Unveiling the Listener Structure Underlying K-pop's Global Success: A Large-Scale Listening Data Analysis

From the mid-2000s to the 2010s, K-pop moved beyond its status as a regionally popular genre in Asia and established itself as a global music genre with enthusiastic fans around the world. However, little is known about how the vast number of music listeners across the globe have listened to and perceived K-pop. This study addresses this question by analyzing a large-scale listening dataset from Last.fm. An analysis of the distribution of play counts reveals that K-pop experienced a significant increase in plays between 2005 and 2019, largely supported by a small group of heavy listeners. The Gini coefficient in play counts is notably greater than that of existing mainstream genres and other growing niche genres. Furthermore, an analysis based on user-assigned genre tags quantitatively demonstrates that between 2005 and 2010, K-pop shed its status as a local Asian genre and established itself as a distinct music genre in its own right.