Star Management of Talent Agencies and Social Media in Korea

The Korean Wave, also known as the Hallyu, refers to the spread of South Korean culture around the world. The term was coined in China in mid-1999 by Beijing journalists surprised by the fast growing popularity of Korean entertainment and culture in China. Since the late 1990s, hallyu (Korean Wave) has become one of the most frequently used terms in both the popular culture industry and the related academic fields in Asia. The Korean wave is responsible for achieving over one billion dollars in revenue annually for South Korea through cultural exports (Kim, Sue-young, 2008). For further explanation on hallyu, see Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi, “Introduction: East Asian TV Dramas: Identifications, Sentiments and Effects,” in East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, ed. Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 1–12.

Guinness World Records, known until 2000 as The Guinness Book of Records (and in previous U.S. editions as The Guinness Book of World Records), is a reference book published annually, containing a collection of world records, both human achievements and the extremes of the natural world. The book itself holds a world record, as the best-selling copyrighted book series of all time. It is also one of the most frequently stolen books from public libraries in the United States (Wikipedia).

The two key factors empower the current K-pop phenomenon that exemplifies the rapid transformation of the global cultural market and industry landscape. On June 10 and 11, 2011, “SM Town Live in Paris” was held at Le Zenith de Paris concert hall in France. Five K-pop bands from SM stable (TVXQ, SNSD, Super Junior, f(x), and SHINee) held their first concert in a European city and attracted more than 14,000 fans from across Europe. While initially only scheduling one show on June 10, SM were forced to add another after the tickets to the first concert sold out in 15 min, and hundreds of French fans responded in protest via performing a dance flashmob in front of the Louvre Museum. In my earlier studies, I mentioned that K-pop is still marginalized and “it is still very rare to experience Korean popular culture on an everyday basis in any single city outside Asia.” This comment is still true to some degree, the situation is somewhat different in June 2011. The successful SM Town Live in Paris concerts suggest how the global pop market landscape is changing dramatically, and K-pop may cross the cultural borders (between East and West) with ease. Many media commentators have observed how the European fans at the concert were able to sing along to the K-pop songs even though they have not been officially released in Europe. The leader of Super Junior, Lee Teuk, stated, “I think K-pop is gaining popularity thanks to SM’s global system, foreign composers and choreographers, and the singers’ appearances … it was also helped by social networking sites, such as YouTube.” As Lee Teuk clearly identifies here, the globalization and chogukjeok strategies of the Korean entertainment sector and the development of new media technologies have enabled the increasing global circulation of K‐pop (Jung 2011).

Late last year, when a major Korean television station MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Company) initiated a new talent search show, it made a strategic alliance with YouTube. In this sense, it seems that media corporations continue to hold a dominant position into the new media age by having collaboration with active fans (NOH Kwang Woo 2011).

KOSDAQ is an electronic stock market, just like NASDAQ.

1USD = 1,200 Wons

The Korea Composite Stock Price Index or KOSPI is the index of all common stocks traded on the Stock Market Division—previously, Korea Stock Exchange—of the Korea Exchange. It’s the representative stock market index of South Korea, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average or S&P 500 in the U.S.

KOSPI was introduced in 1983 with the base value of 100 as of January 4, 1980. It’s calculated based on market capitalization. As of 2007, KOSPI’s daily volume is hundreds of millions of shares or (trillions of won) (Wikipedia).

In many interviews of research done by Jung (2011), most K-pop artists who have been attempting to enter the global (mainly the English-speaking US) market have confessed that the language barrier is the most difficult part of crossing cultural borders. It appears that the language barrier is an unavoidable obstacle for these marginalized pop products to enter the mainstream. In today’s global market many different languages are spoken, and some find intercultural communication and exchange to present severe difficulties. Breaking the language barrier does not necessarily mean mastering other people’s languages and/or speaking them fluently. From her perspective, breaking the language barrier means accepting BoA’s accented English and engaging a range of different subtitled interpretations of Boys over Flowers. It is obvious that advanced digital media technology accelerates the minimization (if not the outright breaking) of such barriers, which enhances the transcultural flows of the once marginalized pop cultural form, K-pop.