Selling Culture: Part 1, K-pop
Exploring K-pop, Reggaeton, and Afrobeats
From ‘Gangnam Style’ to BTS, how did K-pop become globally popular?
With social media and streaming services, we can easily connect over distances to a surprisingly personal level. Such accessibility has made our identities more homogenous and heterogenous at the same time; while we share and adapt one another’s culture, we hold on to our ‘own’ cultural identities even more, wanting to differentiate ourselves.
We can observe this in the way we produce and consume music in the modern day. With the digitization of the music industry, some have predicted cultural convergence; a few international stars will dominate the market and the local culture, especially in smaller countries, will die out. However, others argued that the music industry will grow more diverse as it provides niche markets the opportunity to find their audience in the vast digital space (1). A study also found that the diversity of songs and artists streamed on Spotify and iTunes have increased over the past few years (2).
In fact, many of today’s music trends seem to be some ‘culturally descriptive genre’, such as K-pop, Reggaeton, or Afrobeats. These genres highlight a distinct culture formed around ethnicity, while incorporating Western sounds that appeal to the international audience.
In this series, I will analyze three ‘cultural waves’ in music that have gained international recognition in the past decade or so. ‘Cultural’ is a loaded term, but the waves in this specific series are styles of music that are represented by artists who are not from North America and ethnically not White. Collectively, they indicate a trend of cultural commodification in the music industry.
The concept of heritage commodification, the process of putting a commercial value on cultural goods and ideas, has long been present in the context of food and tourism. In recent years, we can also observe the commodification of language, “useful as added value for niche markets and for distinguishing among standardized products that have saturated markets” (3).
While the commercialization of culture can be tricky to achieve in a politically correct way, the music trends in this series indicate potential for cultural appreciation, rather than appropriation. Cultural appropriation refers to “the representation of cultural practices or experiences by cultural ‘outsiders’” (4). With the spread of streaming services, marginalized groups now have the opportunity to represent their own music culture the way they want to.
In today’s article, we will explore a global phenomenon from my very own country: K-pop.
Although the release of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” is often raised as the primary event that brought global attention to K-pop, Hallyu (Korean Wave) has already been popular in countries around Southeast and East Asia since the mid-1990s (5). The charts below shows interest levels in the terms ‘K-pop’ and ‘Gangnam Style’ on Google from 2004 ~ present:
Surprisingly, world-wide interest levels in K-pop was substantially rising since the beginning of 2010, although ‘Gangnam Style’ was released in July 2012. Though the K-pop boom was yet to reach the Western world, it was a rising trend in regional markets before ‘Gangnam Style’ hit.
To this day, the leading contributors to the K-pop phenomenon are countries in Asia. To see the popularity of K-pop (and other genres) on streaming services in the past year, I created an interactive dashboard which visualizes data from Spotify Charts. The dataset includes songs that made it into the weekly top 200 charts in each available country from 2021/7/14 ~ 2022/7/14. Below is a map from the dashboard displaying the regional popularity of K-pop on Spotify in the past year.
Indonesia, Japan, and Philippines appear the darkest on the map above, meaning many K-pop songs ranked in the top 200 charts of these countries and also got significant streaming numbers. We can see that the top K-pop fan in the past year was Indonesia with 118 K-pop songs and 45 artists making it into the weekly top charts. These songs collected 534,828,064 streams. In the US, only 16 songs and 4 K-pop artists made it into the top 200 in the past year.
Below is also a chart that shows regional interest levels in the genre ‘K-pop’ on Google:
Regional interest levels from Spotify’s past-year data closely aligns with interest levels from Google data, indicating that the main audience for the genre is consistently in Asia. This analysis by Chartmetric also shows that the regional impact of K-pop is the highest in East and South East Asia.
At the same time, anyone would agree that K-pop is popular all around the world, though it may not be the most mainstream genre outside of Asia. How did K-pop spread so widely, to those who were not close geographically nor culturally to South Koreans at all?
Let’s circle back to PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’. The music video, released in 2012, spread world-wide and reached a billion views on YouTube within the year. As we’ve observed above, ‘Gangnam Style’ was released when the world-wide interest level towards K-pop was already starting to rise. This well-timed release gave a final push to a genre that was emerging out of regional markets, leading to an explosion of the K-pop wave globally. The success of ‘Gangnam Style’ exposed listeners outside of Asia to the idea that this ‘niche’ genre (from an outsider’s perspective) can be Pop(ualr music in the West), paving way for following K-pop artists in the global market.
In addition, the distribution of streaming services made it significantly easier for Korean artists to reach international audiences. K-pop is particularly known to have passionate fans, generating abnormally high engagement rates on social media and streaming services. Below are charts showing the view counts and engagement rates for top K-pop and Pop (that is not Gen Z) videos on Youtube:
While top Pop videos consistently have high view counts, the engagement rates are not that high. In comparison, K-pop videos have extraordinary engagement rates, driven by great enthusiasm from the BTS Army and BLACKPINK Blinks. K-pop fans even run their own channels featuring fancam videos (video edits focusing on a particular member of an idol group), which have billions of views (6). Hence, K-pop videos consistently get a push to the top of the social media algorithm and are likely to reach international audiences.
The K-pop wave presented two benefits to commodifying culture for music industry businesses. As companies like Spotify make significant expansions to emerging markets outside of North America and Europe, connecting with local culture is a prime strategy to engage regional audiences. We have seen in Part 1, and will see in Part 2 and 3, that despite the global popularity of these genres, the core fanbase tends to remain in regions that are in close cultural proximity to those styles of music.
The other benefit is that as with language, culture can also be “useful as added value… for distinguishing among standardized products that have saturated markets” (3). Many consider the K-pop wave to be an unexpected phenomena, researching extensively on how K-pop was able to appeal to audiences outside of Asia. Of course, the product is highly marketable to the international audience, as K-pop incorporates Western sounds, and often English lyrics.
But really, the success of K-pop isn’t that surprising when we think about the food industry. Is it that shocking that non-Asian people like Korean, Japanese, or Thai food? Though not in the most authentic form, American people love Sushi. Really, way too many guys from Hinge have suggested Sushi or Ramen for the first date.
Using local languages and styles of music will not limit the audience to only those in that culture. Rather, it will help songs stand out in the global market amongst other spiceless products. As with food though, it is somewhat necessary to incorporate Western tastes to target the international market. The truth is that the for a long time, the global music scene was dominated by the Western world and “Anglo-American pop continues to be perceived as ‘the original’ to be emulated” (7), though we are finally starting to change this perception.
There is nothing wrong with representing culture in a way that deviates from the most traditional form. Just because something has Western influence does not mean it isn’t our culture. Korean youths listen to K-pop, rarely Korean folk music. We love to put cheese in our food. It is still our culture and I’m proud of it. In fact, it’s quite ridiculous to open a super authentic Korean restaurant in a predominantly White neighborhood and get mad when the restaurant shuts down.
In the upcoming parts, I will expand on this food analogy to better illustrate the changes that are happening in the music industry. Cultural commodification is not a temporary trend, but one that will take place permanently in the industry. Various ethnic restaurants will enter the global music market and platforms will evolve to help users productively taste cuisines from around the world.
In Part 2, we will look at the ongoing Latin music wave, led by global superstar Bad Bunny. There are significant similarities and differences, so follow and stay tuned to find out what they are!
