Hyunjoon Shin
Has Korean pop, a.k.a. K-pop, established itself as one of the popular genres in the global music industry? For those who say yes, there exists a clear piece of evidence: “The Korea K-Pop Hot 100,” launched in August 2011, is second in Asia only after “Japan Hot 100,” which was started in February 2008. Popular hits in Korea are displayed with romanized titles and artists’ names, but that is not the whole story. Around the same time as the K-pop chart started its business, two important events heralded K-pop’s “triumph” in the global market. One was the SM Town Live 2010 World Tour held in Le Zenith de Paris on June 10 and 11 that drew big crowds from all over Europe, followed by another live show in Madison Square Garden, New York on October 23. The other was the global craze of “Gangnam Style” that began in July 2012—it topped the music charts of more than thirty countries by the end of the year, reaching number 2 in the U.S. Hot 100 Billboard chart and left a record of more than 2 billion hits on YouTube.
It would be safe to say that K-pop has become a “dominant particular” (Negus 1996, 180, 185–186) at least in East and Southeast Asia, if not around the globe. It could even be said that K-pop has become a template for Asian pop in the twenty-first century, as seen in many national variants such as V-pop (Vietnamese pop), T-pop (Thai pop), I-pop (Indo pop), and L-pop (Lao pop). Thus, the inquiry on K-pop includes questioning the abbreviation of Asian pop music in the twenty-first century.
The etymology of K-pop traces back to Japanese media and industry, with the international media adopting the term uncritically. It is easy to imagine that the terminology comes from J-pop, which K-pop has emulated for a long time, but there is a significant difference between the two. Whereas J-pop denotes all the genres and styles of contemporary Japanese popular music, K-pop is exclusively reserved for Korean popular music worthy of international export. Thus, the latter abbreviation is closely tied to exportability, or in other words, the border-crossing quality of certain types of music. Who or what can cross the border? Idols can.
The face of K-pop is undoubtedly that of an idol. An idol does not refer to an individual person or group, but an institution, as in (idol) “system,” “factory” (Bevan 2012), or “machine” (Caramanica 2011). As an institution, the term “idol” has a long history in popular music with several variants across place and time. Although it initially borrowed heavily from Motown in the United States and Johnny’s in Japan, the Korean idol has turned into a unique institution. In local parlance, it is simply dubbed as a “trainee system” or “academy system.” There always is a long queue for an audition set up by major entertainment companies running this “system.” After passing the audition, the trainees undergo a long training period to develop performance skills (singing, dancing, acting, etc.) as well as language skills (English, Japanese, and Chinese). Some idol training manuals even include cosmetic surgical enhancements. This “idol-dom” is a special kind of stardom, because an idol suddenly rises to stardom from complete obscurity without first paying his/her dues in the lower circuits of the music entertainment industry.
The idol and the entertainment company are dedicated to work hard for each other. The production system of the idol is characterized as an “in-house system” (Shin 2009: 510). This system integrates the music industry’s basic functions (record production, distribution, and talent management) and other necessary functions for making idols. The company (hoesa) is a combination of the record company and the management agency. Housed in multi-story office buildings (saok) equipped with all kinds of facilities, such as recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and conference rooms, major companies retain songwriters-arrangers, recording engineers, managers, choreographers, costume designers, design coordinators, and other personnel. Many successful companies are clustered in the plush areas of Seoul, especially in the districts of Gangnam and Mapo. Cheongdam-dong, a luxurious Gangnam neighborhood where a local road has recently been renamed as K-star Road, is the production center of idol entertainment. The idol-making system was consolidated around the turn of the century when the so-called Big 3 emerged: SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and YG Entertainment. DSP, which manages SS501 and Kara, is sometimes counted into Big 4.
Seo Taiji and Boys (Sŏ t’aeji wa aidŭl) in the early 1990s perhaps foreshadowed the era of idols, but the formula for the K-pop idol was not concocted until 1996 when the five-boy group H.O.T. (High Five of Teenagers) arrived on the scene. Their producer was Lee Soo-man (Yi Su-man), who went on to found the entertainment company bearing the initial of his given name, SM. H.O.T. composed of pretty boys was the first idol group that brought about a revolution in Korea’s pop music history, both in the good and bad sense. A year later a trio named S.E.S., another product of SM, set the standard for female idol groups: cute, sexy girls singing bubblegum pop. With some variations, the same basic formula still applies—to organize and train a single-sex idol group that consists of good-looking members with distinct personalities.
