We’ve entered the Worst Time Line

There has been a lot of turmoil in K-Pop spaces recently with the news that Hybe and Kakako are battling it out for control of SM Entertainment. Almost all of the news coverage I’ve read is missing the point. While the specifics of the Billions-style boardroom dramatics make for juicy reading, the only people really affected by an overhaul in SM Entertainment's management are the artists  and those of us who care about things like the quality of the artistic output and whether or not SHINee will be able to release that post-military comeback album they promised for their 15th anniversary.

The truth is that “music” has a ceiling. As a slice of the global entertainment pie, music is like a teeny tiny tartlet compared to the market leader—gaming. “K-Pop” as a product has been trending away from the music industry and towards more profitable fields for a while, a trend only accelerated by the pandemic and taken into hyperspace by Hybe. As K-Pop companies double down on what Ed Zitron calls “the rot economy” and attempt to find “growth” wherever possible, where they’ve been looking is in tech (apps, games), IP, and data mining their fans. In 2021, I translated a Japanese article on the Kpop market trend towards IP and while IP has become extremely important to “K-Pop” (much more so than “music”) it’s not the only thing that is driving this push from Hybe.

Hybe née BigHit’s strength is not the quality of their music (which is middling at best). Their strength isn’t album sales and it’s certainly not the rabid fandom of middle aged women streaming on Spotify 24 hours a day and running up large tax bills in order to crowd fund mp3 purchases. Hybe’s marquee product is not BTS or TXT or NewJeans. Hybe’s marquee product is Weverse.

Weverse is the vampire squid (to use the tired metaphor) of K-Pop. It’s an app wants to drive all of your precious K-Pop dollars, Euros, yen, rupees, won, etc. into a single, poorly functioning platform. It’s an SNS/video streaming/ticket sales/fan club sales/merch store/music player/propaganda pushing app. (Just don’t mind the reports of leaky data—these are not the droids you’re looking for.)

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s what Bang Shi-Hyuk has been saying himself since at least 2019:

Our consumers are very passionate, and they’re very high spending. So the [goal], using this infrastructure, is to create an ecosystem that will involve these customers that leads to sales and then eventually toward an integration of both the [online] and offline experience. They’re going to the concerts as well as the online buying experience. 

Weverse started as something of a messageboard app in 2018. The platform was Hybe’s answer to the carefully moderdated K-pop fan platform Fancafe (owned by Daum/Kakao). On the plus side, global fans no longer had to learn Korean and navigate a complex onboarding procedure (involving detailed quiz questions--in Korean--about their favorite artists) in order to interact. On the down side, global fans no longer had to learn Korean and navigate a complex onboarding procedure in order to interact. The results are exactly what you would expect for a no-moderation fan message board.

(Definitely looks like a fun platform! Can’t wait to hand over my personal information for a chance to join in!)

Hybe’s acquisition of Pledis moved Seventeen (arguably one of BTS’s top competitors at the time) over to Weverse. Hybe’s deal with YG moved BlackPink and the other extremely popular YG acts (like 4th gen boy group Treasure) over to Weverse. Adding SM Entertainment artists to this would be a killing blow in terms of being able to data mine K-Pop fans.

You also have the Weverse Shop (formerly Weply) that like the SNS part of Weverse has amassed a hefty roster of big ticket artists. Some artists have been able to maintain separate fan club sales operations for Korea and Japan but, for global fans, your only option is Weverse. Again, adding SM Entertainment artists to this roster on Weverse Shops would be a massive coup. 

Then there’s the streaming video. Pre-pandemic, the K-Pop streaming video leader was the platform VLive (owned by Naver). It worked fairly well, allowed artists to have paid and unpaid content, and was fairly good about subtitles. For K-Pop companies that relied on income from concert sales, the pandemic meant they could no longer let Naver host their paid streaming content. And to that end SM Entertainment partnered with Naver for “Beyond Live” which has amassed a pretty substantial library of paid concert videos from both SM artists and JYP artists. Weverse has developed its own streaming platform that includes both a “live” portion replicating the old VLive functions as well as paid video content and concerts… and has also bought out and shut down VLive so fans and artists have no alternative to the Weverse platform. Did you enjoy watching content from a now defunct artist or artist who is not on Weverse? Too bad! That content is gone.

Again if Hybe can roll over the Beyond Live content to Weverse, that is massive in terms of the K-Pop marketplace. Essentially all four of the largest K-Pop idol companies would have their streaming concerts hosted on a single platform. It would be Weverse or nothing.

There’s also the struggle bus that is Weverse albums. The company has tried to push this as something of an alternative to iTunes. Basically you purchase an “album” there which counts as an album sale for the Korean charts and in the mail you get a box with some photocards and stuff in it. The idea (in theory) is you can listen to the album on this Weverse albums app but in practice I suspect those albums are listened to as often as most K-Pop fans listen to their CDs aka not very often. Weverse album listens don’t count towards the streaming charts.

If you think Hybe is concerned with EXO or BlackPink's album sales and streaming metrics rather than rolling up all paying K-Pop fans onto their own proprietary platform then you might also be interested in this bridge I have for sale. (It spans the Han River. High quality merchandise!) 

But this is only if Hybe manages to buy out SM Entertainment, you might be thinking. Sure, yes. Hybe would only be able to roll everyone up into to the cursed Weverse Expanded Universe if they can take over SM. However, SM Entertainment themselves had announced the SM 3.0+ plan which would essentially double down on all of the worst aspects of the way K-Pop has been trending including, as I mentioned at the top of the post, the IP and metaverse nonsense. This is pretty much what Hybe has been doing with its artists, the only difference would be we wouldn’t have to join Hybe’s cursed app universe to participate and, important to me, there’s a bigger chance the legacy acts like my beloved SHINee would be left more or less alone. 

So, basically damned if they do and slightly less damned if they don’t. Take your pick.

But K-Pop as we knew it, the K-Pop focused on music and idol performance, is over, no matter what happens. It’s been a fun ride while it lasted!