Matt Lakeman

A Deep Dive into K-pop

2020-09-06 · 00:00 UTC ·John Doe ·140 min read

Brief

This exhaustive analysis dissects the K-pop industry as a highly systematized entertainment machine that manufactures performers through what the author characterizes as an abusive process. Lakeman traces K-pop's origins from Seo Taiji and the Boys in the 1990s to today's global phenomenon, revealing how South Korean production companies have created a centralized system that prioritizes corporate control over artistic authenticity. The investigation exposes the trainee system where children as young as 10 undergo years of intensive training involving extreme dietary restrictions (some female idols weigh as little as 82 pounds), 10-12 hour daily training schedules, and comprehensive behavioral control including dating bans and social media restrictions. The economic structure proves particularly exploitative, with most idols earning poverty-level wages while repaying training debts to companies that can exceed $500,000 per group member. The author documents how this system has contributed to mental health crises, including multiple high-profile suicides among performers like Kim Jong-hyun, Sulli, and Goo Hara. Perhaps most striking is the revelation that creative control lies almost entirely with production companies who outsource 80% of songwriting to Western producers, making idols essentially interchangeable performers in a manufactured cultural product. The essay also examines the intense parasocial relationships between fans and idols, including the phenomenon of 'sasaeng' stalker fans, and reveals how the South Korean government actively subsidizes and controls the industry as a form of soft power projection. Despite acknowledging the remarkable global success of K-pop and the technical skill of its performers, Lakeman concludes that the industry represents a form of systematic exploitation that prioritizes corporate profits over human welfare.

Why it matters

Matt Lakeman conducts a comprehensive 30,000-word investigation into the K-pop industry's structure and practices:

Key details

  • [scope] Analyzes five key areas: industry basics, idol manufacturing, fan culture, trainee process, and corporate structure
  • [findings] Documents systematic exploitation of trainees through extreme dieting, 16-hour training days, and restrictive contracts
  • [economics] Reveals most idols earn under $10,000 annually while companies take 50-97% of revenues
  • [mental health] Links industry practices to high rates of depression, self-harm, and suicide among performers
  • [creative control] Shows 80% of K-pop songs are written by Western producers, not the Korean performers
Cleaned source text

title: A Deep Dive into K-pop

author: John Doe

content_type: article

publication: Matt Lakeman

published: 2020-09-06T00:00:00

source_url: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/09/06/a-deep-dive-into-k-pop/

word_count: 31492

Prior to last month, I knew next to nothing about K-pop (Korean popular music) besides having heard a few songs in passing and the rumors of the industry’s infamous elements, most notably a string of high profile suicides over the last few years. As an American with no connection to music or South Korean culture, I wondered if I was getting an accurate picture of the industry or if I was being misled by the most lurid and morbid elements eagerly conveyed by the media.

So I decided to do a deep dive down the internet rabbit hole of K-pop to understand what it is, how it works, and what I think about it. For anything that’s not my personal opinion or that goes beyond basic historical knowledge, I’ll cite my sources, which are a mixture of news articles, academic articles, YouTube videos, and some content aggregators like Wikipedia and Statista. I welcome any corrections or criticisms on inaccurate sources or things I didn’t understand.

I’ll warn you upfront – this essay is over 30,000 words long. It is the largest post I have made on dormin.org besides my novel. Since I sympathize with anyone who doesn’t want to make such a large time investment into a subject of passing curiosity, I will present my key findings here divided between the five parts of the essay. If you’re not sure if you want to read everything, you can jump to any individual part and understand it without reading the other sections.

Part 1__ – __The Basics

Part 1__–__The Basics__- “K-pop” is both a genre of music and an entire industry which “manufacturers” performers and their performance output (music, dance routines, shows, merchandise, etc.) in a highly systematized top-down manner

The global popularity of K-pop is extraordinary considering the relatively small population of South Korea, and the relatively small size of K-pop production companies

Part 2__ – __The Product

Part 2__–__The Product__- K-pop’s industrial/corporate structure represents a Korean (and East-Asian) cultural alternative to Western pop and broader music production

K-pop stars and bands are manufactured and controlled by production companies in the same manner Western athletes are trained and traded by sports teams.

