One of South Korea’s most successful cultural exports is K-Pop. From China and Japan to Singapore and Thailand, K-Pop stars like Psy, HyunA, CL and G-Dragon are dizzyingly famous. But how did this happen? Rana finds out – and discovers that this shiny, manufactured genre has begun to take an unexpected turn...
South Korea is now the world's 12th-biggest economy - not bad for a country that was sunk in abject poverty until the 1950s. But over the last decade, Korea has become known for more than the cars and electronic goods that helped speed this small nation to economic success. Since the late 1990s, the 'Korean Wave' of popular culture has won great prominence and popularity across East Asia, starting in Japan, but now spreading increasingly to China.
Rana visits the South Korean capital, Seoul, and meets pop producers and pollsters, noise musicians and historians, movie and TV directors and novelists, to find out how Korea has managed this - and why it cares so much about its standing in the region and beyond.
He explores how, as it has become richer and freer, South Korean culture has been turning to face the pains of the past - which saw it colonised, destroyed by war and oppressed by dictatorship.
And he discovers how, as freedom and wealth bed down, South Koreans are breaking from the conformity that helped them pull off an economic miracle towards a more raucous, more individualist culture, from pop singers to workers in banks.
Speakers include: Chung Chang-wha, Bernie Cho, Hong Chulki, Christopher Green, Kim Jiyoon, Lee Jung-hoon, Han Kang, John Nilsson-Wright, Moon So-ri, Yun Sukho, Tesung Kim, JK Youn.
SparkLabs, one of Seoul’s top accelerators is hoping its fifth batch will produce new success stories (alumni include online beauty product retailer Memebox, another one of Korea’s top-funded startups).
The twelve companies that presented during its Demo Day today include two security companies that have the potential to expand globally: Lockin, which wants to make it easier for developers to integrate cloud-based security into their Android apps, and Qubit Security, which operates a hacking detection platform called Plura to sniffs out attacks as soon as they happen.
On the consumer side, streaming site DropBeat wants to become the top source for electronic dance music, while Way, a device that helps users customize skincare regimens, has raised $105,000, more than twice its target, on Indiegogo.
Other companies include: LoanVi, a peer-to-peer lending platform and SparkLabs’ first investment in Vietnam; Genoplan, which uses genetic testing to customize fitness and nutrition programs; PiQuant, a food-tech startup that checks for melamine in milk and plans to target countries like China where food safety is a major concern; wearable products maker Leemyungsu Design Lab (its first product is a backpack for cyclists); Townus, a group-buying platform for university students; social network-based job recruiting platform Wanted Lab; holographic virtual reality developer DoubleMe; and Evain, which filters out spam and phishing phone calls.
Treeplanet, which participated in SparkLabs’ fourth class but showcased its product at today’s event, is a crowdfunding platform for reforestation projects.
SparkLabs Demo Day 5 : Movies, Music and Mayhem Panel
Netflix and Amazing are continually disrupting movie and TV viewing habits and production cycles. Both of these companies have already received Golden Globe nominations and have traditional TV and cable companies wondering where the next blindside hit will come from. Other disruptors include Hulu, Maker Studios and YouTube.
YouTube is also trying to disrupt the music industry since millions of people use YouTube as their default music source. The initial music wars resulted in Spotify and other streaming services leaving Apple in the dust and forced the tech giant to play catch up and acquire Beats for $3 billion. Will Apple's new streaming service beat out Spotify? Will there be new disruptors launching in the coming years? How has all this uncertainty affected music artists and the overall industry? The panel speakers are: Marc Randolph (Co-founder of Netflix), Sam Wick (EVP of Business Development and Operations at Maker Studios), Andreas Ehn (Founding CTO of Spotify) and moderated by Bernie Cho (President of DFSB Kollective).
A new and far-reaching study conducted by Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s leading global public relations firms, uncovers the increasing significance of “soft power” as a key contributor to the reputation of cities in Asia Pacific. “Engaging Cities: the Growing Relevance of Soft Power to City Reputations in Asia Pacific” focuses on how cities in the region leverage soft power – that is, those attributes of city brand reputation beyond politics, economics and military might – and reveals Tokyo’s leading reputation as a city of influence in Asia Pacific with its reputation as a creative hub driving its top ranking across 10 of 16 soft power attributes examined.
