly seeking opportunities to write about K-pop; today, I’m frequently turning down requests from various editors and publicists asking me to write an article about a new K-pop idol group — that is, photogenic boy or girl bands that perform the kind of dance music that many of us have now come to associate with K-pop. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d actually get tired of people asking me to write about the topic, but it seems that just when much of the Korean public and the Korean diaspora have moved on from K-pop due to the surfeit of idol groups (about 200 to 400 of them have debuted in the past decade, and over 50 are debuting in this year alone), the rest of the world is clamoring for it.

As I’ve written before, the type of Korean cultural content that’s popular in South Korea — whether that’s music, films or TV shows — often tends to be very different from the kind that’s popular abroad. Until “Parasite” came along, Korean films that were a hit with many international audiences were box-office flops in South Korea, and vice versa.

K-pop is probably the best example of this puzzling paradox. “It seems like anytime someone writes something about K-Pop — particularly pieces on boy and girl bands — it doesn’t really matter who authored the articles, it’s pretty much a guaranteed way to generate massive clicks,” Bernie Cho, a music industry veteran and president and founder of DFSB Kollective, an agency that works with hundreds of independent Korean music acts, explained to me. “But unfortunately, what sort of happens as a result of this type of clickbait journalism is that you get a very skewed and myopic lens on the Korean music industry landscape. If you only believed what you read online, it would be easy to assume that every Korean music artist was a boy band or girl band.”

Cho noted that a 2020 Korea Creative Content Agency survey of music listeners in South Korea found that ballad is the most widely enjoyed genre in the country, polling in at a whopping 76.5 percent. “The irony is that if you scan the year-end music charts in Korea, the most streamed artists are actually not boy bands or girl bands,” said Cho. Case in point: Last year, K-pop solo artist IU took the top spot on Korea’s streaming charts, while the two most downloaded songs in Korea both went to trot and ballad singer Lim Young-woong.

And yet, because of the ever-growing global popularity of K-pop girl and boy bands — largely thanks to their vast international fan bases — it’s the kind of music that gets heavily marketed outside of Korea.  Even the way we’ve come to define “K-pop” — as music dominated by idol groups with flashy outfits and slick choreography — has been influenced by the narratives pushed by international (especially Western) media outlets and fans.  

However, Cho argues that the definition of K-pop should be broader to encompass any kind of Korean music that happens to be popular in Korea. He points out that in South Korea, all Korean artists are lumped together into one consolidated “K-pop” chart, which includes a diverse array of genres from hip-hop to R&B to ballads and rock. He compared it to the U.S. pop charts, where artists from a wide range of genres make up the Top 10 and Top 20 spots. “They’re pop artists because they’re popular — it’s less about the style and more about the statistics,” he said.

Though Cho’s answer is technically correct, it seems the predominance of idol music in K-pop’s global reach has impacted the way that even Koreans themselves think about K-pop. When I ask my Korean friends and acquaintances about K-pop, almost all of them now seem to equate it with idol groups, and virtually none of them listen to it (except for the few who have to because it’s directly related to their jobs). In fact, most Koreans I know have told me they listen to Korean indie and folk rock, trot, ballads and/or music by non-Korean artists.  

The growing popularity of Korean TV shows have proven to also reveal this disconnect. Recent South Korean favorites like “Hometown Cha Cha Cha” and “Twenty Five Twenty One” — both available on Netflix — also did well internationally, but in the U.S. they were nowhere near as popular as Netflix’s original thrillers like “Squid Game,” “All of Us Are Dead” and “Hellbound.” Currently, the slice-of-life K-dramas “Our Blues” and “My Liberation Notes” are the top two shows on Netflix in South Korea and are both sitting in Netflix’s Global Top 10 list of non-English series, but neither has cracked Netflix’s U.S. Top 10.

To help explain the divergence in Korean pop culture preferences between South Korean and international (especially Western) audiences, I spoke to David Tizzard, a professor at Seoul Women’s University who hosts the “Korea Deconstructed” podcast and regularly contributes to The Korea Times. He has a theory that makes a distinction between what he calls “K-culture” and “Korean culture.” “K-culture — anything with a ‘K ’— is primarily designed for export. It’s not designed for the domestic market; it’s designed with the taste of international people in mind,” he said. K-pop idol groups would probably be the quintessential example of this. “Squid Game,” which targeted the global market from the get-go, is another great example. 

In contrast, content that reflects “Korean culture,” according to Tizzard, is designed primarily for Korean audiences. Korean historical dramas and variety shows would probably fall in this category. Many of them are hugely popular with domestic audiences, and although some (such as the historical romance “The King’s Affection”) do well in other countries, they’re rarely expected to chart globally, since usually their primary aim is to inform and entertain Korean viewers.

