Rise of Korean Pop Music and the Resurgence of the Mega-Pop Group
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.
Coachella will be taking place over the course of two weekends in April. The line up will be the same for both weekends. Check out the full line up below.
Night 1 April 13 & 20
The Black Keys
Swedish House Mafia
Pulp
Refused
Arctic Monkeys
Mazzy Star
Afrojack
Explosions in the Sky
M83
Amon Tobin
Cat Power
Madness
Jimmy Cliff
Tim Armstrong
Girls
Rapture
Madeon
M. Ward
Horrors
Frank Ocean
James Alesso
Sebastien
Yuck
Neon Indian
Dawes
Black Angels
Deathgrips
Wu Lyf
Breakbot
Atari Teenage Riot
Feed Me
Givers
Other Lives
Band of Skulls
R3hab
Wolfgang
Midnight Beast
EMA
Ximena Sarinana
Kendrick Lamar
The Dear Hunter
Honeyhoney
Hello Seahorse!
Sheepdogs
LA Riots
Night 2 April 14 & 21
Radiohead
Bon Iver
The Shins
David Guetta
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
Kaskade
Miike Snow
Jeff Mangum
Sebastian Ingrosso
Andrew Bird
Feist
Firehose
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
St. Vincent
Martin Solveig
Subfocus
Sbtrkt
Flying Lotus
Manchester Orchestra
Kasabian
AWOL Nation
Azealia Banks
Squeeze
A$AP Rocky
Buzzcocks
Kaiser Chiefs
Destroyer
The Head and the Heart
Laura Marling
Tuneyards
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
Black Lips
The Big Pink
Childish Gambino
The Vaccines
Zed’s Dead
Grouplove
Jacques Lu Cont
We Were Promised Jetpacks
Gary Clark Jr.
Borgore
Dragonette
We Are Augustines
Mt. Eden
Destructo
Suedehead
Keep Shelley in Athens
Pure Filth Sound
Night 3 April 15 & 22
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
At the Drive-In
Justice
Florence and the Machine
AVICII
La Roux
Beirut
The Weeknd
Girl Talk
The Hives
DJ Shadow
Calvin Harris
Nero
Wild Flag
Modeselektor
Dada Life
Porter Robinson
Santigold
Flux Pavilion
Dr. P
Gotye
Seun Keti
Egypt 80
Beats Antique
Fitz and the Tantrums
Araabmuzik
Company Flow
Real Estate
Zed
Le Bucherettes
Greg Ginn
The Growlers
Noisia
Morgan Page
Gaslamp Killer
First Aid Kit
Oberhofer
Lissie
Thundercat
Metronomy
Wild Beasts
Housse de Racket
Fanfarlo
Spector
Gardens & Villa
Airplane Boys
Sleeper Agent
BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER JIM MCCARTHY Thu Nov 10, 2011
Everybody has a concert story. Whether it’s lifting Wayne Coyne aloft in his human-sized gerbil ball at a Flaming Lips show, camping out all night for Springsteen tickets, or being hypnotized by Skrillex’s beats, you’ve probably got a story, too.
Though individuals’ narratives about their concert experiences remain in many ways unchanged, the concert industry itself has evolved over the past 10 or 15 years, because now, it’s overtaking album and record sales (digital or otherwise) as the primary source of revenue for big names in the music industry.
In the past, concerts were little more than promotional appearances for record, tape, or CD sales. Popular artists blew into town, played one underpriced show, which guaranteed a sellout, and created a vacuum of envy among those who couldn’t go. That, in turn, made the unfortunate masses go out and buy those little pieces of plastic or vinyl that enabled them to at least hear their heroes, since they hadn’t been lucky enough to see them in the flesh.
But it’s not like that anymore. Which makes marketing and pricing concerts right critical to the health of the music business overall.
In the early 2000s, people stopped buying those previously lucrative little pieces of plastic and vinyl, or at least, much less than they used to. From 1999 to 2009, sales of recordings in the United States dropped from a little more than $14 billion to just over $6 billion.
Meanwhile, the concert business grew, according to this Live Nation investor presentation and Pollstar data, from about $1.5 billion in 1999 to almost $5 billion in 2009. Numbers on this vary from source to source, but the general trend of the 2000′s is clear: recordings plummeted and concerts soared.
This is what I’ve been telling people for years, and it’s attributable to two different but related things: recordings are so cheap to make now that they’re hardly worth paying for, and people place a higher and higher value on authentic live interaction than ever before. I’ve often told the story of how I paid the same amount of money for a Bruce Springsteen album as I did for a Bruce Springsteen concert ticket in 1985. Today, the concert ticket would cost many times more than the recording, if I chose (as a good citizen) not to steal it.
