Abstract
There are a number of voices who blame digitization for having a number of negative effects on the music industry including a decline in album sales, copyright infringement, unfair royalty payments, and competition with foreign multinationals. Yet, the global emergence of Korean pop music or K-pop suggests a different narrative, particularly given that its growth was largely unexpected among industry experts. Understanding the key to its international breakthrough can thus produce meaningful lessons for the music industries of other countries for their own further take-off. This constitutes the focus for this paper. Digitization has influenced various sectors of the Korean music industry such as business, society, and consumers. It has also transformed the management focus of the industry from analog to digital, from offline to online, from albums to songs, from specialization to integration, from domestic providers to international suppliers, from audio sound to visual images, from possessing to accessing, and from limited integration to synergistic network. This signifies that embracing technology advancement can enhance the competitiveness of cultural industries.
Highlights
In recent years, a number of voices in the music industry have blamed online streaming services like Spotify (Stockholm, Sweden) and YouTube (San Brino, CA, USA) for having a negative effect globally on the music business
This would suggest that the emergence of K-pop in the global market needs to be understood better in terms of the key factors behind its international popularity and their implications that can be useful for other music industries
This paper links digital technology to the music industry and focuses on identifying the key elements that have fostered the digital transformation of the Korean music industry, which has resulted in the global emergence of K-pop
Summary
While K-pop has been around for some time The absolute number is meaningful, the analysis can be different if we consider the number of views per person and per youngster of each country as they are more likely to be the consumers of K-pop; in other words, data for Columns [d] and [e] are more important than those of Column [a] for a fair comparison Such an approach is used due to great contrasts among population sizes and demographics around the world which on its own does not accurately reflect the real popularity of K-pop. In this respect, using data for 2011 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea [20], the ratio of Korean diaspora in each region’s population appears to be around 0 percent Among these regions, North America has the highest diaspora population which is 0.666 percent of the total population, while Oceania, Europe, Asia (excluding China, Japan, and Korea), South America, and Africa all reach close to 0 percent. This paper will comprehensively cover all of these four segments in depth, which will help to broaden the understanding of K-pop’s international popularity
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