Moreover, this dichotomy between “K-culture” and “Korean culture” is probably being further reinforced by mainstream English-language news outlets, which tend to overemphasize certain K-pop idol acts over other kinds of Korean artists and show a predilection for covering only certain types of K-dramas.  

All that said, sometimes I wonder if I’m the one who’s selfishly and needlessly attempting to impose a narrow view of how Korean culture should be understood and interpreted. Pop culture is meant to be enjoyed and shared by everyone according to their own tastes. Perhaps that’s partly why Korean pop culture in particular has taken off across the globe — its elements are so diverse that there’s bound to be something for everyone.  

So if K-pop stans are crushing on and promoting the heck out of their favorite idols on Twitter and YouTube — so much so that media outlets are forced to pay attention — well, who am I to rain on their parade? And if Americans tend to enjoy violent K-dramas while most Koreans prefer more low key and family-friendly ones, like “Twenty Five Twenty One” or “Our Blues,” who am I to say who’s right and who’s wrong? In the end, I’d still much rather see people associate my motherland with idol K-pop and gory K-dramas than with, say, a certain dictator. Maybe those of us of Korean descent, who are observing this ever-expanding Korean Wave with a mixture of pride and bewildered amusement, should just learn to let go and enjoy the ride.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion
By Regina Kim

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

FT Finanical Times : South Korea plots its next entertainment blockbuster

Bong Joon-ho, BTS and Squid Game represent some of South Korea’s biggest entertainment exportsHaving given the world K-pop, Parasite and Squid Game, it now wants to create global platforms to distribute its content

Bernie Cho still remembers his visit to the smoking area of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris in 2010. The Korean-American music executive, who worked with several high-profile Korean pop acts during his days as a producer and presenter on MTV in the early 2000s, was travelling with a delegation of Korean artists and government officials to stage the inaugural K-pop showcase at an international music festival in Cannes.

Stepping outside in Paris after a long flight from Seoul, he was startled to see dozens of young fans of Epik High, a Korean hip-hop trio he was accompanying to France.

“These were fans I didn’t even know existed, French teenage girls excitedly waving placards,” says Cho. “Then in Cannes, hundreds more turned up — some were even explaining their love for K-pop to me in fluent Korean. That’s when I knew K-pop had the potential to explode.”

In turns saccharine, brutal, and dazzlingly original, Korean content has since bulldozed its way into the global cultural consciousness.

Girl group Blackpink has the most YouTube subscribers of any musical artist in the world, while boy band BTS has a following so organised and devoted that Chinese authorities have come to regard it with the kind of suspicion historically reserved for religious groups like Falun Gong.

More recently, South Korea’s merciless social satires have conquered the heights of film and television respectively. Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite and Netflix sensation Squid Game — the streaming service’s most-watched show ever — have given global exposure to traditional Korean preoccupations with economic precarity and social violence.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in speaks as Bong Joon-ho, director of the four-Oscar award-winning film ‘Parasite’, reacts during a luncheon at the Presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, in 2020 © Kim Hong-Ju/Pool/ReutersTaken together with South Korea’s huge gaming sector, in 2019 the East Asian country’s entertainment industry was estimated by the state-run Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) to have raked in $107bn in sales revenues. It has left observers searching for answers as to how it managed to break into the global mainstream in ways others — including much larger neighbours China and Japan — have not.

The rise of the Korean entertainment industry bears many of the hallmarks of the country’s success stories in manufacturing sectors like cars and consumer electronics: active state involvement, a willingness to absorb and finesse foreign influences, and a near-pathological export-oriented mindset.

“This is not just a cultural moment,” says Cho. “It’s an ‘overnight success story’ more than 20 years in the making.”

But if the success of Squid Game illustrates the potential for Korean content to captivate global audiences, it has also crystallised a wider dilemma for Korean entertainment companies: how to move from producing content that performs well on foreign platforms such as Netflix or Apple Music to growing its own platforms so that they can emerge as global players in their own right.

“Squid Game showed the world the quality of South Korean content, but creating a global platform is a different story,” says Chan Lee of Petra Capital Management, which has investments in the Korean entertainment industry. “The immediate goal [of these companies] should be to be treated as more than just subcontractors.

Visitors take selfies with a giant doll named ‘Younghee’ from the Netflix series ‘Squid Game’ at a park in Seoul, South Korea © Kim Hong-Ji/ReutersA clothing factory owner checks newly made tracksuits inspired by ‘Squid Game’ at his premises in Seoul © Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters“The key thing is to be able to influence the production process,” he adds. “From an investor’s perspective, what counts ultimately is who controls the ecosystem.”

