Good luck to Hybe India
In the middle of founder Bang Si-Hyuk’s on-going legal problems, Hybe has announced the opening of a subsidiary in Mumbai, India. I'll let the Korea Times explain why:
India also boasts one of the world’s largest music streaming markets. According to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the country has more than 185 million streaming users, making it the second-largest market after the United States.
Demand for K-pop in particular has been soaring. A report by the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange found that between 2018 and 2023, K-pop streaming in India grew by 362 percent. Analysts attribute the surge to rising internet and smartphone penetration, as well as improved access to global streaming services.
The overall market size adds to the allure. A report released in April by the Korea International Trade Association estimated India's digital media industry revenue at 13 trillion won ($9.3 billion) in 2024, with this year's figure expected to hit 15 trillion won.
Unlike North America and Southeast Asia, India also remains relatively untapped by Korean entertainment firms, making it one of the last frontier markets for expansion.
Wow, a 362% increase in K-Pop streams and an untapped market!
Viewing the market only through metrics, I understand why Hybe thinks India would be a good place to sink their hooks into. Not only has there been an influx of fans from India into K-Pop spaces but the global English-language desi clickbait content mill has become a reliable purveyor of K-Pop--and specifically Hybe--mediaplay. A quick Google search pulls up articles from all the desi news sites I used to scan during my Bollywood blogging days: Pinkvilla, Times of India, Rolling Stone India, and even Filmfare, which now has an entire “Korean” vertical! We’ve come a long way from the days of Gangster: A Love Story.
But it’s not all sunshine and streaming users in the target demo [from the same article linked above, emphasis added]:
But insiders also caution that the opportunity comes with steep challenges.
"India has long been seen as a risky bet because its domestic entertainment industry, led by Bollywood, is so dominant," said one Korean music industry official, who spoke to The Korea Times on condition of anonymity.
"But with K-pop artists now more active globally, entry might have become easier than before. At the same time, Korea will need to pay close attention in respecting India's cultural diversity."
See, I suspect that Hybe does not quite understand the complexities of the market they are going to attempt to enter because “dominant entertainment industry” in the singular is a fundamental misreading of the market they’re going into and attempting to navigate India’s “cultural diversity” as an outsider is like taking a Sunday stroll through an active mine field.
These days Bollywood operates not as the “dominant entertainment industry” in India but rather as a global purveyor of desi entertainment to a global desi diaspora. Like Seoul with K-Pop, Mumbai has become a cultural export hub for Hindi-language #content.
I have an entire series on Bollywood for Beginners for the curious but for the purposes of this post, what’s important to keep in mind is that:
Indian cinema culture is as old as Hollywood and evolved parallel to it. As a result of how the format evolved, Indian music industries and movie industries are intertwined in a very unique way. This doesn’t mean that non-film music doesn’t exist but popular music (the genre Hybe would likely attempt to piggyback off of) is still heavily intertwined with film music.
Instead of considering singer-songwriters the basis for pop music, film music has multiple participants. There’s the actual singer (or “playback singer”), the music directors (who are credited with the music and lyrics to the songs), and then you have the actors who are the face of the songs as they lip sync/dance. Actors aren’t expected to sing well (or at all) but playback singers absolutely are expected to be able to sing.
What’s been interesting to observe over the past decade plus or so is that as Bollywood turns more to a globalized diaspora audience, there are fewer and fewer lip synced songs but there are still songs because that is how popular music is distributed. Even 15 years ago you would have likely seen a song like “Pehle Bhi Main” lip synced by the lead of the film but in today’s Bollywood it’s done as a montage.
The montage is creeping South as well but the lip sync song is still going strong in the domestic-facing industries. Sitting at almost 700 million views right now is “Kurchi Madathapetti” from the Telugu language film Guntar Karaam (2024):
India is extremely diverse and there isn’t one “dominant entertainment industry” but, rather, multiple, regional, entertainment hubs. Explaining the political conflict over “Hindi” and the North-South divide would take forever so just know that it exists. As the Hindi-language industry operating out of Mumbai has become more focused on the global export market, the regional industries have stepped up to become even more dominant in their local markets. Bollywood hasn’t produced a truly pan-Indian superstar since the days of the Three Khans. Here’s a visual representation of what that looks like:
Yes, the top five highest grossing films in India of all time and not one of them came out of the Hindi-language film industry in Mumbai.
Do you notice the Oscar-winning RRR on that list? That’s because RRR came out of the Telugu film industry in Hyderabad.
Outsiders to these desi markets (including the diaspora market) have typically not understood how these markets work nor the audiences they are trying to appeal to. And adding global capital distorts things even further. There’s a host of big time floppers left behind from global capital as it attempted to enter Bollywood. I witnessed these in real time--Saawariya, Roadside Romeo, etc. Hybe would be following in the path of Sony, Warner Bros, etc. only without the liquid capital those massive corporations had to throw around. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a blog post that lays it all out:
One wonders why? Where big banners like Disney / Warner / Sony / Reliance / SaReGaMa failed, how are individual producers successful?
