K-Pop is not popular in America

How popular is K-Pop in America in 2022? Going by my own observations: not very popular. 

Recently on a trip to a domestic tourist trap, my friend and I decided to count markers of “Cool Japan” (anime T-shirts, etc.) against markers of Hallyu. In the end, we lost track of how many anime T-shirts and pins on backpacks we saw but there were only two signs of Hallyu: a middle aged white woman wearing a BTS fan t-shirt and a young teenager with pins of BTS’s chibi characters “Tiny Tan” on his backpack amid the anime pins. No Squid Game T-shirts or K-pop merch to be found. Anecdotally, I can report that my friends with children report that girls at peak boyband infatuation age (12-15) think BTS is cool but older teenagers beyond peak boyband infatuation age (16+) think they are lame. Elementary school girls, in particular, adore Black Pink in a kind of living LOL/OMG doll kind of way. People who keep up (or kept up) with popular culture  are likely to remember the heyday of the previous Hallyu Wave when BigBang were being featured in outlets like (the old) Gawker and everybody remembers “Gangnam Style.”

But let’s define our terms. What do I mean by K-Pop here? I mean Korean pop music that is primarily for export with a target of global consumption. Usually idol music, but not always. And by popular, I mean popular as music and listened to by a wide audience, with a baseline level of name recognition. (Of course, this is with the caveat that America no longer has a single, dominant music culture—if it ever did.)

Articles on K-Pop popularity tend to rely on outdated markers of popularity like the Billboard charts. Here’s Nylon in a 2021 article titled “A Timeline of K-Pop's Rise in America:” 

In 2021, K-pop is no longer niche, but its journey toward mainstream recognition has been a long, bumpy, and unpredictable one. Even as BTS became the first South Korean group to score a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single, the group was surprised to have become household names.

Here’s Rolling Stone in 2018 with an article titled “How K-Pop Conquered the West”: 

[Steve] Aoki points out that the K-pop revolution likely wouldn’t have happened without the streaming revolution: “With streaming, fans now have such a large voice, and that’s how BTS really became a phenomenon — because the fans made it a phenomenon, like with the underground culture of punk and hardcore,” the DJ says. “These guys just crush it. And I think because the fans are making such a big deal, it’s not going anywhere.”

Here’s the Washington Post in 2021 with an extremely dumb “explainer” titled, “Why is K-Pop so Popular?”: 

K-pop labels have found innovative ways to promote their content globally. One of their marketing strategies is to give up copyrights and release songs and albums to stream on YouTube at the same time they become available for purchase, Jin said.

Of the 10 music videos with the most views in their first 24 hours, nine are songs by the K-pop groups Blackpink and BTS, as of July 13. The only non-K-pop song is Taylor Swift’s “ME!” at No. 8.

There are an overwhelming number of these types of articles “explaining” why K-Pop is popular but the proof is never convincing once you dig beneath the headline.

In the examples I pulled, you have as evidence: a Billboard number one, anecdotal fan enthusiasm, and global streaming numbers.

Here’s the problem with these metrics in our Current Era: the Billboard charts have proven to be easily gamed by fans and record companies, global streaming numbers for K-Pop music videos represent global fans mass streaming, and “fan enthusiasm” is anecdotal by nature—I can just as easily pull out examples of teenagers thinking K-Pop is incredibly lame. 

South Korea, home of K-Pop,  is very aware of the problems of mass streaming, to the point that their biggest streaming platform MelOn, instituted rule changes to try and keep the unpopular but heavily streamed idol songs from cluttering up the charts and annoying normal listeners. The rule changes—while not perfect—have made an impact, to the extent that in South Korea,  it’s now considered far easier for fans to get their idols a number one on Billboard than on MelOn. 

Streaming parties have been a staple of pop music fans (not just K-Pop fans) for quite a few years (note that Taylor Swift made an appearance among the K-Pop groups in the Washington Post example) and platforms popular in America like Spotify do have some guardrails in place to prevent the easiest types of zombie streaming—such as not counting streams of a song left looped indefinitely or streams of songs with the audio on mute. But fans can and will diligently test out any algorithm changes and adapt their methods, including using having a single fan using multiple accounts to stream at once. A single fan can generate hundreds of streams a day using multiple accounts across multiple platforms. 

