Discourse Roundup

I’ve had a busy few weeks and missed some of the up-to-the moment discourse on here like:

Foreigners Want To Attend Concerts for J-Pop Artists and Can’t Because 1) They Can’t Get Tickets in Japan and 2) Concerts Held Overseas Are Full of Japanese Fans. 

Honestly, yes, and yes. Not for every artist, obviously, and I’ve been welcomed as a clear foreigner at many J-Pop concerts but I’ve also encountered both situations and it sucks. There is no real solution for foreign fans unless you move to Japan, learn Japanese, and get a permanent Japanese address and accompanying ID. There used to be some wiggle room where staff would turn a blind eye when you had paper tickets sold on secondhand sites but now everything is digital. Measures taken to prevent scalpers from reselling tickets at massive markups also inadvertently block the small number of foreigners who want to attend these shows. 

A small pool of tickets could be set aside for people with foreign addresses but I know that when this has been tried before, some Japanese fans complained—loudly.

Unless companies decide it’s worth irritating a number of outspoken domestic fans to accommodate an unknown number of foreign fans traveling from overseas, then we’re just out of luck.

And those of us attempting to see a domestically popular Japanese act overseas will also be dealing with Japanese fans but at least we’re on our home turf and can legally purchase tickets to the event.

The New York Times Best Songwriters List 

I didn’t particularly agree with the list but it did what it was supposed to, which was generate a bunch of discussion (and clicks). So Mission Accomplished?

The NYT music section has joined outlets like Rolling Stone and Billboard in providing good publicity for acts that the majors are pushing. Take everything with a big grain of salt. It doesn’t mean the artists they are pushing are bad but it also doesn’t mean they are necessarily good. Always use your own ears to decide if you like something or not.

If the American Music Awards happened and absolutely nobody cares, did the American Music Awards actually happen?

This is one that’s been rattling around in my head for a while. BTS/K-Pop had a heavy presence at the AMAs this year; is that really what Americans are listening to? 

I know elementary school aged kids listen to Katseye and the KPDH soundtrack, so those would both be a lock for the Kids Choice Awards, but are the majority of Americans listening to “Pinky Up” as they wash dishes or commute or fold laundry? I’m going to say… No. 

Stans love to throw around Spotify metrics but Spotify is not the dominant way that Americans consume audio content. There are about 55 million paid Spotify subscribers in America, a country of about 350 million people. Sure, there are people with free accounts and listening to stuff on YouTube and Apple Music but a lot of people still listen to the regular old ad-supported radio everyday--93% of all American adults according to Nielsen—and the biggest share of that audience (minus the people listening to talk radio) is listening to adult contemporary and country music. We’re talking Ella Langley and Alex Warren and throw in some Morgan Wallen and Teddy Swims (who did appear so that’s at least one for the AMA). 

So, why then did the AMAs feature BTS? 

In my opinion, what has happened over the past 8-9 years is that the American music industry, specifically the pop sector, has stagnated and lost audience share and attempted to bring in K-Pop to boost their numbers with young people. And by doing that they did get a dedicated cohort of new K-Pop fans from around the world who follow these outdated industry events like the AMAs, the Grammys, etc., along with Billboard metrics, as if they’re tracking the cure for cancer. The size of that audience interested in K-Pop is only a small subsection of the mainstream music audience but they are very loud online and make all sorts of online metrics go up.

One of the trends that has been on-going is the growth of catalog music aka old music aka more people in general are tuning into Michael Jackson than are listening to new music. And that’s not good. Much like the IP-farming that has decimated the audience for movies and television coming out of Hollywood, you can only milk these old properties for so long before the audience loses interest and when the old properties are artists who aren’t even with us any more, what is the end point? An industry of hologram acts that travel around putting on “Beatles” concerts and “Michael Jackson” concerts? It certainly feels that we’re trending that way.

But like Hollywood’s IP farming, audiences will move on if they aren’t getting what they want. It’s one reason I started listening to more Asian music to begin with a few decades ago.

Enter BTS. 

As I’ve said in previous posts, I think what happened with BTS post-2017 and the current Hallyu Wave is that BTS was seen as an easy replacement for a boy band market that had been left hungry after the dissolution (“hiatus”) of One Direction. This initial BTS crossover audience was similar to (if not comprising of the exact same individuals in) the 1D audience aka traditional teenage boy band fans as well as the smaller cohort of older women who have long been a part of boy band fandoms. 

BTS’s music of this era also began the turn from the classic sound of cutting edge K-Pop trend chasing to catering to the tastes of these new fans migrating from 1D. BTS’s company studied this new audience and quickly pivoted to including elements of genres like Hillsong, which spoke to a growing audience who vibed with the positive “Love Yourself” messaging (echoing what Harry Styles had done with “Treat People With Kindness” messaging). My Brazilian guest from episode 48 recorded in 2022, even spoke to the pull that this sound and message had specifically with Evangelical Christians…which, to give their company credit, was a brand new audience for K-Pop (even if it did alienate existing fans).

The pandemic artificially extended BTS’s boy band lifecycle but—and this is just what I’ve observed—those teenage fans have now more or less fallen away and the main audience for BTS is women over 40… which is the exact age demographic who fell for and rioted over Bae Yong Joon in Japan in the first Hallyu Wave 25 years ago. In my opinion, you can’t understand either the original Hallyu Wave or the current Hallyu Wave driven by BTS without understanding that the primary audience for this material is older women.

The success of Winter Sonata in Japan was fueled by older women enjoying a nostalgic romance that reminded them of their youth; the success of BTS in America (again, in my opinion) has been fueled by older women re-fighting the cultural battles of their youth on an empty battlefield and claiming victory. What do I mean by that? I mean things like a sweeping victory at the AMAs in 2026 when nobody is watching and nobody cares. Diatribes against critics of “Fan Girls” as if fan girls are an oppressed class who can’t have their behavior critiqued and not one of the primary drivers of pop culture in the Current Era (see also: Heated Rivalry). 

In other words, in my opinion, BTS have essentially become a nostalgia act for an audience trending at least a decade older than them. The NKOTB audience today is also the BTS audience, which is why NKOTB were also playing the AMAs. That is the small sliver of the American audience who cares about things like the AMAs. The big difference between the two acts is that NKOTB comes from an earlier era when singers actually did need to be able to sing and entertainers were expected to entertain.

Judging from concert reports from BTS fans (and people fan-adjacent who I’m friendly with), NKOTB probably don’t need to bother because the Meet-and-Greet Concert Era is here. To quote from Monia’s excellent post: 

Overall, they do a good enough job of contextualizing the issue. But at one point, Lindsay asks what the value of a concert is, because, “I can pay a bunch of money to be really far away from you in a room or I can follow your Instagram stories,” suggesting that social media has replaced the concert experience. But it also suggests the concert experience was never really about live music in the first place, as while describing pre-social media concerts, Lindsay says they were “a chance to be in the same room as an artist and feel like you’re closer with them.”

Well then.

Rolling in the Hallyu Moms, doubling down on emptying wallets for Meet-and-Greet concerts, and going all in on IP-farming nostalgia acts may keep things chugging along and making the right people money for now. We’ll see if it’s sustainable.