K-Pop’s Plan for Global Dominance? Remove the K

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. I love K pop because they are, by far, I would say, the coolest version of our generation.

Bloomberg reporter so he Can has been covering Korean pop or K pop for nearly a decade as a journalist, but she's been a fan for much longer than that.

Yeah.

Literally, I grew up with K pop, so he vividly remembers her first K pop obsession.

So it was nineteen ninety seven when a trio girl band called Ses come out of Nowhere. I first discovered them from TV and three pretty young teenage girl grooves were singing and dancing on a song called I'm Your Girl. The song was mixed them a little bit of a pop and RMB produced by SM Entertainment, and it completely

Recently, so He started noticing something unusual in the K pop songs getting released. A lot of their lyrics were in English, not Korean. So she did what any Bloomberg journalists would do. She and her colleagues started collecting data. In this instance, they conducted a very fun sounding survey. They analyzed every single K pop song released since nineteen ninety five that included hits like BTS's Butter.

Small Drag, but like Criminal and.

Black Pinks Killed This Love and I found out something pretty surprising.

So almost half the K pop songs released this year had the majority and lyrics, and this is the first time in K pop's history like having a lot of English the lyrics and English songs.

So he says that this push into English hasn't been an accident.

And having more English lyrics is becoming a new norm for Korean idol groups because their songs are actively drawing more audiences not only in the US, but in some regions in Southeast Asia where a lot of K pop content like dance challenges become viral on TikTok and YouTube, and most of them are using English as a main tool.

But if you take out the Korean, you're left with a glaring question, what's K pop without the k Today on the show, after years of meteoric growth, k pop is at a crossroads. Can the genre grow its international audience without losing the key components that made it a global phenomenon in the first place. I'm Sarah Holder and this is the big take from Bloomberg News so today,

So there are so called four big companies SM, High, YG, and JYP. SM is known as the pioneer of k pop, which was established three decades ago. High, the agency behind BTS, is the youngest one, but the biggest in terms of the market value. And why just the management company behind Black Pink and JYP is the agency behind Twice and Straight Kids.

And what's the size of the K pop industry?

Like?

How much money does it make?

The size of the K pop industry is estimated to be about like ten billion dollars according to Korea Creative Content Agency, and the amount of the kpop export was about one billion dollars last year.

Exporting K pop has been a pretty good business. Bloomberg reporters spoke to fans in Los Angeles outside of a concert for the K pop Fan Rise, who said they spent thousands of dollars a year on merchandise, concert tickets, and special events where they could meet members of their favorite groups.

Probably a six thousand budget maybe if not more, depending on how many concerts Ike goes here.

I mean just think about this trip, like the ticket light and everything, maybe like.

Five hundred maybe each just for like today, for me, I would say maybe about two three thousands.

And this is not something like unusual for K pop fans that we'll see a lot of like a K pop fans who are based in la or lets in America, we're like friends or who want to travel more to follow their biggest artists.

What do fans say about why they love K pop so much?

Well, I will say K pop is total package of modern arts. It's not just about songs, their fashion, computer graphic designs in their music videos and futuristic style and the sounds which all comes together. But what makes fans feel more connected to their stars than K pop groups. I think it's song's message and the K pop star's attitude toward fans. K pop artists are trained how to use social media and how not to disappoint fans who believe in them, but.

The global fan base for groups like Rise Bts and Black Pink are in some ways the exception.

So he K pop's largest consumer country is still South Korea, and the fifty million population is shrinking and aging faster than any places in the world. So the core consumer group teens to early twenties will be downsizing for the next decade. And an aging South repopulation isn't the only

All of this might have been part of the reason why sales of physical K pop albums to China have plummeted this year.

There are a lot of like hypothetical thesis around that, but there is no like a certain or clear answer for that. But first of all, like a Chinese consumers, they would still want to buy K pop pop albums for sure, butts there has been a rumor that Chinese wholesalers has stopped buying or stopped ordering work sales because of some sort of like measures that Chinese government has made, and.

That's why today, despite the passionate fans and the billions in revenue, K pop has arrived at this crossroads.

Obviously, in order to make a lot of money, K pop needs to transform their business model to make a sustainable growth for the next decade and reach out to a wider fan base. So it's K pop's mission to reach out to a bigger global market for a survival plan.

