How ‘Gangnam Style’ stormed the music world
A Korean rapper Psy’s music video is very phenomenal all over the world. His music video is gaining huge popularity on youtube and its youtube hits are over 250,000,000. His song even placed first on the US iTunes music video chart. Music lovers all over the world fell in love with Psy’s Gangnam Style. They began singing along with the song and dancing the horse-riding dance together. Gangnam Style flashmob event was held in LA and many different places, even in Cornell. His video was shared on the internet by numerous celebrities such as, T-Pain, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and Tom Cruise. Thanks to his music video, Psy was invited to the MTV video Music Awards and performed his dance alongside comedian Kevin Hart. He also performed in the Dodgers stadium in front of 43,000 baseball fans. Psy also featured on the Big Morning Buzz live show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, NBC’s morning programs, and Saturday Night Live, performing and teaching his ‘horse back riding dance’.
There are numerous aspects we can view this phenomenon; I want to focus it on how Psy, as a normal Korean rapper, could become globally popular by shared interest through the internet and the celebrities within 70 days. In the past, many Korean pop idols strove to spread their music in foreign countries. Although they have gained their fame and become known in Korea, most of them failed make themselves to become popular in foreign countries. (maybe except for some Asian countries) Therefore, most of Korean pop music stayed in the country. Many people listened to English pop/rock songs globally, but K-pop was just another big component which Americans/Europeans did not have interest in. Perhaps Korean pop has been remained somewhat isolated from the rest of the World. The celebrities and people online disseminated the music video to the western culture. These celebrities and people online became ‘bridges of large various components’, connecting Korea to countries all over the World. Celebrities are hot spot of the component, because many people are interested in what they are doing so celebrities have a lot of edges connected to many different nodes. So is online users such as in facebook; they share a post to their friends online, which are usually more than 500 people, and they see the clip right away because it is very obvious in the news feed section. People turn on videos that their friends have posted because it is reliable and seeing videos online is very quick and easy. A single person online might be powerless but a mob can actually influence people’s interest. The spread of media accelerated due to the rhythm and dance of the song; the internet made it possible for the music video to be liked by 250,000,000 people within 70 days. Once the music video took the right path, it spread everywhere. Of course, the song itself is also addicting but we can never disregard the huge influence of celebrities and online. This phenomenon reminded me of the ‘Six degrees of Separation’ which is an idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. This theory explains how small world is and how closely we are connected to each other; therefore, we share information more than what we think of.
http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2012/09/21/south-koreas-viral-export-gangnam-style/tab/video/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style