Introduction
Society and music together create the popular music, but mass media technology is one of the pivotal strategies that birth a new music genre and enforce the popularity of the music around the globe. The “Korean wave” phenomenon appeared in our life in the 19th century, it rapidly conquered Asia and spread around the globe through the use of mass media marketing strategy. It is not only a successful entertainment industry that “jumped to the worth of billions of dollars in less than a few decades” (Asian Entrepreneurship,) but also becomes the identity of Korea. Today, people refer to the K-pop industry as “Hallyu”. This word is derived from the world’s most popular entertainment industry — “Hollywood”, and “Hallyu” refers to the most popular entertainment industry in Asia (Ingyu OH, 2013). Undoubtedly, “Hallyu” becomes a popular trend not only in Asia but also becomes increasingly influential in the western world. However, the rise of Hallyu is tightly linked to the emergence of mass media music distribution channel such as YouTube, as it opens up an opportunity for independent artists from remote places to publish their creation in a new market. This paper will discuss the music distribution channel YouTube, and analyze how YouTube helps to promote Korean pop music’ s popularity around the globe.
The Benefit of YouTube
The rise of social mass media allows the audience to gain access to music contents in a more convenient way, and it begins the new era of “business to business music distribution” (Ingyu OH, 2013) marketing strategy. Out of all the distributional technologies such as TV, CDs, radio and iTunes, YouTube as a revolutionary technology introduced a new market for individual artists all around the world and transformed the way to “consume, create and share music”(Youna Kim, 2013)
One of the benefits of YouTube is that it provide an easy-to-access distribution channel, and allows free uploads and viewings of music or video contents. Artists including underground artists and artists who are from remote areas (e.g. Korea) always face the difficulty of publishing their music and globalizing them. “YouTube has both promotional and distributional functions that radio (promotional) and CDs (Distributional) used to have separately” (OH and Park, 2012). Artists in the 21st century do not need to join music companies to publish their music, instead, music can now be easily published online and spread all around the world in just a click of a mouse. This economic friendly characteristic of YouTube also minimizes transaction cost that arises from the global music business and allows more viewers to participate.
On YouTube, the popularity level is highly depended on the number of views and “likes” that each video receives. The amount of “Likes” and “comments” that a video receives act as a “gatekeeper” that maintains the order of the cyberspace. Audiences are able to choose music videos and like them based on their preference, and this restricts big music industry (the gatekeeper)’s control over the market. Artists are able to avoid industry “Gatekeepers” while marketing their music on YouTube. This is a huge benefit and the pivotal reason why underground artists choose to upload their music on YouTube (OH and Park 2013).
Then how does YouTube promote the popularity of Korean music?
Korean popular music was only a small genre in the Asian Culture; its recent expanding popularity into Europe and North America is certainly YouTube’s contribution. First of all, the free uploading and viewing feature of YouTube allows Korean pop fans to easily gain access to music videos. Before the popularization of YouTube, audiences need to watch television or go to a concert in order to enjoy music and other types or entertainment. Both of these options are extremely inconvenient, as audiences need to be physically present at where the concert takes place, and the audience can only watch channels that are broadcast from their own country. YouTube, on the other hand, is able to share music from all over the world to audiences all over the world. This allows Korean pop music to be exposed to people all around the world. Unlike CDs and DVDs that are hard to organize and find, YouTube allows Korean pop music fans to search and listen to the music anytime at anywhere.
Moreover, the share option of YouTube videos encourages the audience to form a networked community in cyberspace. Whenever audiences watch or hear a music that they like, they can instantly share it with their friends on Facebook, twitter and other social media communities, or leave a comment below the video. The feature of sharing and commenting allows interaction to happen between audiences who have the same taste. This kind of interaction promotes the spread of minority music genre (Korean pop), and it advocates audiences to form a fan group, which becomes the most supporting network behind the K-pop music groups.
As Youna Kim (2013) suggested, “YouTube reinforces the visuality of music.” It changes the way people experience music. Music now becomes an entertainment that can be viewed and listened, and “the role of music video strengthen the spread of music”(Youna Kim, 2013). Unlike other music genres, Korean pop music focuses on both the quality of the sound and quality of visual appearance. In Korea, entertainers are trained in multi-aspects including singing, dancing as well as acting. Besides, entertainers’ fashion style and appearance are carefully designed. Korean pop is a music genre that combines music with dances. This performance centered entertainment attracts both music listeners and visual viewers who are impressed by the powerful dances and stunning design of Korean pop music videos. YouTube as a visual and audio medium is able to introduce and advertise Korea pop music through its music videos.
However, the popularity of Korean popular music in Europe is not only due to audience’s discovery on YouTube (OH and Park 2013). According to research done by Ingyu OH and Hyo-Jung Lee, a majority of European fans get introduced to Korean pop music through Asian culture hubs. Many audiences are Asian culture fans at first, and then they discover the Korean popular music through their Asian friends or from Asian culture community. These audiences then fulfill the role of spreading the information of Korean pop to their surroundings through the social network. In this case, mass media act as a messenger to support the globalization of Korean pop music.
YouTube and “Gangnam Style”
According to Oh and Park (2012), “YouTube is now opening up a new dedicated k-pop channel, as Korean pop related videos have more than tens of millions of steady hits from Asia, Europe, and America every month. Korean pop culture did make a place on YouTube. A Korean pop entertainment news website commented that:
“YouTube itself is very friendly towards K-pop. They created a K-pop genre in the music category, which only consists of genres such as pop, Rock, R&B, Rap, Folk and Latin. K-pop is the first genre to be created for a popular country.”
It begins with the huge achievement of music videos “Gee” performed by Girls Generation, and then arrives at its peak on Psy’s Gangnam Style. Gangnam Style became the most phenomenon penetration in 2012 with its astonishing 300 million viewers on YouTube as of September 2012, and it became Korean pop’s most successful export (Dai Jin, 2016). There are several reasons why “Gangnam Style” became a global hit: the music is catchy, the dance move is hilarious and much more. Nevertheless, what is YouTube’s role in Gangnam Style’s success?
YouTube promotes Gangnam Style’s success in two ways: it allows audience all over the world to get access to this music, and it grants the music fame. Like I stated before, one of YouTube’s benefit is its easy accessibility. The music is interesting in a way that it satires the Korean lifestyle, however, for music that contains this type of information is not going to be spread easily. No matter how inspiring the music is, if there is only a limited amount of people hearing it, it would not be famous. YouTube as a medium allows the music to be accessible all around the world, and promote transmission of this music.
Secondly, YouTube as a well-known music distribution medium is able to grant music fame with the number of views and likes that each music video receives. YouTube can act as Billboard in a way that the most viewed video become the most popular, or the “number 1”. Gangnam style received a tremendous amount of views just within four months of its debut on YouTube, and became YouTube’s most viewed video in 2012. When Gangnam Style first made a success on YouTube, the music was then shared and discussed on many notable international websites such as Reddit, CNN, Wall Street Journal and much more (Dal Jin, 2016). YouTube granted the music fame and becomes the most important outlet for Korean pop music.
Conclusion
Although people might argue that YouTube is not the only important factor that drives the wave of Korean pop, it is certain that YouTube is significant in expanding the popularity of K-pop. This writing analyzes the popularity of Korean pop music from the perspective of the importance of mass media technology YouTube. However, there are many more factors such as the marketing and hybridity, that drive the success of Korean pop music today. I hope this writing could serve as an introductory analysis on the relationship between YouTube and K-pop and hope to continue the analysis in the future study.
Reference
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Now~ I want to share my favorite MV of 2016: