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Mark JaMes russell, formerly the korea correspon-dent for Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, is the author of Pop Goes Korea (stonebridge Press).

Then came Gangnam Style. Since making its debut last July, that funny, over-the-top dance video by the South Korean rapper Psy has charmed young music fans (and their parents) all over the world, garnering the most YouTube views by any artist ever – by far. Even South Koreans who are proud of Psy’s achievement are more than a little puzzled. The pudgy rapper is better known at home as a lighthearted satirist than as an A-list pop star.

But there’s more to South Korea’s global reach in popular culture than an irresistible Asian equivalent of the Macarena. South Korea – we’ll drop the “south” part hereafter – has had one of the world’s most dynamic pop-culture markets for over a decade. Korean movies have won top awards at major inter-national film festivals; Korean TV miniseries (also known as K-drama) have huge follow-ings across Asia, the Middle East, and even in Mexico and Brazil, the heartland of the tele-novela. And, K-pop – Korea’s particularly catchy mash-up of dance beats and love bal-lads – continues to find fans all over the world.

The rise of K-pop, like that of Korean pop culture in general, is a sign of deep changes affecting the world economy, both in emerg-

ing markets and the developed world. Link-ing culture and commerce is hardly new and hardly a uniquely Korean achievement. What is new, however, is the phenomenon of a small country (population 50 million) with an unusual writing system and an obscure language becoming so influential so quickly, effectively rebranding its national identity.

It’s not that American or Western culture is on the decline, but countries like Korea are unlocking the American formula, learning how to replicate it with a spin that gives them an advantage in emerging markets. Equally striking, Korea is proving that trade follows the cultural flag – that popular-culture ex-ports can also promote a wide range of goods (from cosmetics and soft drinks to cell phones and automobiles) both faster and more effec-tively than traditional marketing can.

from little acornsSouth Korea has come a long way, transform-ing itself from the poorest of the poor to the world’s 15th-largest economy, in two genera-tions. Indeed, since the early 1960s, Korea’s GDP per capita (measured in purchasing power terms) has risen from less than Haiti’s to more than New Zealand’s. The IMF reclas-sified Korea as an “advanced” economy in 1997; since then, GDP has more than doubled

of South Korea, chances are you think of slick

cars, slicker consumer electronics or its crazy neighbor to the north. But pop culture?

Until recently, not so much.

When you think

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while exports have more than tripled. Korea’s pop-culture exports, worth $137

million in 2011, are a drop in a $500 billion-plus bucket. But there is solid evidence that pop culture has a halo effect, elevating Korea’s

“brand” and boosting the appeal of a wide array of Korean goods. A 2012 survey of 300 Korean companies by the Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry found that 52 per-cent believed the success of Korean pop cul-ture had helped them increase sales abroad. One consulting firm study estimates the Ko-rean Wave’s economic effects – increases in tourism and goods and services exports – at $4 billion in 2011, and predicts it will top $9 billion by 2015.

unnatural rhythm Koreans are a musical people, as Chinese dip-lomats commented on their return from Korea hundreds of years ago. But pop music was kick-started by the ongoing presence of tens of thousands of foreign troops after the Korean War. That music scene gradually spilled into Korean society, bringing with it a wave of changes in attitude that were rightly seen as in-compatible with autocracy-as-usual. By 1975, Korea’s strongman, Park Chung-hee, had had enough; he launched the Campaign for the Purification of Pop Music. Dozens of singers and other entertainers were rounded up (nom-inally for marijuana use) and blackballed from stage and media. It would be years before Ko-rean pop music recovered; when it did, per-formers would be far more careful about say-ing or doing anything that might raise the ire of the men with the automatic weapons.

Thus, while Korea built a pop music scene of sorts, it did not resemble K-pop until the freer days of 1993, when a high-energy hip-hop trio called Seo Taiji and the Boys rewrote the rules. With their breakdancing, baggy

clothes and New Jack rhythms, the band in-spired a Beatles-like mania never before seen in Korea. “There are two eras in Korean music: before Seo Taiji and after Seo Taiji,” a former music executive explains.

But big as he was, Seo Taiji was just one person. So entrepreneurs like Lee Soo-man, founder of SM Entertainment, looked to in-dustrialize the Seo Taiji phenomenon. He cre-

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ated a pop music factory – a Korean variation on Motown – that could identify young tal-ents, spend years training and nurturing them, then give them the right songs and marketing push to succeed. In 1996, SM Entertainment launched the five-member boy band HOT (short for Hi-Five of Teenagers, also launch-ing Korea’s tradition of tortured English ana-grams), which became hugely popular. SES,

an all-girl group, soon followed, as did bands from competing labels.

Today, SM Entertainment, YG Family and JYP Entertainment are the Big Three of the Korean music industry, responsible for the majority of K-pop acts. While they have a few solo artists, groups are the norm in K-pop. They typically have four to six members. But larger ones are arriving – Girls Generation

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consists of 9 young women and Super Junior has 13 young men. Big groups have the advan-tage of facilitating multilingual appeal, mak-ing room for members who speak English, Japanese or Chinese (and other languages) to serve as spokesmen and women abroad.