K-pop stars are crafted into idealized portrays of individuals by East Asian cultural standards

Part 3__ – __The Fans

Part 3__–__The Fans__- K-pop fandom is both more intense on average than Western fandom, and has a larger percentage of unhealthily obsessive fans

K-pop fandom is based on a parasocial relationship between fans and stars

K-pop stars are forced to abide by extremely restrictive behavioral norms to appease production companies and fans

Part 4__– __The Process

Part 4__–__The Process__- Trying to become a K-pop star is a terrible idea by any rational cost-benefit analysis

The process by which production companies train K-pop stars is abusive and depends on the ignorance of children/teenagers and clueless and/or malicious parents

Even after making it through the extraordinarily difficult audition and training process, the vast majority of K-pop stars will have short careers and earn little or possibly

no*money

Part 5__ – __The Machine

Part 5__–__The Machine__- K-pop is an extremely centralized, hierarchical industry, where structural, business, and creative decisions are almost entirely made by corporate management, rather than the performers

Raw creativity in the music production process is largely outsourced to Westerners who write, produce, and choreograph the music

The K-pop industry is subsidized and supported by the South Korean government, if not implicitly or explicitly directed, as a conscious form of soft power projection and social control.

As you can tell, I came away from my research with a negative view of K-pop. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world, but I find its fandom to be unhealthy and its production process to be exploitative. That being said, there are undoubtedly many tremendous talents in the K-pop world and the cultural power of K-pop is remarkable. I’ll give my summarized thoughts on K-pop as a whole at the conclusion of the essay.

Part 1__–

The Basics

What is K-pop?

“K-pop” refers to a genre of music and the industry which creates it. Both are based out of South Korea and particularly Seoul.

What is K-pop music?

K-pop is an offshoot of 90s Western pop with heavy influences from synthetics and hip hop. Lyrics are mostly Korean, but with English words and sometimes other languages thrown in. K-pop is usually sung by mono-gendered bands with members aged from their mid-teens to late 20s. Such bands typically resemble the structure and appearance of American boy bands from the 90s and 2000s (ie. NSYNC). As a representative K-pop sample, check out “DNA” by BTS:

Properly understood, “K-pop music” is inseparable from “K-pop performance.” The music itself is one component of a larger presentation which includes dance choreography, music videos, fashion, and the personas of bands and individual band members. Though these elements are also present in Western music, they are far more important to K-pop music. K-pop fandom is considered the appreciation of all these aspects as an integrated whole.

What are the Origins of K-pop?

The Western influence on Korean music began in the 1940s with the American occupation of much of the Korean peninsula after its liberation from Imperial Japan. With the outbreak of the Korean War in the early 1950s, further American presence was added, with over 300,000 US troops at the peak.[[1]](#_edn1) After the war, the American military stayed at dozens[[2]](#_edn2) of bases throughout South Korea as a permanent fixture of the country. Over the decades, these soldiers imported American culture and media, including American music. Presently, there are still 20,000 US soldiers in South Korea.[[3]](#_edn3)

The early Western musical influence in South Korea was based on folk and hippie music in the 60s and 70s, and then evolved into sappy ballads in the 80s. These genres merged with traditional Korean music to form a small, localized music industry. Creative expansion was restrained by the South Korean government’s censorship and restrictions on movement in and out of the country. In the 1970s, the government banned American rock music and Korean offshoots for their connotations with drug use.[[4]](#_edn4) Until 1983, South Korean citizens were banned from traveling abroad for tourism, and the last restrictions weren’t lifted until 1988 (year of the Seoul Summer Olympics).[[5]](#_edn5)

