Idol factories turned Korean rap-dance into global export
K-pop—Korean popular music—crystallized in 1990s youth culture via Seo Taiji and Boys rap-dance fusion, then Lee Soo-man's idol system spawning H.O.T. and S.E.S. BTS and Blackpink drove 2019 top-six market rank; training costs hit three million dollars per SM trainee.
The sound took shape in the early 1990s, when Seo Taiji and Boys mixed hip-hop, techno and rock and won over teenagers so completely that the industry reorganised around young listeners. Later that decade Lee Soo-man of SM Entertainment built a system for manufacturing idols, launching H.O.T. and S.E.S. as the first generation. By the early 2000s TVXQ and BoA were succeeding in Japan, and in the 2010s the Korean Wave and social media carried the genre worldwide. In 2020 the domestic market grew a record 44.8%, faster than any other major market that year.
The name seems to have first appeared in print in Billboard on 9 October 1999, in a piece by correspondent Cho Hyun-jin, who is not sure he invented it. Inside Korea, local pop is still widely called gayo, and in 2022 the Korean Music Awards gave K-pop a category of its own, describing it as performance-driven dance-pop from the idol system. France's national audiovisual institute sums the style up as synthesised music, crisp choreography and bright fashion, while some academics stretch the term back to Korean songs of the 1930s.
Would-be stars are found through agency auditions, online tryouts or street casting, then sign binding contracts, sometimes as children, and live together while drilling singing, dancing and languages. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that SM spent about $3 million on average to train a single idol, and Western outlets often describe the regime as robotic. New acts arrive with a name and a concept, cute or fantasy for instance, promoted through showcases, teaser photos and YouTube videos, and every fresh single's campaign is called a comeback even when nobody took a break.
On stage, members trade places in rapid synchronised formation changes, and point choreography repeats one hooky move tied to the lyric, as in Super Junior's Sorry Sorry. English has spread quickly: no top-fifty act in 1990 used an English name, fourteen did by 1995 and forty-one by 2010, helped by the end of censorship of English lyrics after the 1997 financial crisis. Four agencies, SM, YG, JYP and Hybe, dominate, and critics fault the business for commercialism and its handling of artists, though the 2020s have brought more artist freedom and overseas-made groups such as JO1 and Katseye.
Source: K-pop
