The State of the Union
The other day I was asked if I thought “Dynamite” (2020) had changed anything in K-Pop. Echoing Tom Breihan’s conclusion on “Dynamite” in The Number Ones, the most concise answer I could give would be: No, but it did crystallize trends that would only grow worse post-”Dynamite.”
As Breihan wrote:
“But even if K-pop never gains more of a foothold over here, then BTS’s success will still be historically significant. It represents the moment that one fan base firmly established that it can control the Hot 100 for months at a time.
Apparently, the Hot 100 is no longer a historical record of the music that dominates pop culture at any particular moment. Instead, the charts look more and more like a battlefield for competing fan armies. A change like that forces a reconsideration of the entire idea of pop stardom. BTS have taken the existing model and blown it up like dynamite.” (pp. 310-311)
“Dynamite” marks the point at which Brand K-Pop became fundamentally an arena for global fan competition. The music was not being made to be listened to, domestically in Korea or otherwise but, rather, to be streamed and purchased for chart positions and rankings, to give stans fodder for their online competitions, and to drive social media engagement. As Breihan correctly observed, the even charts themselves were no longer primarily reflecting what was being listened to but rather the collective effort of fandoms and (K-Pop) companies to move units.
I’ve gone over this history many times on the podcast but before K-Pop was called “K-Pop” it was simply pop music for teenagers in Korea. This was the era of acts like the great Hyun Jin-Young and Seo Taiji and Boys who jolted the youth market with their trend-forward hip-hop influenced sounds and dances. Then came Lee Soo Man who imported the idol music format from Japan and combined it with the new youth music coming out of Seoul. Did these earlier proto-K-Pop acts have large fandoms who would battle? Absolutely. But, crucially, the difference was that they had large fandoms and the ears of general listeners. I would bet that most Koreans of a certain age would know both H.O.T. and their song “Candy,” which was a hit when it came out in 1996-97. That is just not true for the vast majority of K-Pop “hits” of today.
In about 2012-2013, “K-Pop” the global export product began the process of decoupling from that more mainstream Korean teen pop music. For a while, the global and Korean fandoms existed in tandem, serviced by the same songs, but as the siren song of the mainstream American pop market called out to Seoul, even that relationship began to break down. “Dynamite” represents the final form of that trend away from the domestic market and towards an American-globalized market. It’s a song that is ostensibly “K-Pop” but is neither a product of nor for Korea.
“Dynamite” (aided by the pandemic lockdowns) brought with it a massive influx of global boyband fans who neither understood nor cared about the existing norms of K-Pop fandom culture, which further salted the earth of the existing K-Pop market. This influx of new fans helped push a few more increasingly bland singles to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 but they also displaced longtime, existing fans of the genre, which was a real gamble for the industry. There was no guarantee these pandemic bubble fans would stick around.
Streaming 20 hours a day on five devices while also redeeming mp3 purchases made via gift card donated from a global fandom supporting your efforts to earn that first or second number one song during a pandemic when you can’t go outside or do anything anyways has a kind of fun sisters-in-arms madness about it. Sure, the song was inane bordering on unlistenable but that wasn’t the point. You felt like you were doing something (™). Now though? The focus on streaming and buying and charts feels like what it actually is—unpaid labor on behalf of major corporations, which isn’t nearly as fun and exciting as literally changing the world by streaming a pop song. And fans are getting tired. Sales and streams are on the decline for K-Pop acts and continue to fall.
As K-Pop turned away from its traditional markets in Asia to focus more on the American-globalized market, we’ve concurrently seen the rise of local acts following the K-Pop template in local markets. Acts like the very popular SB19 from the Philippines and Alpha in Kazakhstan. A big part of the idol market—which is what K-Pop is—involves personal interactions. The parasocial elements are baked in. When everyone was online during the pandemic, suddenly we were all on equal footing, globally, but as we came back offline, those in-person interactions became more important again. Local acts like SB19 have a massive advantage in their home market like the Philippines over a K-Pop group trying to be everywhere (but mainly in Korea, Japan, and America) all at once. Local market-focused acts siphoning off idol fans would also seem to contribute to the decline in K-Pop as a global force.
There have also been some real consequences of this industry pivot to the sound of mediocre, bland American globo-pop-slop. A song that attempts to be all things to all people ends up being not all that engaging as art—even pop art. The vacating of the music part of idol pop music left the door wide open to Japan, who has decided (finally) to export its own pop music, high quality pop music that people want to listen to. I was personally witness to Psychic Fever from Exile Tribe’s recent American tour and plan on seeing Be:First later this year. XG, Atarashii Gakko... They sound good and the audience is very open to hearing it. The audience demographic who had enjoyed the high quality pop songs of second and even third generation K-Pop has moved on to acts like Psychic Fever. I saw this in person for myself.
Japanese pop music is even having a crossover moment in Korea, with acts like vocaloid Deco*27 and mega-popular YOASOBI crossing over the East Sea/Sea of Japan to the ears of trend-forward young people.