Korean music had a revolution in the early 1990s with the three-member band, Seo Taiji and the Boys. Founded in 1992, the Boys debuted on a South Korean television talent show and received the lowest ratings of the night.[[6]](#_edn6) Unexpectedly, their premiere song was a huge hit and launched the band to fame. The Boys soon became the first successful Korean rap group and redefined the Korean music industry. Leader Seo Taiji was a rare experimenter in a country still emerging from isolation and relative cultural stagnancy. Prior to forming the Boys, he had been part of an indie heavy metal band.[[7]](#_edn7)

Through their music, style, and appearance, Seo Taiji and the Boys inadvertently became the first K-Pop band. While their music was more hip hop-based, the Boys pioneered the mixture of Western pop and hip hop presented with intense, highly-choreographed dance routines within a refined aesthetic theme.[[8]](#_edn8) For a sample, see here:

Seo Taiji and the Boys disbanded in 1996. But by the end of its short career, mimicking boy bands had sprung up throughout South Korea. These bands were picked up by a new wave of music production companies which would become the basis of the K-pop industry. They looked to Japan and its well established “J-pop” industry as a template for the sustained production of popular musical talent. Thus, while the Boys were independent, experimental, and subversive, the bands created in their wake were more institutionalized, sanitized, and formed by top-down design.

How Big is K-pop?

In 2017, the entire K-pop industry produced $5 billion in revenue.[[9]](#_edn9) For the closest American comparison I can find – in 2019, American *record labels* earned $8.7 billion in revenue.[[10]](#_edn10) Unfortunately, I can’t find numbers for total music industry revenue in the US, so this isn’t quite a fair comparison. The two might be difficult to compare due to diverging industry structures; for instance, in South Korea, $1.2 billion of its 2017 revenues came from karaoke sales, only $250 million less than its digital music sales[[11]](#_edn11)

Nevertheless, considering that South Korea has less than 1/6th the US population and 1/14th the GDP, that’s pretty damn impressive.

Also of note, in 2019, South Korea was the 6th largest music market in the world, ahead of China and behind France.[[12]](#_edn12) In 2017, South Korea exported $513 million worth of music and imported only $14 million worth, which is an extremely strong indicator of the country’s preference for K-pop over Western pop.[[13]](#_edn13)

BTS (AKA Bangtan Boys) is the most popular K-pop band in the world today and ever. According to the 2019 IFPI Global Music Report, BTS was the 7th most listened to artist in the world, and had the 3rd most popular album globally. Despite Spotify not streaming in South Korea, BTS was its second most popular artist in 2019.[[14]](#_edn14)

Perhaps more relevantly, a 2017 Hyundai Research Institute report claimed that BTS alone was worth $3.6 billion to the South Korean economy annually when accounting for adjacent economic activity and tourism. Supposedly 1/13th of all tourists to South Korea in 2017 came because of BTS.[[15]](#_edn15) A 2019 report from Hollywood Reporter brought the figure up to $4.65 billion.[[16]](#_edn16)

How Big is K-pop in America?

I can’t find firm figures, but the general consensus is that K-pop has been blowing up in the US since at least 2017, with articles about the genre’s American explosion popping up in the *New York Times*,[[17]](#_edn17) *NPR*,[[18]](#_edn18) the *Guardian*,[[19]](#_edn19) etc. From 2015 to 2019, demand for K-pop concert tickets increased 1,900% in the US.

[[20]](#_edn20)This growth seems to be largely thanks to BTS, which is about 5X more popular than Blackpink, the second most popular K-pop band in America.

However, I came across an interesting *Digital Music News* article from June 2018 which convincingly made the case that K-pop’s popularity in America is overstated by rabid fans and media hype. It points out that all K-pop songs which hit the Top 100 Billboard charts plummet the week after arrival, and tend to exit entirely within a few weeks. Furthermore, though the Top 100 Billboard Charts are often used as indicators of popularity by the media, they’re actually an outdated proxy since they rely on physical album sales.[[21]](#_edn21) Physical sales have been plummeting in the West for a decade, but as confirmed by other sources,[[22]](#_edn22)[[23]](#_edn23) South Korea still has unusually high physical sales, with its raw numbers somehow increasing threefold from 2014-2018.[[24]](#_edn24) Assuming American K-pop fans even somewhat follow this trend, it’s likely that K-pop’s success metrics are being artificially boosted.

