How “Gangnam Style” Went Viral
Yang Hyun Suk says, “This is only the beginning of the PSY phenomenon”
http://www.allkpop.com/2012/09/yang-hyun-suk-says-this-is-only-the-beginning-of-the-psy-phenomenon
The universal language of ‘Gangnam Style’
http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/18/the-universal-language-of-gangnam-style/?hpt=hp_bn11
Yang Hyun Suk discusses his thoughts on Psy’s global success with “Gangnam Style”
The first article features some highlights on YG Entertainment’s strategy in promoting their artists. CEO Yang Hyun Suk stated that YG has been taking advantage of the social networking system to thoroughly prepare for an overseas attack. Different from other agencies in Korea who focused on television music programs and variety show appearance to increase the recognition of their artists, YG invests most of their funds in producing music videos and created an independent YouTube channel and launched a YG Blog so that anyone across the world could very easily get their hands on the songs and MVs of the YG Entertainment artists. Instead of producing only one MV for the title song of an album like most other agencies do, YG produces MVs for a good number of songs from each album.
The potential power of the social networking system today is beyond imagination, as Psy himself said during an interview at the MTV Video Music Awards, “I only made a music video and uploaded it to YouTube. 50 days later I’m here.” This is a phenomenon we had never seen before social networks came into being. Today, Social networks have reached every single corner on the globe, we can get a good sense of this from a statement in the second link, “If you haven’t heard of “Gangnam Style” by now, it’s likely you live under a rock (or at the very least, have no access to the Internet)”. With social networks today, it is possible we can spread our work/thoughts across the globe with a simple finger click. The traditional TV promotions now seem like a limited and regional promotional strategy, much less powerful than the low-cost social networking strategy. It seems that YG Entertainment has very well noticed this over the past few years.
The first link also pointed out another interesting phenomenon, as soon as “Gangnam Style” reached 100 million views on YouTube, the numbers began to increase even more rapidly.” The number of views of Gangnam style did not become stagnant after it hit 100 million, instead, with more and more people in the network having seen the MV, the network branches out to even more people from all the nodes that are constantly added to the network. It is possible that the increase of number of people being reached is exponential.
In the third link, the article mentioned that various celebrities, including Robbie Williams, Justin Bieber, T-Pain, Josh Groban, Britney Spears and Katy Perry, have all tweeted about Gangnam Style. These celebrities can be viewed as powerful nodes in the network who have a massive number of other nodes linked to them. Being noted by these celebrities definitely added a boost to the popularity of Gangnam style.
A simple game theory setup can also be noticed in the context. Let all the entertainment agencies in the world be players of the game. They can either produce a single MV for the title song of an album and focus on the traditional TV promotions or produce multiple higher-quality MVs for different sound tracks in the album and focus on penetrating through social networks. With the first strategy the agencies can gain a decent stable revenue which depends on the number of agencies that choose the first strategy, whereas the agencies that choose the second strategy will have a very low revenue most of the time, say p% of the time, but an explosive amount (100-p)% of the time once one of the MVs they produced went viral over the internet. Suppose q% of the time an agency would choose the first strategy and (100 – q)% of the time an agency would choose the second strategy, we can calculate a Nash Equilibrium for the game with these values.
YG Entertainment has been trying to lower their own p value by choosing talented artists who have unique characters. It seems that the second strategy was a good choice for them after all since they had Psy.