There are a few crucial points to that:
1. Studio Heads Don’t Know Cinema
Most studio heads in Bollywood are completely cinema illiterate. They all come from management or marketing backgrounds with no clue about the creative aspect of story telling and movie making. If MBAs could make successful movies, we would have IIM graduates running the show. All studio owners and promoters repeated the same mistake – they hired a glib talker instead of people who knew cinema. They all worked on numbers but forgot that the numbers could come only when the “story” was interesting.
Swap “studio heads” for “K-Pop CEO” and “cinema” for “music” see the future of Hybe India laid out in a single blog post.
But the metrics, you might say! A 362% increase!
Sure, okay, a 362% increase.
Here’s something to keep in mind:
India is delivering about the same number of weekly views for BTS on YouTube as South Korea. That’s about 4 million as of the most recent numbers. Great, you might think, except that India has 1.4 billion people and South Korea has 51 million, meaning the proportion of listeners is infinitesimal compared to population.
Film music credits don’t map directly to Western metadata but here’s a few names to look at from YouTube.
Music Director Anirudh Ravichander (Tamil language) at 73 million weekly in India.
Playback singer Ramu Rathod (Telugu language) at about 15 million weekly in India.
Stalwart music director A.R. Rahman (Tamil/Bollywood) at 47 million weekly in India.
Rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh at 56 million weekly in India.
Bhangra artist Diljit Dosanjh (Punjabi language) at 30 million weekly in India.
Even putting aside what we know about mass streaming for K-Pop content, that 4 million weekly views is very small potatoes compared to household names like Anirudh Ravichander.
Yes, but growth potential, you might say.
Okay, sure, but how and where?
K-content has actually been present in India since at least the second wave (early-mid-2000’s) in places like Manipur, located in the far northeast of India, that are culturally more similar to other East Asian countries.
In my observation, the current wave of K-content hitting English-speaking India (and the diaspora) was received via BTS’s boost of popularity in the United States post-2018 and the audience is similar to that same demographic in America/the West (middle aged women and boy band fans). It’s different to—for example—the wave of K-content that hit places like Kazakhstan (or, indeed, Manipur) in the late 2000s/early 2010s which was much more East Asian (trend-forward and teenager-friendly).
There are two directions that Hybe could be going as they attempt to set up shop in Mumbai: 1) the domestic market or 2) the export market. Both are problematic for a K-Pop company.
For one thing there is a very shallow history of non-film music pop music out of India, let alone of boy groups/girl groups (e.g. A Band of Boys/F4) that are Hybe’s stock-in-trade. We can see what a Hindi-language attempt at a girl group a la Fifth Harmony would look like with W.i.S.H., the brain child of Mikey McCleary.
They’re sitting about 400k weekly views from India, with Delhi being the top city.
You also have the attempt of AKB48, the Japanese idol empire, to enter India pre-pandemic with DEL48 and MUM48. To be fair, the pandemic didn’t help their launch but there really didn’t seem to be much domestic interest in this group.
It’s very possible that India simply doesn't want this type of pop group and that the appeal of K-content to the audience that’s consuming it (by my observation, middle aged women and boy band fans) are latching on to something that isn’t music.
A few years ago I wrote a response to a truly ridiculous article in Rolling Stone India about how BTS supposedly challenges traditional masculinity because they wear make-up and care about skin products. Meanwhile, over in Korea, if you tell Korean women that any Korean celebrities are “challenging traditional masculinity” you’ll likely be laughed at. There’s a reason that “disappointed K-Drama fan arrives in Korea and meets real Korean men” is a growing genre of #content.
I witnessed this with Western fans of Shahrukh Khan back in the 2000s and early 2010s when I was active in Bollywood spaces. The sensitive, romantic image that is exported out to the world is not the lived reality for the women of the country. There’s an element of fantasy that’s able to be sustained when you consume the content of another culture—an element that is impossible to sustain when the idols are taken from your own community. You might be able to project a sensitive lover boy image onto Rap Monster because you don’t know Rap Monster or any men like him but the same degree of fantasy can’t be sustained when the idol could be your neighbor’s son and you’ve seen him and his buddies Eve Teasing girls walking out of their college.
In other words, I suspect any attempt at a desi idol group would be DOA—unless it’s done for export. My suspicion for Hybe India, if they manage to produce anything before imploding, is that they’ll attempt to produce a girl group like Katseye but desi--by which I mean something targeted at the global K-Pop marketplace but not Korean. And I don’t envy the girls who sign up to participate, having heard some chilling behind-the-scenes stories of what women have to put up with in the Indian entertainment industry.
Anyhow, good luck to Hybe and attempting to dazzle the country that gave us Superstar Rajinikanth.
I’ve been watching K-Pop videos for over twenty years and I’ve still never seen anything to compete with the over-the-top songs of Indian cinema.