From the very beginning, Lee Soo-man had his eye on overseas markets, as he considered the domestic music market too small. Even in the 1990s, SM Entertainment acts were per-forming abroad in an effort to build interest. Indeed, the most common term for the popu-larity of Korean pop outside the country, the

“Korean Wave” – hanliu in Chinese, or hallyu in Korean – was first used by Chinese journal-ists in the late 1990s to describe the growing presence of Korean music there.

Japan, the world’s second-biggest music market, has long beckoned Korean producers. Japan’s market is so much larger than Korea’s – back in 2000, Japan generated retail sales of $6.5 billion compared to $300 million in Korea – that even moderate success in the Land of the Rising Sun can make a big differ-ence to the bottom line. SM Entertainment has been particularly active there, forming a deal with Japan’s Avex Entertainment to de-velop and market Korean stars. Their biggest success was BoA, a teenager sent to live in Japan for several years in order to become flu-ent in Japanese; today, the Japanese think of her as one of their own. Actually, the Japanese have been forced to share: lately, BoA (now a mature 26) has also recorded songs in English and Mandarin Chinese.

today tokyo, tomorrow the developing world The impact of the Korean Wave has been most pronounced around Asia. But while vi-sionary music moguls were starting to push their bands around the continent as early as

the late 1990s, the real driver of change came from television dramas and cable TV.

The growth of cable around Asia in the late 1990s meant there were suddenly many more channels in search of content. The cable and satellite companies could not all show Friends or CSI all the time, so they began looking around for bargain alternatives. And Korean dramas fit the bill in terms of cost.

Better still, they looked a lot like locally made dramas, though with bigger budgets, better-put-together stars and the latest in cool gadgets. The shows were aspirational – giving the poor of Vietnam and Indonesia and the Philippines something tangible to wish for – and soon had large, devoted followings.

K-drama’s imperial quest really broke through in 2002; the weepy series Winter So-nata grew into a full-fledged phenomenon across Asia. Two years later, Jewel in the Palace, a historical drama about a cook serving in the royal kitchen, was even bigger, setting ratings

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records around the continent. Today, Korean TV dramas are an Asian staple: in the Philip-pines, more than 169 Korean dramas have been broadcast over the past 10 years – and (shades of Hollywood) many countries have talked about limiting the amount of Korean content that can be shown.

When TV dramas took off, Korean pop music soon followed. Rain (born Jung Ji-hoon) made a moderately popular debut in 2002, but after appearing on two soap operas,

especially the pan-Asian hit Full House, his popularity shot up around the region.

The success of K-drama in Asia is not all that hard to understand. But around 2006, something stranger happened: those TV dra-mas continued to find new markets farther and farther afield, gaining big audiences in Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Eastern Europe.

Identifying cause and effect in social sci-ences is always a bit tricky. But there’s no de-nying that the spread of K-pop around the developing world has gone hand-in-hand with other Korean exports. Sales to emerging markets now represent 73 percent of Korea’s exports, up from 53 percent a decade ago. In 2011, Korea sold $402 billion worth of goods to developing countries, with China alone buying $134 billion. Trade with Peru, where

Full House

Jewel in the PalaceCoffee Prince

Winter sonata

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13 Korean dramas have aired since 2006, has increased sixfold over the past six years, reach-ing $3.3 billion in 2011.

Just as TV dramas helped to popularize Korean singers, so, too, have they helped push Korean commercial brands. Product place-ments are rife in Korean programming, fea-turing the stars wearing sponsors’ clothes and using sponsors’ electronics and providing links on the programs’ Web sites. Cosmetics exports have been another big winner, up 35 percent in 2011 to reach $805 million, thanks in large part to the glamorous images of Ko-rean actresses from the popular dramas.

the internet factorThe Korean government made a huge push to expand broadband access in the late 1990s. Today, there are more than 100 broadband subscriptions for every 100 Koreans – the highest penetration on the planet. Broadband

has generated all the familiar benefits and costs in Korea, but they hit there earlier and harder than elsewhere.

Illicit online file sharing devastated the music industry, helping to reduce CD sales from 21.5 million in 2000 to just 6.3 million in 2007. And with revenues plunging, the music industry was forced to scramble, mov-ing to digital delivery very quickly.

The new market started with ringtones for cell phones and background music for Web pages, then grew into streaming and digital downloads of ordinary music. By 2004, Kore-ans were spending more for music online than they were offline, the first place in the world to make that transition. (The United States hit the mark in 2012.)

Koreans, with their strong school and fam-ily connections (and comfort navigating the online world), also flocked to social media years before that phenomenon caught on in the West. The most popular platform, Cyworld,

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was launched in 1999, and by 2004 it had 13 million users – more than one in four Kore-ans. Indeed, the company claimed that 90 percent of 24-29-year-olds signed up.

