The K-Pop's Music Industry

There are many ways a talent agency promotes their song like releasing music albums, selling merchandises, world concert tours, and many more. They also promote their music albums by performing their K-pop groups in music-oriented TV programs like Music Bank (now broadcasting in 72 countries through KBS World) that provides live performances and music chart information. Similar shows include M! Countdown (MNet), Show! Music Core (MBC), Inkigayo (SBS), and many others. An article in the Guardian written by Helienne Lindvall, entitled K-pop: how South Korea turned round its music scene, presents the following example of SM Entertainment’s business selling is not just music, but also in other ways, “SME even has its own merchandise

But we have seen that another important aspect is the visuality of the genre. During the 1980s, the music industry began to rely on television to determine the success of a song or artist. As the TV industry liberalized in the early 1990s, South Korean TV needed programs to fill air space. One strategy was to show concert footage, news updates about various bands and artists, interviews, and music videos. The music industry saw this as effective marketing, and took a more active role in preparing performers for the camera. Part of it was also the careful construction of gender and sexuality in K-Pop. For men, we see a hybridity in the formulation of the masculine image that combines virtues of traditional Korean values of masculinity, kawaii, or cute, masculinity, and a more global metropolitan masculinity while in women, we see a mixture of innocence and sexual submissiveness, with the proliferation of the school girl image as well as images of the same women in more sexually charged situations. Such values are expressed through performativity of movement, speech, gestures, and enactments exhibited in every day social behavior (especially on

Those companies were able to make a hybrid form of music that appeals to many different cultures. The music is written and produced by people from around the world, the chorographers are mostly foreigners and within boy bands and girl bands there are members who were not born in South Korea. Most K-pop songs are sung in the Korean language and have some English lyrics. Nowadays songs are also being recorded in Japanese, Mandarin or English. By making it half-Korean it is ready for consumption by non-Korean consumers. Yet it is expected by the Korean fans that the boy bands and girl bands behave like Koreans. Actors and singers who have not conformed to the Korean lifestyle and culture are expected to go back to their countries. This creates a hybrid culture that makes Korean popular culture more accessible for other cultures that are culturally distant to