Another major factor in post-“Dynamite” audience drift is that the label “K-Pop” itself has become radioactively toxic in English-speaking markets. When K-Pop was first crossing over in a major way in America around 2011-2013, K-Pop was seen as novel, trend-forward, and cool. It was written about positively from (then) very trend forward websites and music critics. Now it’s either something you try to change the subject about when your mom starts in on organic sales numbers, that you buy for your elementary school age kid in the grocery store checkout line or—as demonstrated by this clip from a mainstream broadcast American television series—the purview of hideous online trolls. That’s not a positive development for Brand K-Pop.
I have also personally fielded questions about K-Pop from normies in my life who happen across something like the 2024 Netflix series Pop Star Academy and are horrified by it. “Is this what K-Pop is like?” These people aren’t rushing to tune in to learn more. K-Pop as a label has become toxic. Even the women from BlackPink have been leaning more towards the Shakira mode of English-language crossover than aiming for a “Gangnam Style”. “Apt” is “Hips Don’t Lie” for 2025 and Rose has moved her copyright management to an American company.
And on top of everything else, what used to be the bread and butter of K-Pop was hit songs, of which there have been few and far between in recent years. Actual hits, not just songs fans pushed to the top of the charts. “Apt” by Rose and Bruno Mars has been one of the rare K-Pop songs in recent years to break containment globally and, honestly, good for Rose. It’s a cute song and she’s worked hard. The Brave Girls “Rollin” did the same domestically in Korea a couple of years ago. NewJeans also had a moment and likely could have gone further but were torpedoed by their own company before they really took off. Aespa and Day6 are also doing well domestically but by and large the ethos in Brand K-Pop is clearly no longer about making actual hit songs that are hits with listeners.
The typical “hit” K-Pop song of the current era logs insane numbers of Spotify streams after release and yet somehow has no cultural presence anywhere or, indeed, any presence on any other platform. Chart watching accounts for the Korean streaming services will also (inadvertently) track another hallmark the “hit” song driven by fans mass streaming—songs that will rise meteorically in the charts during the zombie hours late at night when most people are asleep and then fall like rocks once normies and locals are awake and listening to music. You’ll also see this in the annual charts compiled by the IFPI and the global album sales from K-Pop acts won’t be reflected in either the top singles or the top streaming acts.
And nothing has demonstrated the stark contrast between these fandom-driven metrics based “hits” and actual hit songs than the return of G-Dragon to the Korean entertainment scene.
G-Dragon is a legitimate K-Pop superstar and he had been absent from the music scene for years so, to be fair, we could have expected that there would be heavy curiosity about any music he was releasing. But that curiosity wouldn’t necessarily turn into a hit song or, in this case, multiple hit songs… which it has. First with “Home Sweet Home,” released last year with no MV and only a single live performance (a mistake in the choreography of which even went viral in its own right) and now with “Too Bad” feat. Anderson .Paak.
And yet despite the heavy presence in Korea and more traditional Asian markets for K-Pop, G-Dragon’s comeback has made only minimal noise in the current global K-Pop ecosystem. Why? The only answer I can think of is that “K-Pop” has become almost completely disconnected from its home markets and—if that is the case, which it appears to be—I don’t see how it survives as a genre. There’s no artistic innovation coming from inside and nothing being brought in from the outside. It’s become a closed ecosystem, with acts all cannibalizing the look and sound of each other.
It should say it all that the most promising boy group in recent years has been the virtual group PLAVE, from tech company VLAST.
If PLAVE is the most promising boy group, what happened to the most promising girl group, NewJeans? They are currently involved in a now year-long battle with their company, the most dominant force in K-Pop right now—Hybe.
Hybe’s dominance arrived concurrently with “Dynamite” and the driving force of the company has been 1) expansion by gobbling up its smaller competitors and 2) a pivot to tech. Their premiere product is Weverse, an online fandom platform that is an attempt to capture and monetize the social media interactions that had been happening on platforms like FanCafe and VLive in Korea and on Twitter/X, Tumblr, Instagam, and YouTube, etc. globally. This has had mixed results, including harassment of idols on the platform, lack of capacity, and data leaks. The company seems to be following the model of companies like Disney by increasing revenue not by growing the overall user base but by charging existing fans ever more money.
There’s also a real problem with market oversaturation. The solution to a stagnant market from Brand K-Pop seems to have been to debut more and more groups but to what end? These new groups are coming for smaller and smaller slices of a stagnant, if not shrinking, market. K-Pop companies also made a lot of noise about developing “global” K-Pop groups like the aforementioned Pop Star Academy alum, Katseye from Hybe, and SM Entertainment’s Dear Alice but neither one has made any kind of real impact inside Brand K-Pop or outside of it.
So, what is the future for K-Pop? I don’t know but I think the industry is in dire need of course correction. Spurred by the publicity from rapper TOP in Squid Game 2 as well as the return of G-Dragon, one of the most popular K-Pops song globally over the past few months has been the decade old song, “Bang Bang Bang” by their then-group BigBang. While that speaks volumes about the quality of BigBang’s material and their enduring popularity, that’s not a good sign for the industry at large.
Fandom chart battles and online parasocial interactions can’t sustain a market forever. And this market is competitive—especially if the competition is not just their immediate contemporaries but also the entire back catalog of acts like BigBang.
