Kpop and the power of Network Affiliation
Kpop has managed to become a relatively mainstream genre of music on a global market. And if that sounds contentious, then it is at the very least a relevant topic in modern international culture. But what makes it so? How did Kpop become well known to a global audience? In comparison to some other soft power exports from other countries, Kpop is relatively young. Anime and “Kawaii culture,” for example, has been around in the US and abroad since at least the 70s, and was developed in an effort to pacify the Japanese culture to tighten relations with the US and other 1st world countries in the midst of the Cold War. Kpop, on the other hand, is a fairly recent phenomenon and lacks the environmental attributes in the likes of the Cold War.
A 2018 article by the South China Morning Post suggests some theories on why Kpop has managed to make a dent on “worldwide fame” while other Asian pop scenes can’t/haven’t. There is domestic incentive to export abroad. In South Korea, large telecom companies and distributors hold a surprisingly large portion of revenue when it comes to domestic music and entertainment. This pushes many Kpop companies to look abroad for profits. On top of this, the Kpop industry has very high costs of production, and so large companies cannot survive off of regional profits alone.
Because there is a high risk when entering foreign markets, Kpop companies make sure to intensely train their artists to be highly adaptable to the foreign market. As the article mentions, “besides working on music-related skills, they’re taught foreign languages… and are put on strict body-shaping regimes and – in some cases – undergo plastic surgery.” While these expensive investments add to the already high costs of production, they seem to be paying off as a fan from Hong Kong believes “Kpop artists are just flat out sexier and hotter” than stars from Hong Kong. On top of this, the article also attributes the South Korean government during the 1998 economic recession funding music and TV dramas to boost tourism and exports.
While these analyses make sense, they do not answer what the actual driving force for Kpop popularity is. I think it is relevant to analyze Kpop with the ideas of social networks in mind. With the rise of the internet and the rapid globalization of information, I believe Kpop has managed to expand their capacities in ways never possible before. The internet connected what used to be large social components and networks with weak ties and local bridges into a much more deeply connected cross-continental network. The internet even allowed for complete strangers to suddenly connect with each other over passion-topics, like Kpop. On top of all of this, international travel has become significantly easier, strengthening the global network. Kpop was able to capitalize on this new interconnectedness and now exports quite heavily with an international market in mind. Interconnectedness affects many more than just Kpop, but I believe what makes Kpop successful is that Kpop agencies are specifically using it to their advantage to export their products on a global stage; Canto-pop is limited and marketed to Hong Kong, and Indonesian-pop is largely limited to and marketed to Indonesia.
I think it is easy to see how potent the internet has become in passing on information when considering the “small world phenomenon.” It has been proven by Stanley Milgrim that even before the internet, the social distance between individuals in a network is fairly short. This is undoubtedly more true today compared to the 60s. Even if people are not friends, or “close” to one another in a network, the rate at which information passes has undeniably gotten faster and more frequent. This would definitely increase exposure, and that matters. So many people are exposed to Kpop in numbers that have not been possible before the internet. And from what we understand about friendships and triadic closure, if two people are friends with one friend, they are likely connected to each other as well. In the context of Kpop exposure, it is likely that in such a system, if friends like or know of Kpop, their friends will likely know or like Kpop as well.
The article claims that a mixture of domestic market restrictions as well as government funding is what led to the rise of Kpop worldwide. However, I believe these are factors and strategies utilized to help make Kpop popular, but not the actual force that made Kpop popular; that was the power of networks.
Inside the K-pop hit machine: how South Korea’s music …https://www.scmp.com › Culture › Music