Why K-pop feels engineered: New book breaks down system behind global phenomenon

K-pop girl group BLACKPINK performs in Singapore during its "DEADLINE" world tour in November 2025. Courtesy of YG Entertainment

"Almost Everything You Need to Know About K-pop" author Choi Jung-kiu / Courtesy of Choi Jung-kiu

Like many other things in Korea, K-pop rarely pauses to explain itself. New groups debut, concepts cycle, controversies surface and fade. The industry absorbs the moment, recalibrates and quickly moves on.

That forward momentum has long been part of its appeal. It is also what makes the system difficult to read from the outside.

However, beneath the choreography and camera-ready polish, a quieter question persists: Why does K-pop feel so engineered, not just in sound or style, but in how its artists are trained, presented and sustained over time?

That question sits at the center of "Almost Everything You Need to Know About K-pop," a new book by Choi Jung-kiu, published in Korea last December. Positioned as a cultural primer, the book breaks K-pop into its working parts, grounding its analysis in concrete examples drawn from active idol groups, recent releases and everyday industry practice.

Rather than treating K-pop as a trend-driven genre or a series of isolated successes, Choi frames it as a system shaped over time, one in which training, production, performance, technology and fandom are designed to move in unison.

“My perspective is a product of 'dual citizenship' in the worlds of global strategy and K-pop fandom,” Choi said in a written interview with The Korea Times. With over two decades of experience at consulting firms such as McKinsey and Kearney, and now as a partner at Boston Consulting Group Singapore, he brings an analytical lens to a field he has long followed as a fan.

K-pop acts H.O.T, left, and S.E.S. are both first-generation K-pop acts that debuted and performed in the late 1990s. Courtesy of SM Entertainment

That way of seeing K-pop, he said, emerged early.

“The ‘aha!’ moment actually traces back to 1998,” Choi said. “While the world saw the birth of first-generation idols as a local pop [music] trend, I was somewhat involved in K-pop strategy development during its infancy.”

It was then that he realized K-pop was less about novelty than structure.

“I realized that K-pop wasn’t just about catchy melodies,” he said. “It was a meticulously designed value chain.”

That observation anchors the book’s core approach. Choi does not separate music from the industrial framework that supports it. Instead, he treats idol training, in-house production and fan platforms as interdependent components rather than parallel tracks.

“I approach [K-pop] as a system because that is exactly what it is,” he said. “A high-tech, high-touch export engine where culture and business logic are inseparable.”

Throughout the book, works by acts such as aespa, Stray Kids, IVE and Le Sserafim are closely examined alongside the mechanisms that shape them. Choreography, visuals and narrative concepts are presented not as isolated creative decisions, but as results shaped by upstream choices within labels, often long before an artist reaches the stage.

The result is less a celebration of K-pop’s global rise than a careful explanation of how that rise is continuously produced.

K-pop boy band Stray Kids performs during its "Stray Kids World Tour 'dominATE : celebrATE'" show at Incheon Asiad Main Stadium, October 2025. Courtesy of JYP Entertainment

That distance also allows room for contradiction. As both an analyst and a fan, Choi says the two perspectives frequently collide.

“Constantly,” he said. “The analyst in me admires the efficiency of the multi-label system or the high margins of digital fan platforms. But the fan in me, the one who gets goosebumps during a Dreamcatcher bridge or a Lip J choreography, worries when the business starts to overshadow the art.”

The tension is most visible, he added, in the trainee system.

“Analytically, it’s a brilliant R&D [research and development] model that guarantees quality,” Choi said. “Emotionally, as a fan, I see the immense pressure and the shadows of lost youth.”

Rather than attempting to resolve that contradiction, the book keeps it in view, treating it as essential to understanding how the system operates. While he leaves room for admiration, he is equally direct in his book about K-pop's vulnerabilities.

Among the issues he examines, sustainability emerges as the most urgent.

“We’ve perfected the ‘Perfected Idol’ model, but we haven’t yet perfected the ‘Sustainable Idol’ model,” he said. Mental health, corporate governance and the lack of dedicated concert infrastructure in Korea, he argues, are no longer peripheral concerns.

Min Hee-jin, the ousted former CEO of K-pop label Ador, under HYBE Labels / Korea Times file

Recent industry disputes have also brought those tensions into sharper focus. Choi describes the ongoing conflict involving HYBE Labels and former Ador CEO Min Hee-jin as “a classic ‘creative vs. capital’ collision.” As K-pop agencies globalize and adopt corporate structures shaped by international capital, he expects similar frictions to surface.

“The tension between centralized corporate control and decentralized creative independence will only grow,” he said.

Looking ahead, Choi suggests that the next major test may come through K-pop’s localization efforts, as labels increasingly form global pop groups using the K-pop framework. Recent examples include HYBE’s U.S.-based girl group KATSEYE and SANTOS BRAVOS under its Latin American branch, SM Entertainment’s British boy band dearALICE and JYP Entertainment’s GIRLSET, formerly VCHA.

As these acts are produced under K-pop’s rules, Choi said, differences in labor standards, creative cultures and expectations could place pressure on assumptions long taken for granted.

“When you mix the rigid Korean system with Western labor norms and different creative cultures, we might see significant friction,” he said. What comes into question may be less about labels or contracts than about who ultimately owns the concept and intellectual property behind the music.

Global girl group VCHA, now rebranded into GIRLSET, effectively collapsed in December 2024 when member KG publicly announced her departure and filed a lawsuit alleging mistreatment and contract issues, after which K-pop agency JYP Entertainment confirmed the termination of the group’s activities. Courtesy of JYP Entertainment

That uncertainty, Choi suggests, is not a flaw in the system but a sign of its current phase. K-pop, he argues, is no longer a fixed export model, but an evolving structure, one that continues to shift as it expands outward.

“The ‘Almost’ [in the book's title] is a nod to the fact that K-pop is an evolving organism,” Choi said. “By the time I finished a chapter, a new technology or a new dispute had already changed the landscape.”

Currently, the book is available only in Korean, but according to Choi, plans are underway for an English-language edition to be released by World Scientific Publishing Company, with publication currently targeted for mid-2026.

An Indonesian edition is also expected around the same period, with some content adjusted for the local market.

Having looked backward to explain how K-pop was built, the book ultimately turns to what will sustain it. In Choi’s view, technical precision and production efficiency are no longer enough. What matters now is whether the system can maintain narrative coherence and trust as it stretches across borders.

“In the 4.5th generation and beyond, fans don’t just buy a song; they buy into a story,” he said.

That shift calls for a different kind of ambition. Rather than exporting K-pop as a finished product, Choi imagines a future in which its underlying framework becomes the engine itself, adaptable to new contexts without losing its internal logic.

“It wouldn’t just be K-pop exported,” he said. “It would be global pop, powered by the K-system.”

Advertisements featuring K-pop boy band ENHYPEN are displayed across Shibuya, Tokyo, with the group’s visuals filling billboards and public spaces in one of the Japanese capital's busiest streets. Courtesy of Belift Lab