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K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides not only a history of South Korean popular music—the premodern background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American impact, and recent globalization—but also a description of K-pop as a system of economic innovation and cultural production. In doing so, he delves into the broader background of South Korea in this wonderfully informed history and analysis of a pop culture phenomenon sweeping the globe.

The worldwide popularity of South Korean popular music has generated global consumer demand for variations of its grueling training regimen offered by talent recruitment agencies and dance studios. Using the case study of the South Korean popular music boot camps offered by the Australia-based agency, The Academy, this article seeks to frame these performative engagements along more cosmopolitan notions of choreographic co-creative labor. In contrast to the highly competitive South Korean popular music machinery, participation in these boot camps can be characterized as affective prosumer “free labor” from trainees from diverse backgrounds, abilities, and motivations. Through programs that enable trainees to “re-present,” “re-organize,” and “re-interpret” K-pop dance performances, studios like The Academy leverage on K-pop’s popularity and its training pedagogies so as to open new fields of creative labor. Accompanying such openings are the strengthening transnational connectivities in the activities of The Academy in intensifying existing multicultural networks in Australia. The studio is also part of a more cosmopolitan platform in orienting traditionally Eurocentric mainstream Australia culturally toward the Asia-Pacific region. By further democratizing the dance abilities of K-pop choreographies, initiatives like The Academy serve in enlarging creative labor in transnational rhythmic communities.

This book examines how Korean television dramas and K-pop music are employed to promote urban and rural regions within South Korea to overseas tourists. Riding the international popularity of Korean entertainment, Korean cities have actively used K-dramas and K-pop idols in advertisements designed to attract foreign tourists to their regions. By examining the process of cultural marketing, this book shows that places can be “sold” just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, K-pop has constantly gained popularity and reached a wider audience. K-pop has been described as a blend of different music genres, such as pop, hip-hop, R'n’B and electronic music. However, there was Korean popular music before the rise of K-pop and not all popular music in Korea is K-pop. Using data from Spotify at the track level and exploratory data analysis tools, the paper provides an empirical analysis of the characteristics of Korean popular music since the 1990s and compares K-pop and related genres with Anglo-American pop genres in terms of acousticness, danceability, energy, speechiness and valence. While K-pop is close to the dance pop genre through its danceability, it has on average more energy and cheerfulness than Anglo-American pop. There is also more diversity in Korean popular music than suggested by the K-pop phenomenon. Finally, as K-pop became more successful, it did not become more similar in its audio features to Anglo-American pop.

The global music market has witnessed the rapid rise of Korean pop music, K-pop, in recent years. While there has been an increased interest of scholars from various disciplines to account for the global success of K-pop, limited attention has been paid to the key players in the industry, music businesses. Based on a historical analysis of Korea’s music industry, we contend that the innovative production system of Korea’s music businesses has played a significant role in facilitating K-pop’s global success. In order to provide theoretical support to the argument, this paper critically reviews the existing literature to present debates on (i) the process of how value is created in distinctive stages in the music industry; (ii) cooperative and competitive interactions between firms within the music industry; and (iii) changes in the music industry’s competitive environment.

There are a number of voices who blame digitization for having a number of negative effects on the music industry including a decline in album sales, copyright infringement, unfair royalty payments, and competition with foreign multinationals. Yet, the global emergence of Korean pop music or K-pop suggests a different narrative, particularly given that its growth was largely unexpected among industry experts. Understanding the key to its international breakthrough can thus produce meaningful lessons for the music industries of other countries for their own further take-off. This constitutes the focus for this paper. Digitization has influenced various sectors of the Korean music industry such as business, society, and consumers. It has also transformed the management focus of the industry from analog to digital, from offline to online, from albums to songs, from specialization to integration, from domestic providers to international suppliers, from audio sound to visual images, from possessing to accessing, and from limited integration to synergistic network. This signifies that embracing technology advancement can enhance the competitiveness of cultural industries.

In the early 2010's, the expansion of South Korean popular culture around the world is led by popular music, usually known as K-pop. In this paper I seek to answer two questions. First, what are the sources of its success beyond the South Korean national border? Secondly, what does it say about contemporary South Korean society and culture? [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This article introduces readers to the musical, cultural, and linguistic foundations of Korean pop music (K-pop) by exploring its historical development, vocal aesthetics, and unique pedagogical considerations. Through the lens of K-pop singer and voice teacher Jamon Maple, whose artistic journey spans K-pop, gospel, R & B, and Western classical styles, the article examines cross-genre technique, the role of language in vocal identity, and approaches for helping students perform with authenticity. Practical strategies are offered for navigating K-pop vocal production and performance practices, equipping singing teachers to meet the needs of a diverse and evolving student population.

The present study took the Indian population as the sample for studying the differences in consumers and non consumers of Korean content and males and females in their body image. Body image has commonly been linked to Korean content as much emphasis is given to visuals in Korean media leading to potential harm to body image perception among viewers. A sample of 200 was taken which was divided into males and females and consumers and non-consumers of Korean content. To study the body image, MBSRQ-AS was used. The scores of each dimension of the test were analysed using two-way ANOVA and the Mann-Whitney U test. The results showed that gender and Korean content consumption did not impact the appearance related dimensions, However, those who were viewing Korean content showed significantly less body area satisfaction, high overweight preoccupation, and self-classified weight. In conclusion, Korean content consumption is impacting weight-related aspects of body image. This research will be helpful for counsellors to understand potential precipitating factors for disorders like body dysmorphia.

Korean popular music (K-pop) has expanded its cultural reach among Western audiences over the past 20 years (Lie, 2015), and groups like BTS and BLACKPINK have achieved unprecedented global success recently (McIntyre, 2022). As K-pop evolves into a global cultural export, scholars have paid more attention to the code-mixing of English within its lyrics (Yeo, 2018; Ahn, 2021).