Only 15% of budget for K-pop executed

By Jun Ji-hye

The government has only spent 15 percent of its initially planned budget for the promotion of K-pop to the world globally, according to Rep. Nam Kyung-pil of Saenuri Party on Monday.

Nam claims this adds up to approximately 20 billion won, since 2009, and comes against the background of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s (MCST) plan to invest 127.5 billion won ($115 million) over a four-year period to showcase K-pop as a high value-added business.

The plan included the construction of a K-pop concert hall and an array hallyu stars’ performances across various countries in Asia and Europe. It also envisaged offering support to indie or nonmainstream musicians.

However, according to Nam, neither the construction of the concert hall nor the planned concerts, which were all billed to run from 2009 to 2013, has taken place. Despite the MCST’s plan to support eight annual showcases just one took place in Singapore.

To this end, Shin Jong-pil, in charge of the popular culture industry at the ministry, said in an interview with The Korea Times that “although we planned to invest 127.5 billion won, we could only secure 19.5 billion won as of this year. This breaks down to barely an average of 3.5 billion won per year for the K-pop business.”

“We are still trying to expand the budget because more money is required to discover talented musicians and create more opportunities to promote these stars to the world, riding on the growing popularity of K-pop,” Shin said.

Nam countered this saying, “This is a typical example of grand policies made by an administration in its early days but never implemented as its term expires.”