An Investigation of the K-pop Craze
Authors: Cathy Sun (Project Lead), Christine Shen, Irene Zhang, Madeline Zhang, and Nam Nguyen
Two days before this article was drafted, JungKook, a member of the K-pop group BTS, was invited to perform at FIFA World Cup Qatar during the opening ceremony. He was the first Korean artist to perform at the world cup, and he could not have done it without the incredible popularity that K-pop (and BTS itself) has received in the past few years.
The attentive may have noticed the continuously growing wave of influence set off by the K-pop industry, rolling to more and more countries in the last decade. According to a report published by the International Socioeconomics Laboratory, the K-pop industry generates approximately $10 billion for South Korea each year. Another report revealed that Spotify’s K-pop hub had, on average, 7.9 billion K-pop streams worldwide. Moreover, BTS alone, one of the most representative K-pop groups with seven members, generated over $3.6 billion per year for the South Korean economy, which is equivalent to the impact of 26 mid-sized companies.
How did the K-pop craze originate? The shockingly rapid development of the industry inevitably leads to the question: what are the underlying factors that make K-pop so popular? In this article, we will answer this question and discover the potential factors that may have contributed to making K-pop one of the world’s fastest-growing and most-liked music genres.
Method
This article’s analysis will be based on a random sample of 70 hit K-pop songs from 2016–2021. The songs were acquired from a public Kaggle dataset (linked at the bottom), and ten songs were randomly selected from each year’s dataset.
Month of Release
The timing of a song’s release could make a significant impact on its fate; singers may prefer to publish songs at times when the public is most willing to consume, which is to say holidays and summer and winter breaks. The graph below summarizes the months of release for the songs in our sample:
While the graph reveals no particular trend, it is clear that the months near the end of the year are a popular choice for K-pop artists, with October being the month during which most songs are released. Another local maximum can be observed for May and June, corresponding to the beginning of summer. All other months, except for December, show an approximately even distribution of the number of songs released. This result is interesting and provides us with the message that it may be a better time to release new K-pop songs in months before the summer and winter break, after which people would have more spare time and money to support the new songs (in the form of purchasing physical albums, contributing to YouTube view count, spreading the word on social media, etc.). Considering that summer and winter breaks usually apply to students and not the workforce, this observation then begs us to find the primary audience base for the K-pop industry. Are students the major contributing factor to the popularity of a K-pop song? A series of K-pop censuses from Reddit users u/NishinosanTV, u/alleybetwixt, etc. reveals the demographics of K-pop listeners year-over-year. Using the results from 2015 to 2021, we construct the following graph:
From the results, it is clear that people from the age group 18–24 have made up most of the K-Pop fanbase over the years, hovering around 60% yearly. This group usually corresponds to undergraduate and graduate university students, which verifies our previous guess that students make up the majority of the K-Pop fanbase. The second most significant age group is 25–34. There is a clear trend of decrease for group 18–24 and a clear trend of increase for group 25–34. A migration towards the 25–34 group may signify K-Pop being more accepted by the general population, or it may be a result of the aging of the 18–24 group over the years the census was conducted. Either way, the graph implies that elementary- and middle schoolers do not make the major K-Pop fandom and that whether a song makes a hit is primarily dependent upon the opinion of people who are 18–34. Unsurprisingly, this group of people has the highest buying power and is most likely to financially support the K-Pop industry.
It is critical to keep in mind that the census may be biased towards U.S. K-pop fans since they were conducted over Reddit, an American social media. The ages in the census results may not fully represent the international K-pop fanbase. At the same time, the respondents were not a random sample of K-pop fans, and the census may be subject to volunteer bias. Lastly, the census may favor the younger age group who use social media often and underrepresented the older people unaware of the Reddit platform. Nevertheless, the data obtained still serve as a valuable tool to obtain a general idea of the age distribution of the K-pop fanbase.
