Image above: Kris receiving the prestigious Daesang award at Seoul Music Awards 2014 (Source)
After the K-pop industry was shaken by yet another lawsuit – this time Kris, a member of EXO, suing SM Entertainment for contract termination – we asked if the K-pop system is fundamentally unethical. After a longer break than initially intended, we are back to discuss the issue some more. In the first part of the series, we looked at how the changing behaviours of consumers has affected the global music market and in this part we will look more at the Korean music market in more depth before going on to discuss the ethics of the K-pop idol system.
Comparing the structure of the Korean music industry to that of other countries, the thing that sticks out most is the incredibly low price of legally downloading music. Despite having doubled in price in the past year, a download from most Korean service providers costs just 110 won – a tenth of the cost of iTunes in other countries (Apple does not provide an iTunes music store in Korea for obvious reasons). Despite this the digital music market has been growing significantly and this has been one of the factors, alongside tightening of copyright and piracy laws and investment in local artists, which has helped South Korea’s music market jump from the thirty-third to the eleventh largest market in the world in just five years.
Source: JoongAng Daily
This incredibly cheap pricing has had a number of noticeable effects on the industry. One, slightly weirdly, is that it might be one of the reasons Korea’s domestic music market has actually been growing over the past few years, unlike most major markets such as the US. The ease and availability of the online music market, exaggerated by low pricing strategies, allows music producers to get to consumers at relatively low cost. Anyone who watches the Korean charts can see how producers can release albums fairly cheaply and make it to the top of the charts almost instantly, exaggerated by the real time charts built into all the major streaming services. Only a small amount of promotion is required, compared to the large multimedia advertising campaigns of big western pop artists, to get a popular group to the top of the realtime charts whenever a new song is released. This is then often used as a way to gain further exposure through press releases which become news articles.
Obviously this has significant effects on the download market and the behaviour of consumers but it has also had a much deeper impact. Here in the UK, as of time of writing, the current official number one album is In the Lonely Hour by Sam Smith. If I wanted to legally buy this album online, I could get it on iTunes for £8.99 (or £10.99 for deluxe), download it from Amazon for £4.99 or buy the CD from Amazon for £9. If I bought it from a supermarket or a record shop it would probably a little bit more but the difference between download and physical is less than 50% extra in most cases. In fact, in one case, it is actually cheaper to buy the deluxe version on CD than to download it.
Let’s compare this to a current big release in Korea, Taeyang‘s RISE. The album has nine tracks which puts the download price at 990 won (about £0.60 or $1) – that’s less a tenth of its £7.99 price on UK iTunes. The CD, on the other hand, is even more expensive than a newly released UK CD with an RRP of 22,000 won (or £12.80/US $21.50), although I did find it for between 16 – 18,000 won (£9.30-£10.50) on most of the online retailers I checked. This means that it costs sixteen to twenty-two times more for Taeyang fans to buy his album as a physical release rather than a digital download.
As a result of this price discrepancy, the K-pop industry has completely overhauled its relationship to CD marketing. Let’s be clear, for entertainment companies, K-pop CDs have absolutely nothing to do with providing a means for consumers to listen to their artists’ music. When you can instantly buy a full album for less than a US dollar and stream music videos for free, fans, especially young, tech-savvy fans with smartphones and no CD players, are not buying CDs to listen to the music. CDs have become collector’s items – a way for fans to buy a physical piece of their favourite artist, show off their fandom and invest in the acts they really care about.
Many Big Bang fans have actually been looking for ways to prevent the intentional rusting of this album(Source: soratop.tumblr,com)
This is something entertainment companies are very aware of. K-pop CDs are on a whole different level than CDs made for almost any other market or genre in terms of packaging design. Sometimes they come with their own magazines or in several editions for each member of the group, sometimes they have quirky design features like Big Bang’s infamous rusting album and they’ve even won international design awards. Above that, they almost always come with some kind of collectible photo card, poster, photobook and so on –K-pop CDs are much more of a visual than an audio product. Between this and the way CD sales are integrated into fan events, live shows and meet and greets where you must buy a CD in order to be eligible to participate, the Korean CD market is intrinsically linked to fandom.
This plays out in the numbers. The CD market in Korea has been described as volatile but in fact it’s pretty predictable – there are gigantic spikes and deep valleys in sales throughout the year but the high sales usually correspond exactly with the releases by groups with big fandoms. In 2012, month on month sales of the number one selling album on Gaon varied from 330,000 in September to 25,000 (Super Junior’s Sexy, Free and Single) in December (Shin Hye-sang’s Winter Poetry – the only non-idol release to make it to number 1 that year).
Month-on-month number 1 album sales (Source: Messerlin and Shin)
So in Korea, album sales are extremely heavily linked, not to overall popularity, but to amount of devoted fans, more so than in other countries. This has interesting, heavily gendered, implications. Observing trends in K-pop consumption in Korea throws up some interesting differences between K-pop girl and boy bands. According to Hanteo, only 8 of the top 50 selling album artists of 2013 were female artists. Out of this, only 2 of those made it into the top 25 and Girls’ Generation was the only group in the Top 10. This situation is reversed on the single chart. Out of the top 50 singles of 2013, 11 were released by female idols (9 if you don’t include Lee Hyori or 13 if you also include Davichi – both these artists occupy grey areas) but only 3 were by male idols (again, if you don’t count 2AM as idols, that drops down to 2.) Only 2 female idol artists sold more than 50,000 albums in 2013 compared to 19 of their male counterparts and Sistar only sold less than a tenth of the albums sold by VIXX despite the group and its members having taken part in 6 of the top 100 singles of the year. VIXX on the other hand didn’t have a single song in the yearly top 200.
This means the markets for boy groups and girl groups are fundamentally different. For boy groups, it is relatively easy to amass a large number of devoted fans, this may be because in general female fans are more devoted (or perhaps obsessive) than male fans, however it can be difficult to gain wider public recognition. On the other hand, the Korean general public seems to be much more accepting of girls groups but it is very difficult for them to build up dedicated fanbases.
In practice this tends to mean that it is easier for girl groups to become famous but their careers are not nearly as stable as boy groups. Lack of a large fanbase equals lack of protection from wider public opinion. T-ara’s dramatic downfall after their 2012 scandal shows how precarious a position female idols are placed in. However there could potentially be pitfalls to building your career on fandom the way that many successful boy groups have. Obsession can quickly turn sour when an idol fails to live up to (unrealistic) expectations as L from Infinite experienced last year when news of the idol’s love life shattered the delusions of thousands of his fans. The results were harassment and abuse suffered by both L and his then-girlfriend at the hands of people who would have previously named themselves among his biggest supporters. On top of that sasaeng fans are a much bigger problem from male idols and groups are often expected to act in ways which maintain the more delusional beliefs of their fans from same-sex fanservice to referring to their whole fanbase as ‘their girlfriends’. It’s a trade-off between exposure to wider public scrutiny and the need to constantly fulfil the expectations of a group of dedicated fans.
When discussing the ethics of the K-pop industry it is important to have a good understanding of its economic environment. This article has only looked at the legal and above board aspects of the industry but there are also much dodgier goings on behind the scenes. Price rigging, chart fixing, tax evasion, prostitution and slave contracts are just a few of the illegal and unethical practices that the K-pop industry has been accused of in the past few years. In the next and final part of this series, we will be discussing the position of an individual idol within the system and whether there is an ethical way to run an idol entertainment company.
The post Is EXO-M’s Kris’ lawsuit proof that the K-pop system is fundamentally unethical? Pt. 2: How the idol industry works appeared first on Beyond Hallyu.