But even with those methods, Psy’s recent single release, “That That (prod. and feat. Suga)”, has already fallen off of the Spotify Top 200 in the American chart as fans lost steam with their streaming.

April 29, 2002: #91 336, 517

April 30, 2022: #88 325,032

May 1, 2022: #103 273,823

May 2, 2022: #101 297,260

May 3, 2022: #137 268,531

May 4, 2022: #163 251,785

May 5, 2022: #186 239,564

May 6, 2022: Fallen off the chart

The weekly streams have it ranking in at #114, with almost 2 million streams. This is well below Harry Styles (“As it was” with 12 million streams, released March 31, 2022) and a new release from Future feat. Drake and Tems with 8 million listens.

At the very least I think we can safely say that in America, feat. Suga of BTS is nowhere near the draw of feat. Drake.

And what about the currently popular K-Pop tracks getting streamed by fans in other global markets? The American Spotify chart is completely empty of K-Pop. No G-idle “Tomboy”; no Le Sserafim “Fearless”; no IVE “Love Dive”; and no BigBang “Still Life”.

What about YouTube? The platform the Washington Post would have us believe is a true marker of popularity: 

Since the YouTube charts only show weekly numbers I’ll leave Psy’s global weekly number one out for right now (we can check in on him next week to see how fans have sustained their streaming). Looking at the weekly charts for April, week after week you see names like Lil Durk, NBA Youngboy, Jack Harlow, songs from Turning Red and Encanto, Gucci Mane, and Harry Styles but the only K-Pop representation was BigBang with “Still Life”, the week after release clocking in at #35 with 1.2 million views. Meanwhile the Global YouTube chart has prominent showing from artists like Jessi, BTS, Black Pink, G-idle, and Stray Kids. South Korea was streaming BigBang, Red Velvet, Jay Park, NCT, Taeyon, GOT the Beat, and more. (And Japan is still streaming Kep1er.)

But the typical pattern with K-Pop streams in America is a large showing on day one and then a massive drop off as a not insignificant percentage of fans drift back to their normal lives doing homework or taking care of the kids and stop streaming as heavily. 

Global numbers may be large for some of these K-Pop releases but these large numbers are being generated by a dispersed fandom and one that I would argue is much smaller as a total percentage of music listeners in America compared to countries like Japan and the Philippines. Fans can only mimic broad popularity for a short amount of time because the effort to sustain it is simply too great.

And what about Billboard? User listening habits as well as the Billboard chart algorithms trying to track them have changed so drastically within the last few years that it’s impossible to compare them to years past. 

An example near and dear to a friend’s heart is NSYNC (listen to Episode 37). NSYNC set the record for the most albums sold in the first week with 2.4 million back in 2000 with No Strings Attached. That 2.4 million was physical albums that had to be purchased at a store. We’re talking drive-to-the-mall, wait-in-line, and hope that Sam Goody still had a copy in stock. When Adele broke their record in 2015 with 3.38 million copies of 25, fans could order the album with a click of a button online without even leaving the comfort of their couches. It’s apples and oranges but there’s no denying both albums were hugely popular. 

Streaming was already gaining popularity in 2015 when Adele released 25—although she didn’t put her album on Spotify—but streaming has now become the dominant way Americans consume music. The iTunes glory years are long over although hold outs like me will still buy mp3s on the site for personal use (my last purchase was Onew’s excellent album Dice) but Billboard has not quite kept pace with the changing listening habits of the public. The chart assigns an outsized weight to sales of physical albums and mp3s, which record companies (as well as K-Pop fans) have seized on as a loophole to get their chosen acts to the top of the charts. Billboard did crack down on the practice of bundling (giving away an album with purchase of a concert ticket or item of merch) in 2020 but they left in place rules that allowed record companies to put out endless “remixes” that fans could then bulk buy (4 per song per account, leading to a single fan being able to contribute something like 24 or 48 mp3 sales in one transaction) and push the original track up the charts, as well as a rule that says 10 mp3s = one album equivalent unit. If your album has 15 tracks on it and fans buy each one separately, each album counts for 1.5 “album equivalent units”. Neat trick, right? NYSNC and Michael Jackson didn’t have those cheat codes.

