Rise of Korean Pop Music and the Resurgence of the Mega-Pop Group

By My Nguyen 

The past decade has seen a significant shift in musical formats: from the CD to the MP3, we’ve now become more attuned to the way music is being downloaded. But the most significant power shift has to be once record companies and their clout fell into the hands of the consumer. The wake of the 21st century was, also, greeted by another drastic change in our music listening landscape.

In 2001, it was Steve Jobs and his crew of designers and engineers, who introduced the world to iTunes and the iPod, which went on to immediately shape the way we store and play music. Now it seems like that era is coming to a close. For one, speculation has been made on whether Apple will discontinue the Classic iPod and the iPod Shuffle when press passes were issued for the most recent Apple summit on Oct. 4th and no word was mentioned about the iPod. But the most shocking news of all happened the day after the summit; the date we will all perhaps remember as the day a revolutionary figure in the tech world passed away. Mere months after Steve Jobs’ resignation from Apple was announced, the death of the former Apple CEO is a closing, in many ways, of a chapter within our cultural identity. And with that thought, Steve Jobs will be sorely missed.

It is still a shock to even talk about: Jobs has been a guiding force in the tech world, interceding as Apple’s spokesperson to present to a not easily swayed world a more accessible approach towards music. He has inspired legions of fans as well as critics, but in the long-run it is undeniable that his and Apple’s influence spans the globe. Without his earthly presence, the expectant ‘Now what?’ runs tandem with ‘What’s next?’

Greg Kot reinstated in his music column for the Chicago Tribune, “Turn It Up,” that before Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away last year, he had proclaimed “the end of the PC-centric era of computing.” And that is certainly true, with the emergence of free streaming and music storage sites like Spotify, Amazon Cloud, and Apple’s iCloud, you can now access all your music data with a touch of a button on your cell phone.
According to Prefix Magazine, the online audio distribution platform, SoundCloud is quickly becoming one of the most used MP3 streamers on the internet, and with a reported $50 million in new funding from investors; this should vault the Berlin-based company into possibly conceding in the tech war with Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in the forefront.

Music used to be made up of mainly three components: physical, radio, video. If you could get all those three things working for you, then everything was great. Now there is so much more to consider with the popularity of social media and with these free streaming sites emerging as a sudden fixture within the music industry’s ever-shifting paradigm.

Niche music markets, Korean pop and especially the Asian American music scene’s heavy reliance on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube has seen a dynamic rise in media interest in recent years.

YouTube sensations David Choi and Marie Digby, whose cover songs and original tracks quickly went viral due to word-of-mouth via social networking sites, are now pop stars in their own right – the former singer-songwriter’s songs have appeared on NBC, FOX, VH1, MTV, A&E, E!, Travel Channel, Style, PBS, Food Network, Disney, among others, while the latter has performed at the Lilith Fair and released three studio albums, including one Japanese cover album.

As a Hong-Kong born, US-raised singer songwriter, Jane Lui, like Choi and Digby, has developed a loyal following through her YouTube channel, and was featured on the front page YouTube’s Unsigned Picks in 2009. For her third full-length release, Jane raised over $11,000 in two months thanks to the generosity of her fans to fund 50% of Goodnight Company, a self-released project.

And who can forget the mega-rap group, Far East Movement? Released after signing a major record deal with Cherry Tree Records in 2010, their hit single, “Like a G6,” launched them straight into the limelight. According to NYDailyNews, the band consisting of Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Filipino members born and bred in L.A.’s Koreatown, have waited a long time for this historic moment. Gauging from their party anthem appeal and from their collaborations with popular artists like Mike Posner, Bruno Mars, and Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic, Far East Movement is reported to be the first Asian-American group to break into the mainstream.

But it was only a few years ago that music insiders were reported to be highly hesitant to address Asian-American mainstream music as an actual trend. Despite the split consensus, it looks like other facets within the Asian American music scene are making headlines. Recent coverage from Pitchfork and The Guardian writers that chronicled the rise of the Korean pop wave shows that these two major publications have sniffed out the potential of this growing internet phenomenon.

Korean group Bigbang’s surprise win at the 2011 MTV European Music awards sheds some light on this burgeoning trend. Beating Britney Spears by 58 million votes, it goes to show just how much of a stronghold social media has on music. The Guardian reports that with a smatter of K-pop events throughout the west, the SMTown World Tour – featuring Super Junior, TVXQ and Girls’ Generation – and televised soap operas that can also be found on the net, are paving the way for what is for now deemed as an internet-based phenomenon crossing over into mainstream success.

But what is the likelihood of these K-pop stars reaching the same statuses as the Justin Bieber’s or the Lady Gaga’s of our day?  Soompi, one of the longest-running blogs on the internet that provides extensive coverage on Korean pop culture, disputes the chance of K-pop hitting the big time. According to the pop culture blog, in the same way that Hollywood is painted as the golden standard of movies, the same goes for the music market and its influences. For any K-pop group to achieve the kind of fame that put top acts like Justin Bieber and Britney Spears onto the top Billboard charts – they would have to first make an impression on Americans first.

Yet in the peripheral lies the question whether Asian American music will become mainstream and with the Asian American scene still under its own developmental stages, whether the far-reaches of K-pop becoming a mainstay within our musical landscape is plausible. With no reported historical precedent to compare notes with, it’s hard to gauge how much further international as well as Asian American acts have to go. But there is no denying that K-pop and the Asian American acts of today have come a long way. Out of hearing so little out of this niche group in music to the appearance of Hong Kong-based MC Jin, to the emergence of pop sensation Bruno Mars, and the success story of Far East Movement, there seems to be a newfound hope for the scene. And with fans of K-pop and Korean soap operas’ downright fanatic peddling for the public’s interest, it only seems a matter of time before these underground pop sensations become a part of the predominant scene.