The emperor has no clothes and nobody is willing to say so.
A friend passed along a truly absurd piece of fan theory that purports to be a “guide” to the “business” of BTS that's really serious. Over the course of ten parts (written in 2020) the author confidently lays out what she has learned by hanging around in BTS fan spaces and reading BTS fan theories and fan academics. It all boils down to one key thing: BTS are the most special, unique, authentic, and most successful group that ever existed ever in the entire world. Ever.
It’s breathtaking.
Take this from the intro to part one:
But the truth is, even if you were only vaguely aware of this Korean boy band prior to this bid to be 2020’s song of the summer, BTS was already the most popular and dominant musical group in the world. And they did it by completely subverting the music industry playbook in both South Korea, the country of their origin, and the US, the most valuable and influential music market in the world.
“BTS was already the most popular and dominant musical group in the world.” is taken as a given. No citations or criteria given.
Were they though? In 2020?
They had sold a lot of albums that year but those numbers highly inflated by fans buying multiple (sometimes dozens and dozens of) copies. In the USA, they were far from the most popular artists if you look at streaming, which is the dominant way Americans consume music. And if you want to lean into the “musical group” thing, then the Beatles ranked higher in the metrics in 2020 than BTS did.
So, from the beginning, we know we’re dealing with a deep-in-the-cult source.
But the fact that this fan lore has become so embedded into BTS fan communities goes a long way to explaining why they’ve faced such cognitive dissonance trying to understand how—for example—BigBang, by far the most influential and popular boy group of all time in the global Kpop market could come back from a six year hiatus, drop a single song (“Still Life,” a ballad no less) with no promotions, and crush it in the Korean music charts. Crushing it in the charts is something BTS did not manage to do in 2022. Huh.
The author continues her boosterism discussing the IPO launch of Hybe nee BigHit (BTS’s parent company):
Big Hit's offering was priced at 135,000 won (~116 USD) a share, giving the company an enterprise valuation of 4 billion USD and 41 times forward EBITDA. The stock ended its first day (October 15, 2020) on the KOSPI (South Korea's main stock index) trading at 258,000 won (+91%) which is "60 to 70 times its projected earnings for 2021, compared with between 22 and 45 times for rival South Korean entertainment groups and just six times for Samsung Electronics, the country’s biggest company" according to the Financial Times. (See where Big Hit Entertainment is currently trading at on the company's Bloomberg page.)
Left out of this rosy narrative is the part where immediately after the stock rose to those inflated heights, it crashed and many ordinary people who had bought into the Hybe hype lost a lot of money. The stock reached an insane peak of around 400,000 won back in November 2021 at which point it began a long slow march downwards which only accelerated when BTS announced hiatus in summer 2022 to reach a low of about 110,000 in October 2022. With the launch of two buzzy girl groups last year, stocks seem to be back on the rise and as of right now in January 2023 it’s hovering around 190,000 won.
The author then goes on to trumpet various metrics that BTS is dominating, including a long digression on how a number one on the Billboard Hot 100 is the “holy grail” of the music industry. How did BTS get theirs?
BTS accomplished this feat the old-fashioned way, by selling their music to fans, without a useless merch bundle in sight.
Do I need to rehash the pushback this practice of fans crowdfunding and purchasing hundreds of digital copies received? And at least one of the prominent crowdfunders received a hefty tax bill in exchange for her hard work disseminating the funds received from around the world for purchase of mp3s to push BTS up the Billboard chart (a tax bill which she also apparently crowd funded).
Just doing things the old-fashioned and authentic way!
The author uses this as “proof” that BTS fans can chart songs “at will” which has every single music industry on earth running scared. Strange then how their 2022 single “Yet To Come” managed only a number 13 on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart in America and number 13 on the weekly Gaon Digital chart in Korea. (“Yet to Come” ranked in at 102 on the Digital chart for 2022; BigBang’s “Still Life” mentioned above ranked in at number 7. BTS does not appear on Billboard’s year end Hot 100 list for 2022).
Rather than the obvious answer that the BTS bubble has burst (which my guest and I discuss at great length in episode 49) and the group’s fanbase is losing steam (and/or their crowdfunders are busy paying off giant tax bills), the BTS fandom has turned to conspiracy theories to explain why they are no longer charting “at will”. (Just do a twitter search for “Williamboard” to find the theories being spun).
The series continues to spin further and further off the rails so far into fantasy-land that I couldn’t even get through reading the nonsense about “healing” and “lyrics”.
What it all boils down to in the end is fans like the author of this series have trapped themselves in a spiderweb of received wisdom and self-soothing talking points. They all reference each other and affirm each other’s writings, building up a pretend world in which they are the high priestesses of BTS wisdom. But it’s all fake.
The trouble is nobody on the outside thinks it’s worth deflating their bubble so the little Potemkin Village of BTS-ology continues unabated, steamrolling over anybody looking to examine what is actually happening in (or what has happened in) Kpop and Asian popular music more generally.
Just look at this from part two:
As BTS has evolved, they have helped to redefine global popular music while remaining rooted in K-pop. I would argue that with BTS, we’ve broken into new territory with a musical act that has developed during the age of social media and mastered it.
What did they redefine exactly? BTS were slotted into the American Top 40 pop genre as a boyband and to that end were used to push three aggressively mediocre bubblegum pop songs (“Dynamite”, “Butter”, “Permission to Dance”) which had been written for the American market by Western songwriters and have now mostly been forgotten (even my young nieces no longer ask for BTS, preferring to hear their tried and true faves: BlackPink and Lisa).
SMAP’s popularity around Asia directly inspired the first Korean idol group H.O.T. who then helped kickstart a new teen music wave. BigBang’s popularity around Asia directly inspired a wave of rap-flavored pop groups including BTS (as well as my new faves, Kazakhstani group Ninety One). What BTS did was open up the American market and charts as a new sidequest in the Kpop sphere. It’s certainly not nothing but it's not “redefining global popular music”. BTS has been relegated to the clearance rack. Literally. When I was in Japan in December, I spotted BTS goods quite literally in the clearance rack in multiple stores.
How long can the BTS-ology grift last beyond the popping of the BTS bubble? Lenika Cruz is still trying to hawk her specialized BTS “knowledge” (lol) but what audience is left for this kind of writing on BTS exceptionalism when reality says the opposite? Is the core fandom just going to double down and believe harder?
At the end of the day, I maintain that it was a huge mistake to go down this path in the first place. What had been a fun and charming boy group, poised to make some great Kpop albums, turned into this multi-headed hydra of toxic healing and exceptionalism narratives.
(70% markdown on BTS related crap. Photo by me at Tower Records in Shibuya, December 2022.)