The best medium for idol K-pop is on-screen video performance, be it on a TV, personal computer, or mobile device. Live dancing with lip-syncing to pre-recorded music (“AR” in the local business jargon) is the rule rather than the exception on an idol show. An idol group is likely to include one or two quality singers or rappers, but what makes a K-pop idol is the collective dancing skills rather than any individual singing. A typical K-pop song features a compelling, sometimes even addictive, hook with meaningless lyrics synchronized with signature dance moves.
The K-pop industry does not necessarily produce cookie-cutter idols who are indistinguishable from one another. Some local critics observe different idol types based on company cultures (Cha and Choi 2012, 146–150). For example, while the “hard-trained model student type” idols come from SM, YG produces the “hip-hop influenced, wild, and self-boasting type,” and DSP does the “boys/girls next door type.” The critics also highlight the “artistic achievement and generational difference” of “the second generation idol groups” since the late 2000s—to name a few, “Tell Me” (2007) by Wonder Girls, “Lie” (2008) by Big Bang, “Gee” (2009) by Girls Generation, “Mr” (2009) by Kara, “Sorry, Sorry” (2009) by Super Junior, “Fire” (2010) by 2NE1, and “Ring Ding Dong” (2010) by SHINee.
Over the years, K-pop idols have evolved into something different from J-pop idols. Looking back, BoA and Dongbangsingi/Tohoshinki were successful in Japan to the extent that they were received as J-pop rather than K-pop artists. Rain and Se7en distanced themselves from J-pop, but they instead faced the critique of “cloning” American pop (see Shin 2009, 509). Since the late 2000s, the polished audiovisual package of K-pop has been established as a unique brand.
From the beginning, the member composition of K-pop idol groups has been international: diasporic Koreans from the United States (Tony An of H.O.T. and Joon Park of god), from Japan (Sue of S.E.S. and Ayumi of Sugar), and from the Philippines (e.g. Sandara Park of 2NE1). A noticeable change after the mid-2000s is the rise of ethnic Chinese, especially in the products of SM and JYP: Han Kyŏng in Super Junior, Fei and Jia in Miss A, Nichkun in 2PM, Victoria and Amber in F(x). EXO, the latest boy group from SM, consists of two units, EXO-K and EXO-M (K stands for Korea, and M for Mandarin), each targeting the Korean and the Chinese markets, respectively. It is difficult to tell the Korean from non-Korean members by their appearances. Regardless of their actual ethnicity or nationality, bright-skinned, sharp-faced, and slim-bodied Asian boys and girls can earn the transnational citizenship of K-pop. Thus, the “K” in K-pop is not just an abbreviation of “Korean,” but a brand image embedded in the system and practices of the Korean music industry.
It would not be wrong to call idol pop a genre, as long as there is a formula supported by genre rules (Fabbri 1982). However, the genre in this sense does not explain much about the music style. In terms of music style, Korean idol pop may be defined as dance pop and, to a lesser degree, R&B ballad, along with some elements of hip-hop and electronica.
How have hip-hop and electronica become important stylistic music components of idol pop? First of all, hip-hop and electronica are among the most popular genres in the global popular music scene. Hip-hop is no longer seen as exclusively African-American music; it has become a globally relevant entertainment code enjoyed by artists and fans across the world. Electronica is also one of the dominant codes of pop culture in the digital age. The music of the most popular artists in the twenty-first century global music industry combines hip-hop and electronica. Given this context, it is not surprising that K-pop, with its global aspirations, uses the two styles that are currently dominating the global music industry. Even such clever naming and Romanization tricks, such as 2NE1, SNSD (a.k.a. Sonyŏsidae), 2PM, SHINee, and B2ST (a.k.a. BEAST), show the influence of the hip-hop culture.
