In the U.S., K-Pop has grown from an underground digital fandom to “Saturday Night Live” and the Grammys.
The K-Pop band Monsta X, which recently signed to Epic Records. The group is leading a new wave of K-Pop acts signing to U.S. major labels hunting for a hit single.
The deal was brokered by Eshy Gazit, former manager for K-Pop titans BTS. Gazit brought Monsta X with him to Maverick, the management firm owned by Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the U.S. As was the case with disco, teen-pop and EDM, the major U.S. record companies are now scrambling to invest in K-Pop, another fast-paced, diverse and youth-skewing genre that’s taken off globally. There are risks, though. K-pop is still primarily sung in Korean. There’s already a distinct, hierarchic label system and fan-driven culture that created these groups. The hot acts change quickly and the fanbase is young and fickle.
“We love to push boundaries,” Monsta X said. “That’s how we are building our sound and keep changing over the years. “It was an area we should be in. [Gazit] had the skill set and a band with the potential to be much bigger,” said Greg Thompson, president of Maverick Music . But it’s not a matter of simply jumping on the K-Pop bandwagon. The South Korean music industry that built K-Pop is an established, distinct system with different structures and expectations.
The U.S. labels are typically not part of the lucrative branding or merchandising deals that the South Korean labels have procured for their acts. And streams for K-pop acts still lag behind those of comparably popular hip-hop acts on subscription platforms like Spotify and Apple, from which U.S. labels draw the vast majority of their revenue.
Like the sweep of Latin urban music across the pop charts, this is a pivot for how record labels see the genre’s future.
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