Granted, K-pop has continued to gain in popularity since then, with 2019 producing the industry’s highest international sales ever. So my guess is that the *Digital Music News *article is right that K-pop popularity in the US is overstated by the media, but K-pop is still a rapidly growing musical niche.

Part 2__–

The Product

As mentioned, I am not a music-person. I’ve barely played instruments, I don’t know how to read music, I don’t have the slightest sense of how to make music, and I suspect I’m tone-deaf. So I’m not going to dive into the nuances of K-pop music, its influences, its styles, etc. Likewise, I know little about the crucial choreography and fashion components of K-pop.

What interests me more about K-pop is its unique fusion of Western commercialism with Korean (or broadly East Asian) cultural values.

From the West, K-pop gets its music genres, most of its dancing and fashion, and the idea of corporate committees algorithmically crafting superstimuli to capture mass-appeal. For better or worse, all the things you associate with Western pop are more extreme in K-pop. South Korea took American pop music and cranked it up to 11. K-pop is super pop. Uber pop. Ultimate pop. It’s the closest thing to the Josie and the Pussycats movie in real life.

But past the hyper-Western-pop surface, K-pop is an *extremely *Asian cultural artifact with its emphasis on being ultra-refined, artificial, and presenting an impossible idealization of humanity. And the process by which K-pop is produced is far more centralized and hierarchically controlled than Western music.

I’m going to run through what I consider to be the most important parts of the K-pop product and do my best to summarize how they work and integrate into a greater whole.

Idols

K-pop stars are known as “idols,” as derived from J-pop’s Japanese idols. Since the beginning of K-pop 25 years ago, there have been about 1900 idols[[25]](#_edn25) spread across 370 groups and some number of solo careers.[[26]](#_edn26)

Idols are conceptually different than Western musical stars. Wikipedia describes them as a “type of entertainer whose image is manufactured to cultivate a dedicated consumer fan following.”[[27]](#_edn27) Idols are more than singers, dancers, or even all-purpose performers, they’re *personas* – a combination of performance, appearance, and personality which combine to create a *character*.

These characters are manufactured from the ground-up by production companies. Idols enter the K-pop system as *trainees* with little-to-no performance experience in their teens or early 20s. They spend an average of 3-5 years training within production company facilities while doing no public performances. The idol *debuts* to the public in his/her late teens or early 20s as a fully-formed product, though some idols debut in their teenage years, including a few as young as 12.[[28]](#_edn28) The artificiality of this process appears to be a feature, not a bug. The singing, dancing, impossibly good-looking uber-humans who emerge from training are meant to be consummate entertainers whose *entire lives* are performances.

Idols represent fantasies of idealized people from an East Asian cultural perspective. The prototypical idol is young, attractive, perfectly groomed, effete if a boy, petite if a girl, heterosexual, supremely talented, a great singer, a great dancer, a charismatic presence on stage, has impossible anime hair that changes every week, has flawless skin, wears striking clothes, has an air of mystique yet is relatable, and is romantically single.[[29]](#_edn29)

Of course, nobody on earth actually embodies all those traits. To achieve at least a public presentation of such an ideal, idols are subjected to extraordinarily strict controls over their appearance, lifestyle, and behavior. Somewhere between many and most idols are prohibited either formally by contract or informally by company rules from smoking, drinking, doing drugs, clubbing, gaining weight past a mandated level, engaging in political discourse, taking breaks from performance schedules, living anywhere other than in company-owned dorms with their bandmates, fraternizing with idols from other companies, and dating (I’ll go into more detail on all this in Parts 3 and 4).

Even within the bounds of permissible behavior, idols are carefully managed. For instance, an idol’s sex appeal is a balancing act. One of K-pop’s early distinguishing features from J-pop was more overt sexuality in contrast to the Japanese focus on *kawaii* or cuteness. K-pop stars are supposed to be hot, physically fit, perfectly groomed, and clearly *fuckable*.

