translated from Spanish: K-pop: why is South Korea interested in promoting it?

On November 3rd, the MTV European Music Awards were presented in Seville. Three artists were the biggest winners with two awards: American singers Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, and South Korean band BTS. Although the Spanish media were focused on Rosalía and Becky G – the Spaniard took an award and the American, none – The boy band of Korean Pop (K-pop) won the Best Live Performance and Best Fans.
Not for nothing, in 2018 it was the second most played music group on Spotify, behind only Imagine Dragons, and the second most popular artists globally, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
However, the K-pop industry is not free from ruthless competitiveness, lack of privacy and suicide from those singers who do not stand the pressure. The latest K-pop fatality is young Goo Hara, who was found dead in her Seoul apartment on Sunday.
The “Korean Wave”
There is no doubt that K-pop has made its way into the global music industry, including European and American music, since the beginning of the decade. For many Westerners, the first touch-up with this musical style was in 2012 through the music video “Gangnam Style”, by Korean rapper PSY.

Despite not understanding the lyrics of the song, Western audiences were hooked by its fun choreography and catchy rhythm – we later learned that it referred to Seoul’s most exclusive neighborhood. Although PSY’s fame has declined, today it is his compatriots of the Bands Blackpink, BTS and EXO who fascinate the global public.
Music is certainly playing a prominent role in opening Korea up to the world, politically and economically speaking.
Since 1981 the growth of the South Korean economy had only a brief halt during the Asian crisis of 1997-1998. From the 1960s ones, its economic development was based on industrialization by promoting government-driven manufacturing exports.
However, competition became very arduous in exporting manufactured goods with China’s entry into the world market, and since the 1990s, the South Korean government has been emphasizing the information technology industry and audiovisual and musical services, closely linked to Korean democratization.
The “Korean wave”, or hallyu, was born, consisting of the expansion of television series (K-Dramas), manhwa (Korean comics) and K-pop. It first expanded in Southeast Asian markets and, from the success of “Gangnam Style”, to Western markets and even the Middle East.
Percentage growth in South Korea’s real GDP. World Bank, Author providedThe soft power of K-pop
K-pop’s contribution to the South Korean economy is not based solely on the rights to albums and concerts, but also on tourism, the Korean language and the sale of merchandising.
Fans travel to the country to attend concerts, get to know the filming locations of music videos and the favorite establishments of their idols. Demand for Korean courses has skyrocketed thanks to fans’ desire to understand the lyrics of the songs, so the South Korean government has established 130 institutes in 50 countries for this purpose. Considering that Korean is not among the ten most spoken languages globally, this is outstanding.

It is the power of soft power, or how a country can be influential and have a global presence by taking hold of sport or culture. In fact, the 1988 Seoul Olympics are considered the beginning of Korean soft power, followed by the 2002 World Cup organization alongside Japan.
The globalization of K-pop
Koreans were clear that their market of 51 million was insufficient to monetize large investments in music groups, unlike in Japan with J-pop, with a market of nearly 150 million fans.
That is why the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism created a department dedicated to the globalization of K-pop, which has never lacked funds to attract the attention of the world’s public, especially the younger.
This generated a cool, adult image for its singers, more appealing to Western audiences than the childish and kawaii, or too friki, appearance of their Japanese colleagues, such as AKB48, Babymetal or the Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, the Japanese Lady Gaga.
In addition, K-pop music groups perform different versions of the same song in multiple languages (English, Japanese or Mandarin Chinese) in order to make them more accessible to foreign listeners, and know how to exploit their musical style through YouTube among billions of people.
This causes the Korean soft power machine to be at full capacity. If the United States, for example, uses, among other things, sport, film and music to generate this international empathy, Korea uses K-pop. In the ranking of the last Soft Power 30 report this country appears in 19th place, ahead of Brazil or China, and rising one post since 2018.
The dark face of K-pop
But it’s not all gold in this plan of globalization through K-pop. This report highlights the bad influence of the Korean music industry dotted with the sex scandal of the nighttime Burning Sun in which two Korean singers were involved.
Goo Hara in 2014. Tail / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SAThe K-pop industry is dominated by only four producers. These companies invest large sums in the formation of potential idols, recruited when they are still teenagers. Your daily training can reach 12 hours a day consisting of solfeo, dance, languages and acting classes. Apart from forcing them to go through the operating room and impossible diets to achieve the ideal of “perfect beauty”, record labels sign very long-term contracts with the singers, which they cannot break without paying a million-dollar fine to compensate for the money invested in their training.
In addition, singers cannot have a private life of their own: contracts forbid them to have a partner and express their political opinions, because Asian fans want to see in them perfect and single models so that they can continue to dream of conquering them. In 2014 there were rumors of the romance between an EXO member and a Girls’ Generation singer. Both had to publicly apologize for having “hurt” the feelings of their fans.
In just three years, four of these idols have committed suicide. The latter have been Sulli, the “rebel” former member of F(x) who took her own life in October after suffering cyberbullying and, this past weekend, Goo Hara, former member of the kara gang.
In her last message on Instagram she appeared lying in bed wishing her followers good night. Hara had a history of depression and had already attempted suicide in May.
In 2017 Kim Jonghyun, SHINee singer and also deceased, left a farewell letter confessing to his long depression since he had become famous.
Eszter Wirth, Professor of International Economics, Universidad Pontificia Comillas
This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original.

Original source in Spanish

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