The study examines eight cities – Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo – across 16 soft power attributes that, when combined, contribute to a differentiated positioning of a city’s brand reputation and perceived influence. They include social media and digital technology; tourism; food, culinary and dining experiences; architecture and design; sustainability and the environment; and standard of living. In partnership with KRC Research, Weber Shandwick interviewed 4,147 people online and spoke with 20 experts in sectors as diverse as media, design, architecture, retail, sports and trade.
Among the soft power attributes studied, the Weber Shandwick report reveals Singapore’s top ranking for its innovative approach to sustainability and the environment and for offering a particularly high standard of living to residents. Hong Kong was rated first for being seen as the financial centre of the region, and Sydney was rated first across sports and leisure infrastructure, contemporary architecture and design, and gender tolerance, but was rated as the least influential city in terms of food, culinary and dining experiences.
“The dramatic urbanisation of Asian countries and the increasingly challenging environment in which civic leaders compete for creative talent, inward investment and tourism dollars has made brand reputation a priority for cities,” said Ian Rumsby, chief strategy officer, Asia Pacific, Weber Shandwick. “The ability to articulate, connect and promote unique, soft power attributes is now at the centre of success for governments and cities.”
Insights on Overall Perceptions that Distinguish City Reputations Today
The report reveals five primary observations that inform public, private and social sector leaders about the drivers of reputation in Asian cities.
Identity
The strength of national brands can overwhelm the ability of a city to cultivate awareness of its core attributes. This presents challenges and opportunities in equal measure as cities strive to elevate their reputation as a destination of choice. As cities compete to attract and retain top-tier talent, leveraging national attributes whilst balancing and creating their own city brand identity is an essential first step in fostering better understanding of a city’s total value and offering.
Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods are culture-clusters that showcase the unique, diverse attributes of a city to residents and non-residents. These are the areas where a city’s personality can be revealed, giving people the chance to witness and engage with the distinctive attributes of a certain location that suit their areas of interest. Cities that elevate the interest and relevance of neighborhoods to people’s lives advance their reputations.
Citizen Advocacy
Residents of the eight cities in Weber Shandwick’s report consistently rate their own city higher against each of the selected soft power attributes than non-residents. Overall, residents rated their own city 18 percentage points higher against all attributes, combined, than non-residents.
Understanding and tapping into the groundswell of citizen pride in cities is becoming increasingly relevant. As cities grow and people become wealthier, their ability to travel and engage with people in different markets becomes easier. Finding ways to stimulate residents’ endorsement as ambassadors of their hometowns in other markets has enormous branding potential.
The Creative Classes
Creative people are a potent force behind city innovation. They invent idea-led economies that bolster innovation in everything from music and technology to sustainability and design. Civic leaders need to think deeply and strategically about how to foster a diverse and inclusive environment that attracts creative talent needed to future-proof cities.
“Creative and innovative talent has always played a fundamental role in the cultural and economic development of a city. In today’s highly-connected, highly-competitive world, being able to attract that talent requires a strong brand reputation,” said Tim Sutton, chairman, Asia Pacific, Weber Shandwick. “Civic leaders can utilize the powerful ideas and insights uncovered in this new research to identify, refine and capitalise on their city’s strongest soft power attributes to build a reputation that competes for the best.”
People Power
Big investments in city infrastructure can be undermined by a failure to deliver an engaging experience. Whether it is an airport or sporting venue, the experience of a place is dependent on the people who define it. Cities that invest in a people-based service culture can enhance experiences and ensure that a reputation as ‘warm and welcoming’ is advanced.
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The “Engaging Cities” report includes an analysis of each city’s performance against 16 soft power attributes with commentary by respondents on the rationale for their ratings. The report also explores City Self-Esteem—an initiative designed to understand the perspective of residents of a particular city against those who visit or do not live there.
“There is a huge amount of mobility between the cities of Asia Pacific,” said Jennifer Sosin, chief research strategist at KRC Research. “The proportion of respondents who said they have visited at least one other city or actually lived in one of the other cities is high. This means that city brand and influence, more than ever, are created through the personal experiences of people who are not residents.”
Please view “Engaging Cities: The Growing Relevance of Soft Power to City Reputations in Asia Pacific” and infographics for the cities reviewed here.
Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]
In Seoul’s Garosu-gil, Colin Marshall talks with Korean music industry expert Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a creative agency that provides digital media, marketing, and distribution services to Korean pop music artists. They discuss why the world now knows what K-pop is; how Korean youth culture, pop culture, and digital culture have become one in the same; Psy as outlier and representative of K-pop, “the bad boy who became the golden boy,” who put a dent in the industry’s pursuit of perfection; how “made in Korea” can work, internationally, as a label; whether the concept of “crazy Korea,” like “weird Japan,” has any traction; the big technological differences between the time of the 1990s J-pop boom and the modern K-pop boom; the musician’s perceived need to break out of Korea for success; how, growing up in the United States, he became aware of Korean popular culture; his disenchantment with the “boo-hoo session” of Asian American studies; the accidental meeting that got him into music television; what he discovered in Seoul’s Hongdae neighborhood; the Korean government’s investment in internet technology, and the digital and cultural revolution that followed; why Korean pop artists have, in the recent past, made so little money; the use of music not as a business, but as a business card; Korea’s other DMZ: the closed-garden “digital media zone” of Korea-only technology; how he first saw the seemingly wholly under-construction Seoul almost twenty years ago; how the vibe of the 2002 World Cup has carried over into the present; what Los Angeles and Seoul have to learn from each other; how his advantage in coming from America has gone away; how K-pop has become “sonic bibimbap,” uniquely Korean in its mixture of various ingredients; what Koreanness internationally-marketed Korean music retains; his “What am I even doing?” moment on a flight from Los Angeles to Seoul; why the origin of the word “piracy” reveals it as a good thing, and how it sparked the British Invasion; what he makes of the return of the 1960s and 70s “golden age” of Korean pop and R&B; and why he tells artists they shouldn’t do everything in English (and why he plays them Sigur Rós).
This was written by Colin Marshall. Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2014, at 2:20 am. Filed under Korea, Notebook on Cities and Culture, Seoul. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition.
First Psy, now six new K-pop bands come to America: Psy broke the mold for South Korean pop bands in America. Now Infinite is following in his footsteps with its upcoming show at the Fillmore Silver Spring. Here are a few other K-pop bands you should check out In early May, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong posted a photo to his Instagram account of “Gangnam Style” sensation Psy. “This dude is the herpes of music,” the caption read, alongside the hash tags #flareup and #pleasegoaway. “Once you think it’s gone, it comes back.”
That post came nearly a month after the release of “Gentleman,” the 35-year-old Korean pop phenomenon’s follow-up to his first smash hit, a song whose video, with 1.8 billion total views, is — by almost a factor of two — the most watched visual in the history of YouTube.
For much of the past year “Gangnam Style” was inescapable on TV, at weddings, at sporting events, everywhere. That song vaulted Psy — a doughy, good humored outlier in his native country’s carefully moussed, vaguely militaristic music industry — to pop cultural heights no one in Seoul could have ever anticipated. After a decade spent touring almost exclusively for Korean audiences, he was teaching Britney Spears the “horse dance” on “Ellen,” counting down the New Year for us in Times Square, shilling pistachios during the Super Bowl, and, perhaps most impressively, performing for the Obamas at the annual “Christmas in Washington” special. He’d gained entrée to the largest music market in the world. He was a part of pop’s most inner circle. And all of it stemmed from the sometimes maddening appeal of one very viral music video. How could he possibly follow that?
As of this past week, “Gentleman” is the year’s most-viewed video on YouTube with 573 million hits and counting. But have you actually heard “Gentleman” recently? An unabashedly strategic copy of its predecessor, the song is armed with a similarly propulsive, high-wattage electro hook and an equally relentless barrage of outlandish visual punchlines. “Gentleman” has, if the numbers are to be trusted, been an overwhelming success — proof, the narrative would suggest, that Psy wasn’t just a one-hit wonder and that “Gangnam Style” wasn’t just the 2012 equivalent of the “Macarena.” But like the Latin pop surge of the mid-1990s, Psy’s unexpected breakthrough came at a pivotal moment for Korean pop, or K-pop as it’s also called.
Since the late 1990s, Korea has been producing some of the most exhilarating pop music in the world. It is an artform — closer to a science — that in recent years has made cultural inroads outside of Asia. As early as their teens, prospective performers are recruited and sent through a specially designed, deeply competitive training program meant to prepare them for careers as global pop exports. They live together in housing arrangements made by their record label, learn foreign languages, song composition, rapping and dance choreography before finally debuting.
