Earlier this decade, it seemed as if the long-vaunted South Korean takeover of American pop was finally happening. In summer 2020, BTS’s Dynamite became the first K-pop track to top the US chart, and in 2023, girl group Blackpink became the first K-pop act to headline Coachella. But just two years later, the story looks very different.
Ruby and Alter Ego, recent solo albums by Blackpink members Jennie and Lisa, each debuted at No 7 on the US album chart before dropping out of the Top 10 after one week, and neither album produced a single that peaked higher than No 68. Relative newcomers such as Tomorrow X Together, Ateez and Twice have achieved solid first-week chart positions, thanks to strong physical album sales, before facing precipitous drop-offs. NewJeans – a young, critically acclaimed new K-pop group who looked to be the genre’s strongest hope in the US after Blackpink and BTS – have been bogged down by controversies and legal dramas in South Korea, stopping them from capitalising on the success of their 2023 single Super Shy.
Even back home the genre is struggling. “K-pop has lost a lot of market traction in South Korea – the music is not being written to appeal to a Korean audience, but more to this homogenised, globalised audience,” says Sarah, the host of the Idol Cast podcast, who uses a pseudonym for fear of reprisal from K-pop fans. “It’s trying to be all things to all people, and ends up being sort of nothing to no one.”
Sarah says that K-pop made by obsessed-over “idols” – performers hot-housed in training camps by entertainment agencies – is no longer seen as cool in trend-conscious South Korea. “A lot of older fans have entered the fandom, including older women. I’m not bashing them, I’m one myself,” she says, but these newcomers have alienated young would-be fans. K-pop has also, she says, “become a lot more siloed” away from the rest of South Korean culture. “You’re not seeing idols in TV dramas or variety shows; a lot of content is moving on to gated [online] platforms like Weverse.”
This shift coincides, says US reporter Tamar Herman, with a move away from Korean lyrics. “It’s built to be exported,” she says. “Because of Dynamite’s success as an all-English song, K-pop started leaning into English.”
This also alienated Korean listeners – while more innovative acts such as Le Sserafim and Aespa, without the forceful marketing push that BTS and Blackpink received, haven’t found a footing in the US market. “The US loves to invest attention into certain artists – once you have it, you become the [sole] representative of [K-pop],” says Herman. “We don’t care for the hottest thing – we want the artists we’ve followed since high school, like Taylor Swift.”
The UK has only fitfully embraced K-pop, though there’s enough of a fandom for Tomorrow X Together to play London’s huge O2 Arena this week, and for Stray Kids to book two nights at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium in the summer. But artists like these, Sarah says, could be losing traction in South Korea because they have “pivoted their focus from the domestic market to the global K-pop market”. The South Korean charts are filled out instead with J-pop acts, Korean rap and “2D idols” like Plave, a virtual boyband. Meanwhile, Bang Bang Bang, a 2015 hit by boyband BigBang, “has consistently been one of the most-streamed K-pop songs globally over the past few months, which is not great for K-pop,” Sarah says. “Where are the new songs?”
In the US, one of the few genuine hits by a K-pop star in recent months has been APT, by another Blackpink member, Rosé. But it sounds nothing like K-pop, instead taking its cues from pop-punk and new wave, and is a collaboration with the eternally popular Bruno Mars. “Take him out of the song and I doubt it’s nearly as successful,” says Joshua Minsoo Kim, a critic who reviewed Jennie and Lisa’s albums for Pitchfork.
“[Rosé] has done everything she can to separate herself from the brand of K-pop,” says Sarah. “She’s even moved her copyrights to an American company – so that should speak to her confidence in the South Korean industry to handle an actual global hit song.”The teen five-piece NewJeans were one of the biggest success stories in K-pop’s western expansion. Their breakout EP, Get Up, featured collaborations with the alt-R&B singer-songwriter Erika De Casier and experimental Norwegian duo Smerz, and their innovative sound found acclaim among fans and critics. “[Producer] Min Hee-jin’s creative direction was very strong,” says Kim, and the music “was often produced by Korean producers privy to stuff happening in the underground and internationally”.
Here was an act that actually felt cool to gen Z and younger millennials – but over the past year, NewJeans have been stuck in a bitter war with Hybe, the K-pop company that formed them. The group attempted to terminate their contract with Ador, the Hybe subsidiary that formed them in 2022, alleging mismanagement. The group were also angry over the fact that Min Hee-jin was dismissed as Ador’s chief executive. Ador subsequently sued NewJeans, alleging that the band had no grounds to terminate their contract – though in February the label stated they “regret the escalation of this matter to court and believe that most claims advanced by NewJeans members thus far have arisen from misunderstandings”.
The band are the rare K-pop act to break ranks from the genre’s rigid corporate system; last year, they aired a bombshell livestream in which they spoke directly to fans about their perceived mistreatment. The spat has since bloomed into a media storm, fuelling discussions around the rights of K-pop stars as workers, a status they have been legally denied.
The potential ramifications are grave – a coalition of trade bodies warned in February that the spat could “collapse” the K-pop industry – and NewJeans have continued to act as whistleblowers. This month, member Danielle said that when she was a trainee in one of the idol boot camps, she was constantly surveilled and had to have all meals approved by management (Ador and Hybe have not commented on those allegations).
Last week, a South Korean court ruled in favour of Ador, granting a preliminary injunction that will stop NewJeans from working outside their Ador contract until the main lawsuit hearing in April – they had recently been performing as NJZ. Ador has said that it is “fully committed to supporting the artists going forward” so long as they perform as NewJeans; the band, posting as NJZ, have said they can “no longer remain with a management that has disrespected our identities and undermined our achievements”. They are now on hiatus and planning to challenge the injunction, saying in a statement to Time magazine: “It almost feels like Korea wants to turn us into revolutionaries.”
Kim is pessimistic about a new K-pop group breaking the genre’s losing streak in the west, and Sarah says K-pop companies have started milking fanbases more intensely than before to make up for the decline in new artists breaking, with fees to access elements like fanclubs and exclusive videos. “At a certain point, the audience becomes tapped out: you can only pay so much for your hobby, especially looking at a recession coming around the corner,” she says. “You can’t ask fans to sustain this multimillion-dollar industry. It’s a losing strategy in the end.”
But Herman still believes there is great K-pop going untapped in the US – “certain groups who are huge in other parts of the world”, such as girl group Twice, “arguably the biggest K-pop girl group of this generation, if you look at money and album sales. I don’t know if they’re going to cross over or not, but I’m here for everything.”