However, there are firm limits on the permitted sexiness of idols. K-pop is meant to appeal to the mass-market, which in South Korea means being *family-friendly*.[[30]](#_edn30) One K-pop agent said she recruits girls that are “attractive in a way that’s sexy but wholesome.”[[31]](#_edn31) In appearance and performance, K-pop stars can be scantily clad, but almost never sexually explicit; songs never mention sex, and only the edgiest of stars might get away with referring to carnal acts by metaphors.[[32]](#_edn32) In other words, idols should be *sexy*, but not *sexual*. So while K-pop stars can gyrate their perfectly toned nubile bodies in short-shorts, they can’t go on stage nearly naked and twerk against a much older man to a song (arguably) about date rape.

Idols are also given assigned personalities by their production companies which vary from amplifications of their natural personalities[[33]](#_edn33) to whole-cloth inventions.[[34]](#_edn34) Maybe this is one of those impenetrable cultural things you can’t understand unless you’re inside, or maybe my Googling skills failed me, but try as I might, I haven’t been able to find good descriptions of individual idol personas, or how they differ beyond basic characteristics like “bubbly,” “smiles a lot,” “shy,” “sweet,” etc. The idol personas are some mixture of looks, fashion, musical talent, dancing, training, and personal life details, but I have trouble digging past a shallow layer. For instance, from a Quora question, “Without saying their name, who are your favorite K-pop idols?”:[[35]](#_edn35)

“This woman is the leader of a 9-member girlgroup. She was among the 2 main vocalists and she is considered a great vocalist. Her voice can comfort broken hearts. She had a solo debut in 2015, but she is among the top soloists in terms of talent and popularity. I ship her with a former member of her group. She is dealing with depression. Rocks every type of hair.”

Though K-pop has international appeal, especially across East Asia, K-pop is still a *very* South Korean product. Hence, 96% of all idols have been South Korean, with most of the rest being Chinese or Japanese, and a handful being from the United States, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and India,[[36]](#_edn36) though there are current and former trainees from other countries. Among the few Western trainees, somewhere between many and most are fully or partially ethnically Asian.

This lack of racial and ethnic diversity has been increasingly a news issue in K-pop, I suspect due to the rising importance of the American market. According to a bunch of online articles, even the concept of non-Asian K-pop idols is controversial in South Korea and not broadly accepted.[[37]](#_edn37) This may be a rare area where the production companies and fans are in opposition, with the companies wanting to diversify idols to tap into new markets[[38]](#_edn38) and the fans being more conservative.

It’s my sense that the companies have even tried experimenting with diversity to test fan reactions, but haven’t gotten good results. The one high-profile black idol, Kentucky-born Alex Reid, was recruited from acting gigs by DR Entertainment and integrated into BP Rania, an existing group with five members. From Wikipedia:[[39]](#_edn39) “The unveil received approval from Korean netizens, with many complimenting her appearance; on the other hand, the unveil resulted in a ‘heated debate between hardcore and casual fans of K-pop and hip-hop, points of contention between cultural appropriation, creative licenses, and proper representation.’”

Reid quit the group less than a year after debuting. Fellow members reported that she was isolated by cultural differences and not being able to speak Korean, and critics accused of her of not sufficiently adapting to Korean culture.[[40]](#_edn40) Reid later stated in an interview that she was subject to bullying, racism, and a generally toxic atmosphere.[[41]](#_edn41)

Bands

Like idols, K-pop bands are conceptually different from Western bands. The closest Western equivalent is a boy band like NSYNC or One Direction, but that doesn’t quite capture the distance.

K-pop bands function more like Western sports teams. The band itself is owned and operated by the music production company, while the members are trained, molded, utilized, and swapped out like players.

Bands are formed during the idol training period by the production companies. Individual idols are assigned to slots in new or existing bands and then made to train and live alongside their bandmates for years. As far as I can tell, the band-placement process is determined almost entirely by marketing strategies, and individual idols are expected to contour to the company’s designs for the band.