THE KOREAN WAVE

Aside from renown in the rarefied realm of highbrow cinema, until the 1990s South Korean popular culture went largely unnoticed beyond the country’s borders. That started to change as a wave of creative energy was released in the wake of South Korea’s post-1987 democratic transition.

In the early 1990s, brash western-influenced music acts such as Seo Taiji & Boys challenged government censorship and displaced an old guard of crooners in the affections of young Koreans, fuelling the rise over the course of the decade of a new generation of Korean entertainment companies and talent agencies. They were influenced both by American popular culture and the “idol” pop star assembly line model developed in Japan.

Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, first realised K-pop’s international potential while at a music festival in Cannes, France © Ore Huiying/Getty/All That MattersEpik High, a hip-hop trio, were one of the first K-pop bands to find teenage audiences outside Korea © Michael Buckner/GettyThe bruising experience of the 1997-98 Asia financial crisis convinced successive South Korean governments to invest heavily in the country’s digital infrastructure and in the promotion of its cultural exports. “The financial crisis convinced policymakers that there was a limit to what could be achieved through the manufacture of physical goods,” says Yong Kwon of the Korea Economic Institute of America.

Incentivised by the proliferation of cable TV channels hungry for content, in the late 1990s and early 2000s Korean dramas made inroads across Asia, giving rise to the term hallyu, or Korean Wave.

“Government policy succeeded, but not in the way it might have intended,” says Kwon. “What really mattered was not its efforts to subsidise the creation of content, but the creation of a robust broadband infrastructure that accelerated the disruption of the existing entertainment industry, paving the way for a new generation of producers and consumers.”

Singer Rain performs during a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2006 © Scott Gries/GettyYet, by the mid-2000s the Korean Wave still had not reached beyond Asia. That would require the emergence of technology that would bypass traditional channels and in the words of one industry insider, inject Korean content “straight into the bloodstream”.

In January 2006, a 23-year-old Korean singer called Jung Ji-hoon — otherwise known as Rain — played two concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York. His 2005 album, It’s Raining, had sold more than 1m copies across Asia, and he was regarded by many in the Korean music industry as their great hope for breaking into the US market.

Despite attracting the curiosity of the American media, however, Rain’s US tour did not achieve its objectives. While attracting large numbers of Korean-American and Asian-American fans to his shows, the crossover success that would later be achieved by acts such as Psy, BTS, and Blackpink eluded him.

“The only way of finding mainstream success in the US at the time was through traditional media outlets such as TV, radio, and the printed press,” says Cho. “It was just before the dawn of social media platforms — he missed out by just a few months.”

Customers take pictures next to BTS-themed decorations outside a McDonald’s restaurant during the launch of the BTS Meal in June 2021 in San Fernando, Pampanga province, the Philippines © Ezra Acayan/Getty THE 'SECRET SAUCE' OF SUCCESS

Michael Hong, a former chief executive of ImaginAsian TV, the first 24-hour Asian-American television channel in the US, bears the scars of years of trying to convince American executives to take Asian content seriously.

“In the pre-digital era, the barrier to entry was very, very high — you would get put in this ethnic media ghetto,” says Hong, who now distributes digital content from around the world. “It’s not that the executives were bigoted, necessarily. But they go by the numbers, and we didn’t have the metrics to convince them.”

Even before the rise of social media, K-pop groups enjoyed dynamic relationships with their digitally savvy fans. Producers would constantly experiment with a dizzying array of musical and visual genres, inviting fans to upload their responses and imitations. That in turn would create a fierce sense of community between fans as they praised, encouraged and quarrelled with each other, turbocharging online engagement.

"Korean fan culture has always been about active participation, about making your own videos, about joining in and getting involved with fan groups,” says Hong. “In return, the groups are constantly acknowledging their fan bases. That creates a dynamic like a sports team, when the group’s success becomes their own.”

The timing could not have been better. “Korean fan culture fitted perfectly with YouTube culture; Korea’s cultural moment coincided with the rise of technology that could deliver it to the world,” says Kwon.

Focused principally on overseas consumers, Korean distributors placed great emphasis on the sophistication of the metadata attached to their content, making it easier to be found by non-Korean speakers on American and European platforms.

“As sexy and slick as K-pop videos are, it’s actually something as mundane as the metadata that really set them apart [from other foreign language competitors],” says Cho. “It’s the secret sauce: you can’t fall in love with something if you can’t find it.”

“That’s the main difference with Japan and China,” says a Korean industry executive. “For the Japanese, foreign markets were an afterthought. The Chinese cut their platforms off from the rest of the world. But for the Koreans, it has always been about exports.”

According to Kwon, “the Japanese had the right idea when Sony bought into Hollywood. Their misfortune is that they peaked too early.

