K-pop, hallyu continue global rise

Lee Geun, president of the Korea Foundation

By Kim Ji-soo

There is a cautious but strong move to bet on K-pop to lead the Korean economy in the years ahead, as interest in hallyu continues to grow.

The Korea Foundation has released a booklet tallying the status of hallyu over the globe, which found that global fans of the Korean wave increased about 11 percent in 2019 or nearly 100 million over the previous year. The foundation, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, made the assessment by studying hallyu communities in 98 nations. As of December 2019, there were 1,799 hallyu fan clubs with 99.32 million fans. The number of fans increased 11 percent over the figure of 89.19 million in 2018.

The bulk of the fans were based in Asia and Oceania at around 72 million, followed by 15 million in Europe and 12 million in the Americas.
The object of love for these fans was mainly K-pop, followed by K-dramas.

The book ascribes the growth of hallyu to expanding distribution and consumption routes of Korean content through such platforms as YouTube, Netflix and SNS, and to the qualitative growth of content as seen in the rally of director Bong Joon-ho's film "Parasite" and the diversification of hallyu content itself. Regarding K-pop, with music distributed through streaming and re-shared among SNS, it's rapidly consumed regardless of physical borders that may herald a new consumption pattern in the future.

Lee Soo-man, chairman of SM Entertainment, in a recent seminar co-hosted by the Korea Foundation, the Success Economy Institute and the Korea Economic Daily, said that he had confidence in K-pop to grow through technological innovation where Korea and Asia can lead the music scene, but also where the hallyu celebrities in AI-powered avatars can become part of our lives.

"Hallyu has become not only global content but an important asset in public diplomacy," said KF president Lee Geun. Also at the seminar, Lee said that interest in K-pop and other cultural content has driven up the demand to learn the Korean language at major universities around the world, and in fact has created what he termed as a "preference empire" where people want to engage and participate in hallyu-related, Korea-related activities.

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