When K-Pop fans sent BTS’s “Butter” to the top of the Billboard HOT 100 in 2021 and managed to hold it there for a few weeks, they unintentionally shone a big spotlight on the practice and it caught the attention of industry watchers and the consensus around “Butter” congealed to “artificial hit.” 

Stray Kids fans also scored their favorites a Billboard chart topping album in 2022 with Oddinary. The title track “Maniac” ranked in at number 178 on the Spotify charts for the United States that week and then vanished. Does it really make sense that people wouldn’t be streaming the most popular album in the country? The answer is that it wasn’t the most popular music in the country that week. This is not to shit on Stray Kids or their fans (I actually quite enjoyed “Maniac”) but simply pointing out that the Billboard chart is not an accurate measure of what people are listening to in the United States and that it can still be easily gamed.

And then there’s the Grammy. The great white whale of “achievements” in America. BTS was nominated for a Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance in both 2020 and 2021 with nothing to show for it except a performance slot in the broadcast. And how did this play out? Certainly not a boost in ratings, which were abysmal (last year) and just shy of all time low (this year). The spy-themed performance of “Butter” got positive mentions from the television critics and music reviewers watching the broadcast but it wasn’t a water cooler moment and weeks later absolutely nobody cares. It’s as if it never happened. When the performance was posted online to the group’s official YouTube account on April 22, 2022, it ranked in at #6 in South Korea for the week with 414k views and in Japan it was #16 with 1.09 million views. But in America? Not even in the top 100. That’s below a 4K remastering of a-ha’s “Take on Me” posted in 2010 and Eminem’s ancient hit “Love the Way You Lie feat. Rihanna”. 

The BTS official YouTube channel has 66 million subscribers. If Americans were watching at the same rate as Korean and Japanese fans, the video would have undoubtedly charted higher than “not on the chart” but it didn’t because the performance had no impact in America.

And then there’s radio--even in an article putting a positive spin on BTS’s radio play, it’s clear that K-Pop in general is simply not heard on the radio even if the Top-40 format friendly “Dynamite” and “Butter” did eventually get some traction. There are many reasons for this—-and I’ll recommend the excellent book Top 40 Democracy again here—but the bottom line is that K-Pop is not heard ambiently in American public life unless you like go to a Korean BBQ restaurant or something. But people still listen to the radio and the biggest format? Country music. Far more Americans listen to country music, rap, and Latin music than listen to the Top 40 format which is where K-Pop aiming to cross over has been targeted. K-Pop companies would have a much better chance at gaining traction with American listeners with songs like Super Junior’s Spanish Language “Lo Siento” or picking up where Se7en left of targeting R&B listeners.

Then there’s concerts. This is a point I’ve raised again and again but when a domestically popular act like… NKOTB (who I’ll be seeing later this summer) sells out a 20k capacity arena in the United States, they’re pulling in an audience that’s mainly locals from the surrounding area. When a K-Pop group sells out that arena, they’re pulling fans from a much, much larger area including a not insignificant number of fans from overseas. The concert may be in California but the audience is global. NKOTB can pick up and do a show in LA and then do one in the next major market over and get another, completely different audience of locals. The K-Pop group cannot. That’s the difference. The audiences for the 2021/22 concerts that BTS performed in Los Angeles and Las Vegas were far, far closer to something like the 2014 Arashi concert in Hawaii than if say the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Rolling Stones performed at the same venue.

None of this means that K-Pop is bad or that nobody in America likes it but simply that the impact of K-Pop in the United States among the general public (aka not K-Pop stans) has been greatly overestimated by the media and by K-Pop stans in their social media bubbles. The truth is that it’s still a very marginal format and has not been embraced by the general public and worse still it has been abandoned by the taste-making class of music critics and consumers who championed it during the last wave.