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K-Pop is a new buzz word in the global music industry. Korean pop singers such as TVQX, SNSD, Wonder Girls, and Psy currently attract unprecedented followers in Asia, Europe, and North America. The dominant explanation behind this unique cultural phenomenon rests on the concept of cultural hybridity or Pop Asianism (i.e., continuation and expansion of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian subcultures in the global cultural market). I argue that the globalization of K-Pop involves a much more complicated process of globalizinglocalizing-globalizing musical content that originates from Europe than what hybridity or Pop Asianism arguments suggest. Specifically, the rise of K-Pop in the global music industry involves a new technique of locating new musical content in Europe or elsewhere, modifying it into Korean content, and then redistributing it on a global scale. Furthermore, K-Pop represents an effort to network global talent pools and social capital in the formerly disconnected music industry rather than an effort to emulate and slightly modify Japanese pop culture. As such, within the global music industry, Korea occupies a structural hole that exists between Western and East Asian music industries.
Key Words: K-Pop, Music Industry, Globalization, Structural Hole
1. Introduction
As the trendy magazine Monocle put it recently: "The Korean Wave movement is the biggest soft power success story of the region, acquiring global - and still growing - adulation over the past decade, with the fevered export of South Korea's pop culture, from music to drama to anime to computer games" (Monocle 49, Dec. 2011Jan. 2012: 48). Particularly, the rise of K-pop or Korean popular music in the global music scene came as a coup de main to many music fans, commentators, and business people in Asia. The Anglo-American or European domination of the global music industry has rarely faced challenging competitors from Asia prior to the sudden K-pop epidemic. Psy's "Gangnam Style," for example, ranked number one in the world in terms of YouTube click counts, reaching more than 1.7 billion hits as of July 21, 2013. The second most hits recorded in YouTube history by Justin Bieber comes in at just 0.9 billion.
Before Psy's ascendance as a global pop star, other boy and girl bands from Korea have enthralled a massive number of young Asian and European...