In 2011, Billboard and Billboard Korea jointly launched the Korea K-pop (Korea Pop) Hot 100. On the Billboard homepage, K-pop is listed in the main menu under “International,” below Canada, France, Germany and Japan. In the same year, hundreds of European fans held a flash mob in Paris to persuade SM Entertainment, a major Korean pop company, to add another concert after the first concert sold out. JYJ, a Korean pop group, also performed at sold-out shows in South America, setting a new record for the fastest ticket selling time. The following year, Girls’ Generation, another Korean singing group, made a huge debut in the U.S. mainstream market by performing on the Late Show with David Letterman. Other K-pop singers gained public attention not only in East and South Asia, Europe and the Americas, but also in the Middle East and Africa. K-pop’s circulation and popularity had gone global. The most monumental event in K-pop history happened in December of2012, when the Gangnam Style music video by Psy, a K-pop singer, reached, for the first time in YouTube history, 1 billion views on the video-sharing website – as of April, 2013, it recorded 1.5 billion views, making it the most watched video on YouTube ever. Thanks to the video having gone viral, the song climbed to second place on the Billboard Top 100, behind Maroon 5’s “One More Night.” At the end of 2012, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) included Psy with Taylor Swift and Carly Rae Jepsen on its 2012 New Year’s Eve show, reinforcing and arguably sedimenting K-pop as a global cultural force. The rapid rise of K-pop seems almost ironic given Korea’s colonized posi-tion during much of the twentieth century. Korea was colonized by its neighboring country, Japan, for more than 30 years beginning in the second decade of that century. After gaining separation from Japan in 1945, Korea, from the Maginot Line to Communism’s southward movement into East Asia, largely remained under economic, political, cultural and social control of the United States (Choi 2006: 85). In her 1985 essay, “Three Women’s Texts and A Critique of Imperialism,”Gayatri Spivak described “worlding” as an imperial process of implicitlyreinscribing imperial culture into “the Third World” contexts in order to legitimize imperial dominance. Korea, as part of “the Third World,” was assuredly worlded by imperial powers. The importation of imperial culture from “First World” nations meant colonial dependence was established through the directional flow of global cultural products (Choi 2006: 77) and unequal trade and consumption practices. Given this history, how might the current diffusion of Korean pop (K-pop) be understood? Might it be that the historical colonial worlding process of First World culture infusing its culture into the Third World is being reversed, with empires functionally participating in their own un-worlding? As a no longer overtly colonized society, to what degree is Korean culture, in its deportation to Western civilization, un-worlding Western colonial societies? Because Korea fell under imperial control historically, is the current popularity of K-pop culture an example of a hybrid colonial form that both worlds and “unworlds” culture? Or, is K-pop itself part of the very worlding Spivak described nearly 30 years ago? Interestingly, central to this discussion about K-pop’s contemporary role as aworlding and/or un-worlding phenomenon is YouTube. In YouTube’s infancy, K-pop content was unofficially distributed. The virality of K-pop videos on YouTube played a crucial marketing, distributional and advertising role in promoting K-pop as a popular entertainment form worldwide. But, of course, the effect of such videos was mutual: with YouTube’s own popularity, its role as a global media archive, and its credibility as unfiltered (or uncensored), being one reason for it becoming a home for K-pop videos. Now YouTube is a self-reflexive staple in the campaign process of marketing new and old K-pop artists and productions. YouTube’s ease of access made it possible for audiences to download and upload content, and to write in the comment streams below videos. These practices reposition Korea and Korean culture not only within the global cultural imagery, but also within processes of global capitalism, and within empire. An embedded marker of modernity’s infrastructural commitment to technology, YouTube plays an indispensable role in the K-pop’s worlding and/or un-worlding process. This chapter examines the role YouTube plays in the global spread ofK-pop by asking how this Western-originating medium benefits local industry and culture and alters the way we understand worlding to occur. K-pop culture, unlike the first Korean Wave in the early 2000s, is, in part, a pre-planned and well-organized cultural product demonstrating synergies among: (1) marketing strategies of the music industry (strategies of industries created out of empire); (2) a dispersed, yet strong, global fandom; and (3) the power of YouTube. Therefore, we investigate the close relationship between YouTube and K-pop and conduct an interview with a K-pop industry worker. By doing so, we aim to present multi-layered aspects of the transnational cultural K-pop phenomenon that deserves such complex and in-depth attention.
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Ono et al. (2013) studied this question.