All this means that Korean music compa-nies were forced to move aggressively into the digital world instead of dragging their feet, as music companies in many other countries did. Korean labels thus learned early on to work with fans at the grass-roots level, build-ing large and dynamic online communities.

That can have its downside: today’s fans are far less inclined to celebrate whatever they are offered than yesterday’s followers of TV shows and stars were. When SM Entertainment tried adding a 14th member to the aforementioned 13-member group Super Junior, fans rebelled big-time, staging protests in front of its head-quarters in Seoul. Moreover, the Internet is forever: a less-than-tactful online comment about Korea made years earlier by the young Korean-American star Jay Park was dug up,

forcing him to resign from his band, 2PM. But plainly, the benefits to the music industry of online communities outweighed the problems.

k-pop and the westKorean pop culture first made inroads in the West through the movies, when high-end Ko-rean cinema blossomed in the late 1990s. Im Kwon-taek won the best-director prize for Chihwaseon at Cannes in 2002 and Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy won the Grand Prix in 2004. Kim Ki-duk won the Silver Bear for best director at Berlin in 2004 and the Silver Lion for best director at Venice in 2004. But their appeal was largely limited to the buffs who at-tend film festivals. K-pop targets (and hits) a very different demographic.

Unlike its arrival in the developing world, where TV laid the groundwork for K-pop’s success, Korean music arrived in the West pri-marily via the Internet. International fan sites, particularly in English, built communities all

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over the industrialized world and helped non-Koreans get to know the stars and the music better.

In North America and Europe, K-pop is still niche-based, but it is growing in visibility in tandem with the increasing presence of Korean products. Ironically, for many fans, narrowcasting is part of its appeal – a way for them to differentiate their interests from those of their peers while joining a large in-ternational following. K-pop fans also say they like the less-crude and less-cynical na-ture of K-pop compared with Western pop; it may be cheesy, but it sure is fun.

Attempts by K-pop impresarios to break into Hollywood and Western media have had mixed results. The singer Rain had a short

“feud” with Stephen Colbert and subsequently picked up a couple of roles in Hollywood films – the big-budget Speed Racer and the guts-and-gore Ninja Assassin. JYP Entertain-ment’s Wonder Girls starred in a special on Viacom’s Teen Nick channel a year ago. Girls Generation appeared on David Letterman’s Late Show in the fall with an English-language version of their song, “Bring the Boys Out.” And SM Entertainment spent millions of dol-lars in 2009 pushing BoA in the United States, but ended up with very little to show for it.

Rapper G-Dragon’s song “Crayon” ap-peared in several high-profile, best-of-2012 lists, including one in The New York Times. The song also won a 16-song elimination contest on the American pop-culture Web site Pop Dust, although that is perhaps more a testament to the willingness of K-pop fans to vote early and often than to the breadth of the genre’s popularity.

today k-pop, tomorrow…As K-pop and K-drama have proven to be winners, government has moved in. Korea

has aggressively expanded its official cultural presence, chiefly through the Korean Minis-try of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s cultural centers. There are now 28 centers around the world, along with 76 King Sejong Institutes for studying the Korean language. The minis-try, moreover, has teamed up with the Federa-tion of Korean Industries to form the Bureau of Culture Diplomacy, explicitly using soft power to expand Korean exports.

Korea’s Export-Import Bank has also an-nounced plans to spend nearly $1 billion to help cultural exports. It has already financed Korean movie theaters in Vietnam, the sale of Korean TV dramas to Sudan and K-pop con-certs all over the world, investing 66.5 billion won (about $65 million) in 2010 and 142.3 billion won (about $139 million) in 2011.

Meanwhile, plenty of K-pop acts are an-

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gling to be the next Psy. The latest single by SM Entertainment’s Girls Generation, “I Got a Boy,” reached 10 million YouTube views within 55 hours of its release on Dec. 31 (SM claims this is a record) and was still seventh in YouTube streaming popularity three weeks later.

But with or without another global giga-hit like “Gangnam Style,” K-pop’s influence isn’t likely to diminish any time soon. It seems that K-pop, some of the most manu-factured, industrialized pop music on the planet, morphs as it travels around the world, finding unexpected niches and growing into something very different – almost avant-garde. Consider the electronic music artist Grimes, the 24-year-old Canadian (real name Claire Boucher) who is an indie darling and who has appeared on all manner of critics’

best-of-2012 lists and articles. She makes no bones about the influence Korean pop has had on her songs. As she wrote on the blog of New Musical Express:

It’s the insane art direction in K-pop music videos that got me addicted to it. I like the misguided appropriation of Western pop tropes in the videos – because they’ve got it wrong, it’s kind of better.

As globalization and the Internet Age un-fold, the multilayered, bottom-up model of culture looks to grow ever more important. And in this round of global culture wars, the United States is sure to get a good run for its money. Entertainment forged in an environ-ment that more resembles the anything-goes early days of Hollywood than the button-down world of multinational conglomerates is beautifully positioned to flourish. m