Essay On Korean Pop Culture

Ma. Kimberly Anne V. Poquiz

Professor Motoike

English 1 – Section 1808

20 May 2014

Korean Pop Music Globalization

In October 2009, Wonder Girls, a South Korean girl group, became the first Korean singers to enter the Top 100 of the Billboard’s Chart with their hit song “Nobody” and ranked 76th place. This is a big deal for them since the Billboard Hot 100 is one of the two leading music charts is the United States of America. And recently, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the most “liked” and viewed YouTube video of all time currently garnering almost 2 billion views. He also became the first artist from East Asia to top the United Kingdom Charts. This video became so viral that you could search for more than a million dance and song covers from different countries all over the world. These Korean songs became worldwide hit songs because of social media. Korean music industries are focusing on using social media as a medium to reach the global fame that it is enjoying today.

Korean Pop music, also known as K-Pop, has been struggling to enter the global music scene but was able to make it because of social media. Dal Yong Jin explains that K-Pop has undergone a huge shift in late 2007 due to the advancement of social media. Korea has also made innovations in social networking sites (SNS) and smartphones which played a role to the globalization of K-Pop (6). For the past decades, Asian music, including K-Pop, finds it difficult to enter the global scene because it is completely dominated by Western culture. Artists have always viewed United States of America and Europe as the ideal place to promote their music. However, getting to the global market is difficult for artists who don’t have enough money to promote themselves overseas. Be...

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...sharing engine that will disseminate its contents globally, it wouldn’t have reached the popularity that it has attained today. Social media has given people the capability to have more power to choose what they want to hear or watch online. They won’t be any time when updates on their newsfeed about a movie that they’re not interested on will pop out. There will also be no more listening songs to the radio that they don’t like. People are now becoming more responsible of themselves. If they would want to become famous and they have the talent, they could upload up videos online and endorse themselves on social media. Just like the strategies that K-Pop has made by using social media as their main promoting device and by making sure that they are being distinct from other music genre that people are used to listening, success won’t be that far to reach anymore.