This debut is usually a heavily considered concept, be it a 12-member, half-Chinese, half-South Korean boy band that can split up to tour separately but simultaneously; or a sprawling, nine-member girl group with members come from as far away as Southern California. (Both of those examples, EXO and Girls’ Generation, call Seoul’s first powerhouse agency, SM Entertainment, home.) The songs, like the groups themselves, are constructed for maximum reach: Choruses are built from catchphrase English, verses are in Korean or custom-tailored to target markets. Sounds, textures and visuals are often sourced from various Western hits. The result is a listening (and viewing) experience that is both bewildering and thrilling, one wherein recognizable pop moments from the past (or present) are copied, tweaked, and improved upon before being fused together, side-by-side, in the space of the same, aggressively polished product.
Which is why Psy is such an extraordinary case. He is not a conventionally pretty face and “Gangnam Style” is comprised of very specific cultural signifiers, written in largely untranslatable Korean. It not only transcended the language barrier but also upended thousands of hours and millions of dollars worth of market research in South Korea, where the word “invasion” had become used more and more frequently to describe and package the impending arrival of highly trained, highly disciplined pop brands who were already uniformly famous across the Asian continent.
The march continues, and much of the force behind K-pop’s aggressive outward expansion is that Korea’s own market is, at this point, too small to contain it. Though established Korean pop acts visited the United States as early as the 1980s, when the “godfather of Korean pop,” Cho Yong Pil, performed at Carnegie Hall, there has been a dissonance between attendance numbers and mainstream awareness. “The K-pop fan community keeps up to speed with the touring or promotion visits, so even before these groups become familiar to a wider audience, there have been in-market trips,” says Yvonne Yuen, senior vice president of international marketing at Universal Music Southeast Asia. “Some acts may not have Billboard hits but still manage to sell out Madison Square Garden or the Staples Center.”
More recently, high profile Korean pop groups have continued to test the waters in the United States before, during and after Psy’s rise. In 2005, the renowned solo artist Rain performed at the Garden. Girls’ Generation returned to New York early last year for appearances on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “Live! with Kelly Ripa” months before Bigbang and 2NE1 — outwardly edgy, fashion-forward labelmates of Psy’s — embarked on brief sold-out tours of the United States. There also have been collaborations with popular American artists, but none have moved the needle in any visibly significant way outside of the distinctly fervent (and always online) K-pop fan network.
Still, Psy’s success has generated an interest that, more and more, expands beyond the Korean-American community. According to data provided by Google, the online viewership among K-pop artists in this country doubled in the year after “Gangnam Style” was unveiled in July 2012. And audiences are increasingly diverse, a development that has made touring more attractive for an increasing number of young groups.
On Nov. 13, Infinite, a spritely, seven-member boy band, will perform at the Fillmore in Silver Spring as part of its “One Great Step” tour. This four-date jaunt also includes dates in Los Angeles, New York and San Jose. It’s an interesting development. While fellow upstarts VIXX and B.A.P. also have planned visits to the United States this year, all three groups have experimented with booking shows outside of the usual markets of the Bay Area, Big Apple and L.A.; the latter came to D.C.’s Warner Theater in May and VIXX plans to visit Dallas later this month. This is not an accident.
Though Infinite debuted to tepid response in 2010, with an album titled (ahem) “First Invasion,” they would not perform in front of an audience at home in Korea until early 2012, when they walked out on stage in front of 8,000 screaming fans. In the two years between the album’s release and the live debut, the group work-shopped its repertoire extensively. It developed the “scorpion dance,” a move that spawned a rash of video tutorials and contests. This current tour will visit four continents and their fans, dubbed Inspirits, promise to be there in numbers.
“These virtual tribes connect and ultimately, want to connect with each other in real life,” says Ted Kim, of MNET, a Korean music television channel that now produces English language programming in this country. “Live events and concerts provide a great opportunity for like-minded people to come together and celebrate their mutual interest and passion.”
“Psy has definitely opened the door to a new market, including America, for us and other K-pop artists,” Infinite said via e-mail. “We do appreciate him so much and hope this world tour will contribute to K-pop in some ways as Psy has done. Above all, we are enjoying every single moment of the tour which has given us many chances meeting lots of Inspirits and K-pop lovers out there. It makes us feel proud of ourselves. We are ready to give audience unforgettable moments.”
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 at 9:35PM | 
