Hail Hallyu - Let the K-Wave crash over you

If you haven't heard it yet, let me break it down to you.

It's official folks, the almighty K-Wave is washing Western shores, collecting followers everywhere,
and actually successfully converting people with more success that I ever hope to achieve during the time of this course.

Why do people like K-Pop?

To be quite frank, any of the following videos would be enough for a short answer.

Get ready to go to heaven with Taeyang's laid back r'n'b track, while supposedly amateur singers compete for a chance to sing with him, casually singing in perfect harmony:





Or if you're more in a ballad mood, bring out the tissues before even attempting to press the play button for the heart-wrenching performance of Wildflower. Epic key change soars over the pieces of broken hearts - you've been warned.




Or if you're eager to hear some inspirational, 'motivate me to work harder towards my dreams' type of music to kick start your morning in fashion, listen to one of the excellent recent releases of the genre - Pentagon's 'Like This'.



Still not convinced? Don't worry, there is so much more to come.

The more interesting question in our case, what gets people into K-Pop?

All I hear is opinions lately, including mine which I'm sure most of you are already bored of.
Some of them are informed, some of them seems to be wired in, some of them don't even pretend to cover up the fact that as the fandom lingo would say 'only here for the views'. Of course some sources genuinely try.

One thing is for certain, the phenomenon itself became big enough to reach the levels of news coverage, with most of the prominent media outlets making their predictions for its future. Now that the genre is receiving more attention than ever, it's rather interesting to watch how is K-Pop portrayed in the media, while there is still a chance that the narrative can be influenced by the original audience, hopefully giving a broader picture. The main challenge when it comes to covering the topic is balancing interesting content whith educating the audience.

So in the posts to follow we are diving in deep to look at what we call 'the Western Media' says about K-Pop in general, and more specifically what reasoning they found for its success.


To be fair, it's a huge challenge to write about a genre which is not only in a foreign language, but is filled with essentially cultural references, which are hard to understand without spending a considerable amount of time on research, or you are not involved in the culture one way or another - and the latter still won't guarantee you get everything right.

K-Pop is designed for export but has a large domestic following. To give a simplified example: it almost works in similar ways as the classic example of eating Chinese food outside of China, it's tailored to match the recipient's taste.

That's leads us to a much bigger question: How does K-Pop work as a business?

There is no way, these can be answered in one article, so let's go on a journey together for the next 8 weeks with the new Hail Hallyu series, which hopefully will help to get everyone to solid level of understanding, and insert a structural, critical thinking when it comes to discussing the many aspects of the entertainment business.

The first articles to follow are:
Hail Hallyu - Hail Hallyu - Analysing The Western Media Coverage
Hail Hallyu - 10 Marketing and Branding Methods You Should Learn From K-Pop
Hail Hallyu - K-Pop As a Business

+1 Hail Hallyu/Converting people to K-Pop: Reaction from a Branding/Media Manager