Acousticness vs. Danceability
The scatterplot shown above displays the relationship between the “acousticness” of a K-pop song and its “danceability.” These measuring criteria and their corresponding values were taken from Spotify’s Web API, which assigns to every song an index for the different song features, including energy, loudness, and danceability. According to Spotify, “acousticness” is “a confidence measure from 0.0 to 1.0 of whether the track is acoustic. 1.0 represents high confidence the track is acoustic.” To better define the term “acoustic,” we turn to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which defines the term as “of, relating to, or being a musical instrument whose sound is not electronically modified.” Spotify defines “danceability” as “how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity. A value of 0.0 is least danceable and 1.0 is most danceable.”
With the definitions in mind, let us turn to the plot. We immediately observe the tendency for hit K-pop songs to be on the lower end of the acousticness spectrum, whereas danceability varies greatly, primarily from 0.5 to 0.8. This observation implies that most K-pop songs utilize electronically modified sound for their tracks, which intuitively corresponds to a more energetic or “danceable” presentation. The result is not surprising and relates well to our common sense: most hit K-pop songs we hear on the web are those that appeal to the ear, tempting you to dance along with it.
With the understanding of the inverse relationship between acousticness and danceability, we will use the number of Youtube Views to assess whether listeners prefer danceable songs or not?
Danceability is a large contributor to a kpop song’s success, as it allows listeners to follow along with their favorite group’s dance and learn it with them. Thus, we wanted to observe the relationship between the danceability of a song and number of Youtube Views (as of Nov 1, 2022). The dataset we used compiled the top 10 Kpop songs from 2015 to 2021 and measures each song based on a numerical category. Values range between 0 to 1. The higher the value, the easier it is to dance to the song. We used Youtube as a measurement for popularity since Youtube is typically the first media listeners stream the songs from.
In the visualization, the majority of the songs have less than 250 million views. However, the songs that have more than 250 million views are concentrated between a danceability of 0.6 to 0.8, implying that hit songs tend to have a higher danceability. Additionally, the song with the most youtube views– How You Like That by Blackpink– has a danceability of 0.828. Following kpop dances is a large contributor to a song’s success, so we suspect that listeners would want to dance along with more energetic and happier songs. With a higher danceability song, there will be greater replay value, thus corresponding to more views on Youtube.
To further analyze danceability, we plotted danceability for the top hit songs in 2021, our most recent data. Although this correlation is very minimal, we see that the higher the popularity rank of the song, the higher its danceability.
K-pop is well known for its upbeat and fast-paced style of music, leaving room for high energy and intricate well-choreographed dances. Thus, in examining the tempo changes through time, we see that the genre has gotten increasingly faster through time. Through our sample of 70 most popular KPop songs from 2015 to 2021, we see that, from 2016 to 2021, the tempo of popular kpop has increased nearly 22% during the period. In addition to the highly danceable nature of KPop, it would make sense that the most popular songs are generally higher in tempo, as higher tempo songs often get people more excited and leave a greater impression within their audience. Thus, not only will these songs do well through radio and streaming, but it will likely be played more in popular venues such as bars and clubs.
Final thoughts:
We come back to the original question: what are the underlying factors that make K-pop so popular? By understanding the target demographic– students aged 18–24– that listens to kpop, we can increase a song’s odds of becoming popular by utilizing their preferences to increase a song’s odds of becoming a viral hit. From analyzing and graphing our data set, we discovered danceable songs with higher tempos seem to be more streamed by kpop fans. However, trends come and go. The perfect formula for an instant hit kpop song is still a mystery. Yet, through trend visualization, we can get a close picture to where kpop is headed.
References:
https://www.asiafundmanagers.com/us/kpop-and-economic-impact-on-south-korea/
https://thediplomat.com/2022/06/domestic-and-global-political-impacts-of-k-pop-boa-bts-and-beyond/
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/jesseleelee/kpophits2021
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17-HlvG-Z-sMcVWyWVOnkhlIp-ea-LsYkqgtV8QMjo7o/viewanalytics
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Tc7IgXKJmnFZCJ4p1dF2rNtRzGBervj5zyYAfwkKbQA/viewanalytics
http://census-results.redditkpop.com/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kfPGpeaDj9DPs5lTJmIgHSz7LRleBMjC/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m46JLwlAK4czQoX8rJuCAKcvJt1TVJRn/view
https://towardsdatascience.com/what-makes-a-song-likeable-dbfdb7abe404
