The Enshittification of K-Pop

One of the concepts that has made its way around tech spaces is the “Enshittification of Platforms.” Coined by Cory Doctorow, the concept goes like this:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

K-Pop is not a platform in the same way that Twitter is a platform but it feels more and more like we’re in the downward spiral of enshittification. Traditionally, K-Pop has been part of the music industry (or at least adjacent to it) but increasingly the product being sold is not pop music or even parasocial idol interactions but something closer to a “lifestyle experience” revolving around various apps.

In the beginning, at the heart of K-Pop were the idols, fans, and the entertainment company—an unwieldy three-way arrangement but it more or less worked. Idols completely under the thumb of the fandom or the company will burn out; companies that can’t maintain some level of quality control will hemorrhage fans and funds; and and idols left completely on their own tend to find that keeping fans happy and producing good content isn’t as easy as they thought. All three need a healthy balance.

Unfortunately for all of us, it’s no longer that simple.

The ur-point of the Korean idol system was when Lee Soo Man and SM Entertainment harnessed the power of fandom to launch H.O.T. into superstardom. What followed was what we now call “first generation K-Pop.” It was a mostly domestic-Korea-facing market supported by Korean teens and young adults looking for a bit of glamor and happiness in an increasingly unstable economy.

Two big things changed in K-Pop that weakened the collective power of fans. One is that this domestic product began to pick up foreign fans and more and more foreign money. Foreign fans are not only easier to manipulate than domestic fans (who are far better informed than foreign fans about the dirty details of what’s happening because they are on the ground in Seoul) but they also have less of a connection to the idols themselves. I’ve discussed this in numerous episodes but the domestic fandom can (and does) develop deep connections with their idols. Korean fans attend music show filmings and fan signs during comebacks.

The most devoted fans channel their inner Apple Scruff and wait outside the company buildings to say good morning and good evening. As George Harrison said about the Apple Scruffs: 

You've been stood around for years

Seen my smiles and touched my tears

How it's been a long, long time

And how you've been on my mind, my Apple Scruffs

These on-the-ground fans see what we can’t see via our screens. They see when idols are overworked or unhappy. Foreign fans will simply never have that level of intimacy with the idols. When my beloved T.O.P. was finally released from his mandatory military service, he conspired with his fans to give the Korean media the slip and have an intimate and deeply personal handshake event in a secret location. 

Just this past month, SHINee fans were able to throw a big enough fuss to get SM Entertainment to move the venue of their anniversary fan meeting to a more appropriate location. Fan power is real.

For idols whose foreign fandoms are more powerful than their domestic fandoms (or who have no domestic fandom to speak of), this is a huge problem. There can be no collective action to assist the idol against the company when the domestic fans are absent or, worse, when domestic fans are undermined by foreign fans who refuse to believe anything bad about the company.

The other problem is that these entertainment companies which had previously been one-man shops, were now becoming publicly held corporations with obligations to shareholders first, not the fans or their idols. When the shareholder rather than the fan is the target audience, what matters is the money coming in, not the product going out. Is it any wonder then that Weverse, the premiere product of K-Pop’s premiere Vulture Capital firm, has attracted a flood of e-commerce complaints in Seoul? (Not that foreign fans see this.) And Korean fan worries that the rolling up of fandoms onto the problematic platform will completely obliterate consumer power have gone ignored by the broader global community.

When fans can ignore idol burnout or coercion by the company to do things like engage in skinship when they aren’t comfortable with it it can only lead to resentment towards the fans on the part of the idols.

On top of everything else, the quality of the idol product offered by K-Pop overall is just not as good as it used to be. To a certain extent K-Pop relies on the Churros Model, something I’ve taken from an anecdote a friend in Seoul told me a few years ago. One day a churros stand opened; suddenly long lines began developing as everybody wanted to get into on these exclusive, novel, and delicious churros. Then churros stands began popping up all over Seoul and churros turned into just a normal street food that everybody could eat whenever. And then next trendy food popped off, and so on.

What I’ve referred to in the past as the K-Pop Trend Generator is just the Churros Model in idol form. BigBang pop up offering something completely new—churros, if you will—then suddenly everyone else is also selling churros, er, hip-hop idol pop. 2PM gave us beast idols; EXO gave us the sci-fi drenched EXO Extended Universe; SHINee had their skinny jean flower boy look, and so on. But at a certain point the new concepts just stopped… there were no more trends to fuel the trend generator. Girl Crush in the vein of 2NE1? Faux innocent girls-next-door? Twinky BL-themes? The last big idol group to make a splash was the survival show group WannaOne in 2018 and the trend was halted suddenly thanks to the leaking of the Produce 101 vote rigging scandal and the potentially huge X1 was cut off before they could begin. NCT have fueled a fantastic pots-and-pans musical trend but overall, what fans are left with is a Recycle bin full of unlistened to mp3s and a wallet full of Jelly, the platform-exclusive digital currency used on Weverse.

BoyNextDoor are cute but what do they offer that a billion other groups before them haven’t? Are LeSserafim offering anything Stellar didn’t? 

When K-Pop innovation is channeled into ways to skim money from fans via various tech platforms rather than fueling new trends in performance and music; when companies are fine completely relying on fandom bulk buying/streaming rather than looking to cultivate some level of popular appeal for career longevity… well, I think we’ve hit the peak of the enshittification cycle.

I think we’ll look back on the Hybe-Kakao-SM fiasco as the beginning of the end, at least of this era. Lee Soo Man got his golden parachute and left his artists to Weverse. Three members of EXO announced today that they’re looking to terminate their contracts and honestly I don’t blame them. The future of K-Pop—the Idol Singularity, fueled by Jelly, and probably not offering much cash to the idols within it—looks grim.