To do that, some of the industry's biggest players are arguing for a radical transformation.

So High founder Pamschi Hawk is declaring it's time to take the K out of K pop.

Coming up after the break, how K pop is reinventing itself and why this is causing something of an identity crisis for the industry. One way for K pop groups to appeal to a more global audience is to release songs with more English lyrics, which is something Bloomberg reporter so He Kim and her colleagues have confirmed is already happening. Another strategy is for existing big name K pop groups to team up with some familiar names in the international pop community.

For example, BTS. John Kook's latest album was produced by Scooter Brown and executives and producers in La and Lisa from Black Pink. She worked with Sony Entertainment's RCA. She released a new song called the rock Star gelsis a non adash of rockstarm make your favorite single. She invited a lot of like a Thai talent and creators and musicians to get involved in her So it's a multinational collaboration that can be just call it as a Korean pop But.

K pop companies are also launching new groups from scratch using their tried and true formula for recruiting, molding, and debuting talent.

The core process hasn't changed, but there are more auditions worldwide, language lessons during training period, and tons of digital marketing to promote the groups globally.

From the get go, getting these groups concert ready is time consuming and expensive.

It typically costs about like three to five million to create an idol group, but there are some cases that the costs exceed ten million dollars these days.

So he got to meet one of Korea's most promising next generation K pop groups last month at SM Entertainment's headquarters in Seoul. The band is called Rise. They're the ones those fans in la were lining up to see.

Is the latest idol group created by a SAM Entertainment. Their music was based on the house music produced by creatives based in US and Europe, and they also got trained by Western hip hop choreographers for new songs, so that resonates more with general audiences. But at the same time, they kept the core value of K pops such as empowering messages, emotional sounds, and phantom communications, so they look very fresh but something very familiar to K pop fans.

Meanwhile, Hibe, the label behind BTS, is trying something even more experimental with an all girl K pop group called kats Eye. They released their first single called Debut on YouTube and on the group's website a little over three weeks ago.

I don't need know on two trin I'll set oh just how to make a scene, just me mass.

As you can hear.

Their lyrics are in English, but that's not the only thing that's different about the group.

So among the members, there's just only one Korean member and their main stage is not Soul or South Korea. Their main stage is now US and Hollywood.

In La Katsi's debut video has already been viewed over three point seven million times. Even with those numbers, so he says that doesn't necessarily mean the group is going to take the world by storm.

It's early to say whether they will be successful, but definitely it's a very new thing for the K pop industry because it's a total collaboration with the US record label to create a idol.

Group but with only one Korean member, mostly English lyrics, and an American home base. I asked, so he what makes Kat's Eye k pop at all? It's the question that's at the heart of this new.

Era for K pop.

Yeah, it's a billion pellar question. Denying we're abandoning k or Koreans could be risky if the new groups failed to appeal to both of K pop fans and general music audiences. But if any new projects find a magical way to keep the value of K pop and make a global appeal, I'm pretty sure they will revirite the pop history.

For the fans.

Bloomberg spoke to outside of that Rise concert in La the embrace of English lyrics and K pop got a mixed.

Review vibe It's giving me. It is kind of head or miss.

I do somewhat like all the create K pop English songs. I just don't heard it for anyone, just because that's where they rooted, that's where the culture is, that's where they should be.

I like to be honest, sing the words out.

But it doesn't matter like what language is, as long as it has like a message to the meaning.

I like, I don't know.

The music really think they're easier for me.

So he says it's too early to tell if K pop's new strategy will lead to the next BTS, but the industry is setting its sites even higher.

Attempting like Coachella is not enough for them at all, So they want to go stadiums for like the size of Beyonce and Taylor Shift and Coldplay. Their dream now is to perform at the super Bowl.

Hot Time show A black pink BTS super Bowl show could be dynamite. That's it for this episode of The Big Take from Bloomberg News.

I'm Sarah Holder.

This episode was produced by Thomas Lou and Alex Uguia, who also mixed this episode. It was edited by Stacy Vnnick Smith. It was fact checked by Naomi and Thomas Lou. There was additional reporting by Jin Wu and Jeremy Lynn. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Kim Gettelson. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole beamsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big