Second, the technique and sensibilities of idol pop are close to those of African-American music, although this tendency is not limited to idol pop. In Asia, Korean popular music is arguably demonstrated as having the strongest affinities to African-American music. As Lee Sooman put it more than ten years ago, “if Japan has forged J-pop by digesting Anglo-American rock, Korea has forged K-pop by digesting African-American music” (Shin-Yoon 2004). There are many popular theories on the affinities between K-pop and hip-hop: the cultural basis of Korean hip-hop is perhaps the firmest among Asian countries; Korean language has a linguistic structure suitable for hip-hop’s rapping and rhythms; the strong presence of Korean-Americans in the Korean hip-hop scene has facilitated the articulation of local indigenous hip-hop. True or not, these theories have had an impact on industry practices. While hip-hop as a music genre is not considered mainstream in Korea, K-pop songs appropriate many elements of hip-hop. B-boying, another important component of hip-hop culture, also figures prominently in the spectacular, powerful dance moves of idol pop.
Last, but not the least, the incorporation of hip-hop and electronica is due to the specific method of music production in idol pop. In K-pop production, priority is given to how the group members are deployed, rather than the quality of the songs. Thus, most of the songs by idol groups are divided into parts that each member can actually perform. Each and every song of the idol groups is constructed in ways that expose the musical characteristics of the members. For instance, the best singer in the group gets the main melody, and the best rapper gets the rap part inserted in the middle of the song. The members’ harmonious melody is essentially a portion designed to highlight dancing. Rap-centered hip-hop and beat-centered electronica are assembled in order to supplement the limited vocal skills of the idol groups. Given this situation, idol pop necessarily calls for the strong electronic beat and hip hop-tinged sound structures that facilitate rapping. Depending on the disposition of the team, an idol group may have a preference for hip-hop or electronica, but generally speaking, the two genres are blended on the basis of song construction and sampling sounds for pop melody, rapping, and powerful dance.
Idol pop understandably does not require actual instrumental performances in studio. Except for the vocal parts, all sounds rely on a computer-controlled recording system. This does not mean that creativity is always absent in such a computer-controlled production method. It does emphasize that the music making of K-pop is different from the conventional method. It is not the songwriter/producer who seeks out a singer after songwriting is done, but just the opposite. First, a performer is found, and then the songwriter/producer optimizes the music for the performer. In this system, songwriters often double as producers who develop musical trends and engage in the singers’ musical activities. Thus, songwriting, arrangement, recording and mixing, and post-production are all integrated into a production collective or team. That is why the best songwriters of K-pop, such as Yoo Yongjin (a.k.a. Yu Yŏng-chin) in SM and Teddy in YG, are currently the board members of their companies. Another one, Park Jinyoung (Pak Chin-yŏng), is the founder of JYP. Some of the well-known K-pop songwriters outside the companies also take the form of a production team, such as Yonggamhan Hyŏngje (Brave Brothers) and Sinsadong Horaengi (Sinsadong Tiger).
Another key factor in K-pop’s formula for global success is international collaboration, in which SM is the most pioneering and adventurous. For example, Girls’ Generation’s “Genie” (2009) was made by a Norwegian collective; “Hoot” (2010) by a Danish collective and a British songwriter; and “Run Devil Run” (2011) by a multinational collective composed of American, British, and Swedish songwriters and producers. To facilitate this collaboration, the company organizes a “songwriting camp” that invites songwriters–producers from Europe (mostly Scandinavia) and North America. Songs are first written in English and then translated into Korean before their release. Hence, it is tempting to put K-pop not in the temporal trajectory of Korean popular music, but in the spatial-geographic configuration of global pop music, yet suffice it to state here that some K-pop songs sound more and more global and metropolitan even with Korean lyrics. It is cosmopolitan pop music performed by Asian bodies, which suits the soundscape of globalized urban spaces.
Simon Frith once said that making money out of music is done “with difficulty” (Frith 2001, 26). Whenever I meet the staff and employees in the Korean music industry, I hear the same story. What is the “difficulty” of making money out of K-pop?
How K-pop makes money is indeed not well known to the outside world. One can speculate that the major source of revenue is idols being treated as a commodity or brand. K-pop idols are never idle, and they do work hard in the cultural industries. A successful idol works not only as a singer-cum-dancer, but also as an actor in film and drama, TV talk show host, radio DJ, and salesperson in ads. It looks as though a one-source multi-use, a popular concept in managerial sciences, has been invented just for K-pop idols.