Long term, concerts along with all other forms of live entertainment have a bright future–but the concert business as it’s currently done isn’t going to cut it.
Over the past few years, ticket prices rose for the reasons I mentioned above–and rightfully so: the live product is the premium product and it had traditionally been underpriced. But the pendulum swung too far in the overpriced direction, especially in concerts, as the acts who were touring stayed pretty much the same.
As late as 2008, the top 10 touring acts were positively jurassic, with an average career launch year of 1986. That’s Hasselhoff in Knight Rider old, not even Hasselhoff inBayWatch old. In 2010, that led to a 15% drop in concert sales, which in turn fueled much wailing and teeth-gnashing. Although 2011 has picked up some of the losses of last year, there’s still a widespread feeling that concerts aren’t on a steady footing.
Why should things feel so shaky when the long-term trend is pointing the right way? Because the business model of the first decade of this century is dying, because it’s a lousy business model. Big bucks, big venues, big (old) acts, and high stakes is a loser. Do you really think Fleetwood Mac is going to be pulling down $150 a ticket in 2020?
Instead, the concert business needs to rethink itself to capture the favorable long-term shift of consumers wanting to see the live shows.
To do this, the business needs to do at least these three things:
First, the business needs to get better at audience development.
Let’s say that you are the manager of a band. You’ve got at least some faithful fans, and then you’ve got people who don’t care about your band. You should run your business in a way that not only pleases the faithful, but increases the number of the faithful. Running a Super Bowl ad for an upcoming performance might sell a few tickets, but the people who buy probably won’t buy again. Likewise, if your marketing is focused only on the guys and gals who already stand in line on a cold night to see you, you’re probably not in for much growth there either. Delight and honor the faithful every day, but then look for places where you’re likely to find more people like them and then reach those people with your work.
Fans of a similar band? People who like skateboarding, are between the ages of 18 and 30 and live in the three markets where most of your fans live? Friends of your current fans? All good places to start, but the point is to look for the next ring of faithful fans who just haven’t found you yet. Today, concert folks seem to act as though audience development happens automatically. They shouldn’t.
Second, live entertainment venues and promoters have to get much better at yield management.
This is simply the idea that you’ve got to get productivity out of your venues. Airlines, hotels, telecommunication companies, public transportation systems all use yield management, because they have a resource that costs the same to operate (hotel room, airplane, city bus, telephone line) no matter how many people use it. The point is to get people using it as much as possible. In live entertainment, this means getting as much out of each “seat” in a venue as possible.
It’s simple to calculate: just take the total revenue from a given show (or run of shows or tour) and then divide it by the number of “seats” that could have been sold. (It doesn’t have to be literal seats; just the number of admissions that could have been sold at maximum.)
Say there’s a show in a 1000-seat auditorium, and 600 seats were sold at $50 each. That’s $30,000 in ticket sales, divided by 1000 seats, leading to a $30 revenue per seat. Perhaps a venue could make more money on the ticket, so let’s imagine raising the price to $60 and selling 425 tickets. Is this better?
To find out, just calculate the revenue per seat: $60 x 425 is $25,500. That makes the Revenue Per Seat $25.50, so the price increase didn’t help.
The point is that you can tweak the price table to offer different prices so that you’re getting the best revenue per seat possible. Raise? Lower? Offer more varied prices? Only revenue per seat can tell you for sure if you’re getting it right–but almost no one in the industry uses this metric, though they could and should.
Third, get better at “curating.”
How sad is it that U2 is the number one touring band in 2011?
Bing Crosby wasn’t the top tour when I was in high school in the late ’80s, but that’s the equivalent. Yes, U2 is great (so was Bing, for what it’s worth), but people in the concert biz have to find a way to get people interested in a newer, fresher, more varied group of acts if they want to keep the business alive.
Venues bid for the same acts, many of whom are overpriced based on success 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. It’s not sustainable or even particularly healthy.
Venues that can choose what acts play in their buildings have an opportunity to connect directly to an audience. If they’re finding and choosing something distinctive, high-quality, and fun and wrapping it in a great concert-going experience, those venues will succeed and get people coming back just to see what’s happening next. It works for theatres, sports teams, and performing arts. It can work for concerts too, but it takes an eye for something special and a willingness to take some risks along the way.
And somebody with a genius eye for the right acts and the right customer experience stands to get rich and famous figuring it out.
If you’re in or want to be in the concert biz, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that if you want to keep doing things the way they’ve been done for the last decade or so, you’d better hope Congress finds a way to save Social Security. The good news is that the fundamental desire of consumers to go to live events, including different and better music-driven events, is greater than ever, and ripe for change.
(Source www.fastcompany.com)
[Image: Flickr user momaraman]
