Internationally, dance studios in Singapore for example offer classes that teach K-pop moves. Somboonsub says she’s visited Seoul to watch the weekend “street dance” by thousands to choreographed K-pop songs. “The rhythm, the sound - there’s a lot more sound engineering involved,” Somboonsub, who performs K-pop songs, said.ĭance routines by groups like nine-member Girls’ Generation, is also a big hit among fans. Thai native Tan Somboonsub, 31, who’s been following Korean television dramas and music for the past 10 years, says the K-pop sound has transformed in the past decade. “Lately we’ve been recording in English, Korean and Japanese for them, we really try to release one for every market.” We have other nationalities practicing on the road,” the former musician said. “There’s a Thai guy in 2PM, he’s really popular in Thailand. The executive manager of one of South Korea’s biggest K-pop production companies, who wished to remain anonymous, says producers try to recruit international artists to broaden their fan base. “It actually is rooted in the Western pop genre, but at the same time the Korean pop industry brought that Western pop element into Korea and localized and made it something unique by mixing it with other elements,” she said. K-pop’s similarities to American pop, hip hop, R&B and European electronic music genres makes it more appealing to Western audiences as the bands start to target global audiences, according to NUS’s Jung. “We’re seeing very rapid growth recently.” “If you look at the past six months, K-pop sales in iTunes have tripled,” Yang said. Seoul based Sean Yang, CEO of music service provider Soribada which started distributing K-pop to iTunes and Amazon three years ago, says demand for the music really started picking up last year. “Sometimes there are translations, also they’ve got captions.” “Sometimes it’s the rhythm that’s nice and sometimes you watch the video and it makes sense,” Ng said. Ng, who’s Singaporean and doesn’t speak Korean, says watching the videos online makes it easier to understand the songs. K-pop fan Daren Ng, 26, says he first discovered the genre on YouTube four years ago and then started downloading the music and attending concerts. The views have jumped three-fold since 2010. According to a report by YouTube, K-Pop video clips were viewed nearly 2.3 billion times in 235 countries in 2011. Online social networks are the biggest medium that K-pop fans around the world use to follow their favorite bands. Internet and social media technology kind of enhance those flows.” “It’s very significant how Korean language K-pop is popular somewhere like South America and European countries. “People can share, distribute and consume foreign pop cultures much more easily these days,” Jung said. ![]() Sun Jung, Research Fellow at National University of Singapore (NUS), who’s been studying the emergence of Korean culture in Asia since 2003, says it’s no surprise the K-pop phenomenon is growing so rapidly globally, because social media has made the music more accessible. Exports have been growing on an average annual rate of nearly 80 percent since 2007. K-pop’s exports also rose to $180 million last year - jumping 112 percent compared to 2010. ![]() ![]() The industry’s revenues hit about $3.4 billion in 2011, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), a government group that promotes the country’s cultural initiatives. These “manufactured” girl and boy bands are creating a frenzy among their young fans by selling out concerts within minutes worldwide, breaking through billboard music charts and even being featured on postage stamps in Korea. With their synthesized bubble-gum pop sound, flashy outfits and video art, K-pop groups such as Girls’ Generation, Big Bang and 2NE1 are carefully-selected, slickly-produced acts that can feature as many as 17 members. She is one of millions of K-pop fans around the world who aren’t letting a language barrier stand in the way of consuming what is becoming a major global powerhouse in the music scene. Despite the release of English versions of several K-pop songs, Tianadi says she prefers the Korean version even though she doesn’t understand most of the lyrics.
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