In the official discourses on Korean cultural industries, an idol is defined as “content,” which is turned into capital through the logic of one-source multi-use in the emerging ecology of the digital economy. Not just for the music industry, but for all sectors of Korean cultural industries, the term “content industry” has much wider currency than, say, “creative industry.” If Britpop is the outcome of the creative industries in 1990s’ UK, then K-pop is the outcome of those content industries in 2000s’ ROK (Republic of Korea).
Korean entertainment companies are thus scrambling to produce entertainment contents beyond recorded music, but if it is not easy to create one-source multi-use content in the first place, then how have a few entertainment companies come to mass-produce such one-source multi-use content? The process is closely associated with the socioeconomic transformation of Korea after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The rapid development of the digital economy with strong governmental support was regarded as a solution to the crisis, and it profoundly affected music and cultural industries. Although the first generation K-pop idols prospered up until the early 2000s, their profitability dropped in the following years due to the decline of TV music show programs. Worse still, the decline of physical sales led to the collapse of the distribution system.
The Korean response was to develop “the first music industry where digital music sales overtook physical music sales” (IFPI 2007, 7). The new outlet for the revenue was sought from the additional “spin-off” market, which depended heavily on the Internet and mobile platform. Winners were those who quickly adjusted themselves to the emerging digital economy and abandoned the old business model based on physical CD sales. Fierce competition in the digital arena left only three or four companies as the winners that took the risk of cultivating the idol system. The problem, however, is that the revenue from digital music sales has never been enough for the traditional music industry to recover from the crisis.
The real winners are the three telecommunications companies (SK Telecom, Korea Telecom, and LG Telecom) that control the networks and run the Internet and mobile music distribution services (Lee 2009, 493). There have been constant complaints, not only from artists and performers, but also from entertainment companies, that the big telecoms are taking in more than 50 percent of total digital music sales. Actually, the total sales revenue from digital music distribution in 2012 was 622.1 billion KRW (564 million USD), or much bigger than the sales revenue from music production, which amounted to 387.8 billion KRW (US$352 million) (MCST 2014, 340–341).1
Under this circumstance, it is especially notable that the idol system has been closely associated with the advertisement industry from the start. According to Fortune Korea (August 2011), “the current advertisement market is structured in this way: if a certain company produces a commodity, an entertainment company supplies advertising endorsement.” As major entertainment companies and ad agencies are tied with one another ever closer, idols are increasingly becoming the face of various products: Rain for Pepsi Cola, Girls’ Generation for Intel microprocessors, Big Bang for LG mobile phones, etc. It is a sign that the profit model of the Korean music industry is transitioning from the B2C (Business to Consumer) to the B2B (Business to Business) model, relying less on consumer payments than on business transactions (Oh and Park 2012).
According to a study on SM Entertainment, physical CD sales are 18.51 percent and royalties (digital music sales) are 51.08 percent of the total revenue. Surprisingly, 78 percent of the royalties come from abroad, accounting for 40.3 percent of the total revenue. The remaining 30.31 percent comprises “service sales” based on the B2B model (Park and Rhee 2011, 98).2 In other words, about 70 percent of SM’s total revenue comes from foreign royalties and business transactions, neither of which depend on domestic consumers. Thus, the Korean music industry has become an industry type highly sensitive to both the international and domestic business cycles.
Digital music distribution by nature involves little or no reproduction costs on the part of the entertainment companies. A much more serious issue regarding the cost is the potential conflict in the trainee system. Long-term investments in trainees require high upfront costs that should be recuperated during the idols’ shelf life and contract period. The idol system’s viability depends on the virtuous circle in which the profits from the current idols shall be reinvested in future idols. If the circle is broken, then the idol system is hard to maintain. The average contract period for idols at SM Entertainment is known to be longer than ten years. “Slave contract” may be too harsh a term to describe an idol contract, but the serious dispute between SM and the three original members of Dongbangsingi (now JYJ) attests to the ample potential for conflict between idols and their companies. Under the current system, it is difficult to imagine fair contracts and reasonable remuneration for idol performers.
Readers may wonder why there is no mention of the new media, especially social media (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), which are important platforms for K-pop fan communities all over the world. Indeed, K-pop entertainment companies have been actively using social media as promotion tools (Jung 2016), and K-pop fans are active cultural intermediaries. I will leave the subject to the expertise of media studies researchers and instead make some general comments on the academic discourse surrounding K-pop by way of a conclusion.
In the introduction to an edited volume on the reception of K-pop, Choi and Maliangkay (2014, 7) said that the primary concern for international fans is “their own locality and its cultural milieu” and the fans are the active agents of “post-textual production.” However, it not enough to just say that K-pop, as with every other type of pop music, produces different meanings in different places around the globe. Is there any cultural inclination and aesthetic disposition shared by K-pop fans in different parts of the world? The authors cautiously noted that the international rise of the Korean music industry gives “a glimmer of hope to those with similar historical experiences of having been cultural subalterns” in “a new ecology in global popular cultures” (Choi and Maliangkay 2014, 12). In their words, K-pop provides a “clean” alternative” (2014, 11) to fans in Muslim Middle East, Catholic Latin America, as well as Confucian East Asia.
Lie (2012, 361–362) by contrast argued that K-pop is “merely a brand, part of Brand Korea that has been the export-oriented South Korean government.” This echoes the Le Monde (Mesmer 2011) review of SM Town Live World Tour, which reads, “it seems the boys and girls trained according to the plans of production companies that have made music into an export product [and] have reached us thanks to massive support from the Korean government, which is attempting to market a positive, dynamic national image.” It is undeniable that there is a sort of collective ethos in K-pop. One of its famous examples is expressed in the very beginning of I.AM, the documentary film of the SM tour, where Lee Sooman prays, “today we have come together in one place and would like to perform this mission representing ROK and its people.”
Are we still trapped between an over-political explanation of transnational consumption and an over-bureaucratic explanation of national production? K-pop is still subaltern and minoritized in the global popular culture, although its ecology is gradually shifting. K-pop is wildly globalized and cosmopolitan in the regional popular culture, even as it is still tied to the national politics, economy, and culture. Can we call it an example of subaltern cosmopolitanism, an example of disjuncture in the global cultural economy? If yes, then the abbreviation mentioned in the introduction to this chapter is what has been erased or buried during the process of the rampant globalization.
If K-pop is subaltern, then can it be another example of Asia’s challenge to the empire of Anglo-American pop in spite of its ultra-commercialism? What is for certain is that the Korean music industry keeps doing it, however vain it may be. It chooses to not choose its own destiny.
I respect the order of Korean personal names, which begin with the family name (usually, one syllable), followed by the given name (usually two syllables), when transcribing them. However, a hyphen (-) is added between the two syllables of the given name in order to avoid the prolonged sound. This method of transcription also corresponds with the McCune-Reischauer Romanization System, which has been standard in international Korean Studies. It is also applied consistently to Korean words other than personal names. Exceptions to the McCune-Reischauer Romanization System are those Korean authors who have published in English using a different spelling in their publications and those with internationally known names. For instance, Lee Sooman would be rendered Yi Su-man according to the McCune-Reischauer Romanization System, but the former is used instead. The first time this personal name comes up it will appear as: Seo Taiji (a.k.a. Sŏ t’ae-ji). In all subsequent cases, only the former will be used.
1 It is rather surprising that the revenue of the industry is not as big as one might expect from the boisterous news. The total sales of the Korean music industry comprise only about 5 percent of Korea’s cultural industries as a whole. In terms of export sales by this industry, though rapidly rising, they do not exceed 5 percent of the total value of exports. Putting aside the meager part of the Korean music industry, exports to overseas markets (US$235 million) are less than 10 percent of cultural industries as a whole (approximately US$2.683 billion). Moreover, Japan takes up a big part of the music industry’s overseas markets, occupying more than 80 percent of the demand for K-pop (MCST 2014, 38, 46 and 47).
2 It was reported that the revenue in 2011 from abroad by SM and YG was 43.7 percent and 40.8 percent, respectively (Yi 2012).
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