“Japan’s cultural moment occurred in the age of the video cassette” he says “the Koreans had YouTube. There’s no contest.”

Psy on stage at the MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto in 2013 © Canadian Press/ShutterstockThe online momentum being gathered by Korean pop acts would break into the open in 2012, when Psy’s Gangnam Style — the most-viewed music video ever on YouTube but originally aimed at a domestic audience — emerged as a global phenomenon. But it would be almost a decade until a Korean drama, Squid Game, which has been viewed over 100m times, achieved a comparable impact.

Passed up by numerous Korean companies, the dystopian drama was produced by Netflix as part of its focus on “glocal” content: locally-produced shows that capture market share in target countries and regions while being fed into an ever-expanding bank of content for consumption by over 200m subscribers worldwide.

Netflix has spent Won770bn ($650m) on Korean content over the past five years, and is, it says, planning to invest another Won550bn in 2021 alone.

That investment may have brought Korean content to the world’s attention. But it also highlights the scale of the challenge facing Korean entertainment companies seeking to increase their market share. South Korea may have gained the plaudits for the success of Squid Game, say observers, but Netflix made the money.

“There is a limit to relying on Netflix too much,” says Park Hyuck-tae, industrial policy team leader at KOCCA, which coordinates development and promotion of the Korean content industry. “Netflix is giving a margin of just 10-15 per cent to Korean production studios, and taking all the intellectual property rights for the content. That’s why people say it is Netflix that is making most of the money, despite the huge success of Squid Game.”

Merchandise for boy band BTS on display at Hamleys toy store in London Merchandise for boy band BTS on display at Hamleys toy store in London © Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty BTS perform at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles in 2020 © Big Hit Entertainment/GettyEXPLORING THE 'METAVERSE'

Seo Jang-ho, senior vice-president at CJ ENM, South Korea’s largest film and television producer with a market capitalisation of over $3.4bn, says that while it is more realistic to take advantage of global platforms “for the time being”, his company will “seek ways to strengthen Korean platforms in the long-term”, including through investment in his company’s streaming operation.

Underlining the Korean music industry’s global ambitions, Hybe Corporation — formally known as Big Hit Entertainment, the company behind BTS — in April completed a $1bn merger with Ithaca Holdings, an American management agency whose clients include the likes of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. Smaller agencies are also expanding internationally, exporting their business models by offering consulting services and pop star training programmes.

At the same time, the Korean gaming sector, which dwarfs those of K-pop, film and television is buying into Korean and western content producers and companies specialising in creating virtual worlds known as the “metaverse”.

In a sign of the creeping convergence of sectors once regarded as distinct, Korean gaming company Com2uS has invested both in US studio Skybound Entertainment and in WYSIWYG, a Korean metaverse company specialising in visual effects technologies. Another gaming company, Netmarble, in August created a partnership with Korean production group Studio Dragon and launched a subsidiary called Metaverse Entertainment to explore the production of interactive content involving virtual pop stars.

This has translated into a proliferation of metaverse platforms where users can use cryptocurrency to purchase digital assets such as virtual clothes, videos, or parcels of land. Korean entertainment companies JYP Entertainment, YG Entertainment and Hybe all have stakes in Zepeto, a K-pop and fashion-focused avatar platform backed by Naver, a Korean tech group. Four out of every five users of Zepeto, which has its own digital currency, are teenagers; Blackpink, the all-girl group signed to YG, held a virtual signing event on the platform last year.

“Korean entertainment companies want to be the platform providers of the future, offering multiple services and sucking in data,” says Kwon of the Korea Economic Institute of America. “It’s ultimately through data, not media content, that they move up the value chain.”

In May, the South Korean government launched a “Metaverse Alliance” of over 200 companies and institutions. It has earmarked almost $8bn from its 2022 budget for the country’s next digital transformation. The hope, it appears, is that the country can repeat the trick of the late 1990s and again steal a march by adopting next-generation technology earlier and more enthusiastically than everybody else. If so, say observers, it is a manoeuvre aimed at contesting not the present dominance of Netflix, but the potential future dominance of another US technology group: the company formerly known as Facebook.

For many Koreans, however, the future should not be allowed to distract from what has been achieved so far: global recognition and critical acclaim that means more than sales of cars or chips ever could.

“The part of you that maybe you were suppressing — the Korean part of you — all of a sudden that part of you is shining, and it just makes you whole,” says Hong, who grew up in Queens in New York.

“You’ve never seen so many prominent Asians looked upon as equal, you never saw those images,” he adds. “We’re contributing something to the culture that’s not watered down, that’s not derivative — it’s the ultimate validation.”

https://www.ft.com
By Christian Davies (Additional reporting by Song Jung-a and Kang Buseong in Seoul)

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]