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The once prevailing myth held among scholars of East Asian Studies that Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, was over has now lost much of its credibility, as Korean TV dramas continue to attract and maintain an impressive audience base in Japan, China, Taiwan, South East Asia, and the Middle East. Particularly interesting is the resurgence of the popularity of Korean pop music not only in Asia but also in Europe and North America as well. This paper discusses the impact of new social media on the sudden explosion of K-pop popularity. We argue that the Korean entertainment industry is now rapidly changing its conventional business model from the audience-based B2C strategy to a new social media-dependent B2B model. In this new model Google through its subsidiary company YouTube acts as a key provider of the new social media market to the K-pop music industry that is now targeting royalty income as its main source of revenue. We use both archival and in-depth interview data to arrive at our conclusion that major Korean K-pop talent agencies, including SM, JYP, and YG, are exploiting a large profit potential through new social media and the B2B model.
Key Words: K-pop, YouTube, SM Entertainment, New Social Media, Hallyu
I. Introduction
When the Korean pop music group Girls' Generation appeared in an Intel advertisement in 2011, holding Intel logos and product symbols, mainstream scholars of Asian Studies were flabbergasted at the shocking revelation. The prevalent myth they had persistently held onto could no longer be validated: Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, is all but dead. In an official email to an author of a Hallyu paper submitted to Asian Studies Review, editor Peter Jackson (2009) wrote:
Both reviewers note that the paper's argument [on Hallyu] is somewhat out of date, and that Winter Sonata has already been significantly studied and written about elsewhere, meaning that the K-wave boom is largely over and the paper needs to be recast in a more historical light.
Without realizing the fundamental reasons for the initial Hallyu boom, which could still be the same catalyst for its continuing popularity, scholars of Asian Studies like Jackson boastfully proclaimed that Hallyu was dead. However, in the same year when Jackson made his ill-conceived and over-reaching...