The Ups and Downs of K-Pop — from BTS to NCT Hollywood

In recent years, BTS, or Bangtan Sonyeondan (translates to "Bulletproof Boys"), has established itself as a Korean legend. Despite its relatively modest beginnings at the once-obscure agency known as Big Hit Entertainment, BTS now holds multiple records as one of the most successful artists in South Korea and Asia. K-Pop, short for Korean pop music, became a household name around 2019 when it saw a 44.8% increase in popularity following the rising global attention of BTS and Blackpink. Now, it positions itself as one of the fastest-growing genres of music.

Despite its sudden rise in popularity, K-Pop's attempts to garner international audiences are not something new. The pioneers were TVXQ and BoA when they first ventured into the Japanese market in the early 2000s. The so-called Korean Wave (termed Hallyu in Korean) subsequently became popular in East and Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent, in countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Latin America, and the Western hemisphere. Recently, BTS and Blackpink, a four-member girl group managed by YG Entertainment, seem to have taken K-Pop to another level. However, I suggest that we take this purported success with a grain of salt.

International success — especially among Western audiences — seems to have a particular and irresistible appeal for K-Pop producers. One famous story centers on Wonder Girls, a second-generation Korean girl group managed by JYP Entertainment that was all the rage during the late 2000s. At the height of their popularity, the quintet attempted to enter the US music market but found little success. It is a well-known episode that Park Jinyoung, the eponymous producer of JYP entertainment, pushed for the group’s US debut against the wishes of its members. As such, fans of Wonder Girls often complained that JYP neglected the group’s domestic fanbase in favor of its quest for global recognition. Interestingly enough, a decade later, Big Hit Entertainment is also receiving the same criticism — that it is neglecting BTS’s strong domestic fanbase in its love affair of creating an international pop icon.

Another example of K-Pop producers zealously looking for fame and popularity abroad is SM Entertainment's tentative "NCT Hollywood." Even the title itself sounds like a hoax, considering that NCT was never particularly successful in Korea to begin with. Expectations were high, given that SM Entertainment produced EXO, one of the most popular K-Pop artists of the third generation. NCT, short for Neo Culture Technology, debuted in 2016 with a flexible member system and now boasts 21 members and five units (of which the Hollywood version is one). Despite NCT not achieving much domestic success, SM Entertainment went ahead and announced its plans to collaborate with MGM, an American filmmaker company, to hold auditions to select new members for NCT’s Hollywood unit. These members will hopefully be fluent in English and hold enough appeal for the international audience, most likely as an attempt to recreate the success of BTS.

The million-dollar question, though, is how successful is BTS? Are the numbers and rankings all they seem to be? Long story short, no. Billboard uses both streaming rates and music download rates to determine its rankings. Though BTS scores low in streaming (which determines much of the rankings in the contemporary music market), it maintains a high ranking by scoring almost ten times more in download rates than streaming rates. How is such a feat possible?

Sure, the traditional saying is that all's fair in love and war. If the music market is a battlefield, BTS is certainly playing true to this maxim. By creating five remixes of their single, "Butter," and selling it for half the usual price, they are able to sell the same song multiple times. The global fandom of BTS views streaming and downloading the group’s music to better its chart rankings as an honor. So, they collect funds on platforms such as Twitter to buy multiple copies of the same song and stream it endlessly. Love and war aside, it's not too far-fetched to say that the BTS legend is built on a blind, sacrificial loyalty of its fanbase. As proverbs have it, love makes one blind; in BTS's case, love had made legions of teenage girls blind.

K-Pop is an attractive genre of music — there's no denying that. The problem is that for decades, there has been an inexplicable obsession with the notion of creating an image of an international pop icon that is neither necessary nor healthy. Through K-Pop, many foreigners have become interested in Korea as a country. Shouldn't we, then, seek to create music that portrays Korea and K-Pop more healthily and sustainably rather than obsessing over chart rankings and streams?