K-Pop: huge music industry with dark sides

K-Pop garnered worldwide attention with a famous single called “Gangnam Style.”

But is this trend as popular as it presents itself to the world? Let's take a look into it.

K-Pop is the short form for Korean popular music, which is as it says: Korean Pop/Hip-Hop music.

Different from western Hip-Hop/Pop, which is mainly made by soloists, K-Pop is above all made and sung by music groups.

These groups are mostly entirely men or entirely women, that's why you call them boy/girl groups.

The group members normally eventually make a solo debut, e.g. Lalisa by Lisa from Blackpink, although they stay part of the group.

K-Pop began to get attention with the drop of a single called „Gangnam Style“ by PSY.

This trend flattened over time. But after two years it was finally the time that one of the biggest boy groups ever made their appearance.

BTS, a group which started as a small group of a nearly insolvent company, which now wins award after award with bops like “Dynamite” and “Butter,” and carries their company to absurd wealth.

They were even nominated for a grammy, one of the most prestigious music awards worldwide.

Just some weeks ago, they were the special envoy of the South Korean president at the UN General Assembly and held a speech there for the future generations.

The K-Pop industry is booming. For example, just this year, HYBE entertainment company, which manages BTS and Justin Bieber, made over 300M dollars, thanks solely to BTS. The girl group Blackpink brought in over 90M dollars in 2019.

Although the idols make a lot of money, they hardly get any of it.

This kind of profit is what the companies of various K-Pop groups see every year. They get this much money from tours, merch, streams, fan meetings and other activities.

But we should bracket streaming, because a big part of the streams come from possesive K-Pop fans who put the music they stream 24/7 on loudspeakers, buy views, spend a fortune on albums too, to boost the revenues and force family members and friends to stream it too. They even develop strategies to stream a song more efficiently.

Although the idols make a lot of money, they hardly get any of it. Many companies tend to keep most of the money for themselves.

A famous case happened in 2016. A boy group, which worked under a company for over three years , didn't get paid for these three years, so they sued the company.

As a result, the company dissolved the contract with the group and gave every single member a compensation of merely ten thousand dollars for their three years.

Overworking is another problem. Overworking has resulted in many suicides in the K-Pop biz.

One of the most prominant cases is the suicide of former Shinee member, Jonghyun, who comitted suicide at his home, because of depressions rooted in burnout.

He said in his farewell letter: “The depression that was slowly gnawing at me eventually engulfed me. I couldn't get over it.”

Companies often equip juveniles with unfair contracts with few shares and often even plastic surgery obligations.

The South Korean government wants to put an end to these unfair contracts and they will take harder action against crimes against juveniles.

Another thing they want to put an end to is “sponsorship.”

Sponsorships are mutual agreements where an influential person promises a trainee (often a minor) a starting position in a group in exchange for “services.”

These trainees often have no other way to do something for a living, because they often quit school to concentrate on the trainee life.

There are also other pressures, like stalkers.

K-Pop is a cool, fun community and genre, but we shouldn't forget about the crimes that happen under the surface. Although there are companies like HYBE and PNATION, who treat their artists fairly, by no means do all companies that. It’s important to enjoy the music of our favourite K-Pop artists while still recognizing the realities of the business.