K-pop opens new chapter in Asian music market

TOKYO/SEOUL, July 18 (Yonhap) -- A shopping street in Shinjuku, central Tokyo, with a high density of shops run by Koreans, was crowded with people despite the hot summer weather last Wednesday.
There were long lines of customers in front of the carts of street vendors selling Korean food such as topokki, rice cakes in hot sauce, and Chinese pancakes.
One of the large shops selling Korean pop-culture items, including souvenirs, on the street was totally packed although it was in the middle of a workday.
"We saw a sudden rise in the number of customers last summer. These days we have around 5,000 visitors during workdays and 8,000 to 9,000 on weekends," a sales clerk of the shop said.
Photos and life-sized posters of K-pop stars such as the boy band Shinee and the girl group Kara were seen inside a Tower Records store near Shinjuku Station.
At a K-pop section of the store, there were old and new albums of top-notch Korean "idol" groups such as Girls' Generation and 2 PM on display. There also were albums of newcomers, including the boy band Boy Friend.
"Recently, K-pop records are selling as well as Japanese pop music. K-pop is now so popular that I can't even compare the popularity to that in my first year of work here," said a female clerk who has worked at the store for seven years. Dance music albums by Girls' Generation and f(X) are especially popular among the Japanese, she added.
K-pop is no longer the exclusive property of a small number of K-pop enthusiasts in Japan, the largest pop music market in Asia. It is now increasingly appealing to the Japanese mainstream cultural fans.
According to the state-run Korea Creative Content Agency, South Korea's exports of its pop music products to Japan surged 92.9 percent to US$21.63 million in 2009 from the previous year, boosted by the popularity of Korean idol singers. This year's figure is far higher than that of 2009 considering the recent fast rise in popularity.
The wind of K-pop is also strong in China and Southeast Asia.
South Korea's K-pop exports to China rose 28.5 percent to $2.36 million in 2009 while exports to Southeast Asian countries jumped 149.6 percent to $6.41 million.
In Thailand, South Korea accounted for more than half of the country's sales of foreign pop albums.
Many Japanese fans say they were enchanted by the professional performances of Korean idols.
"Korean idols dance and sing well. Their performances are of high quality," said a 26-year-old Japanese company worker who identified herself as a fan of the Korean boy group Big Bang.
Industrial experts also highly rated the professional aspects of Korean pop stars.
"South Korean idols who spent multiple years as trainees have excellent singing and dancing skills," Kim Choong, a music program producer of the South Korean public broadcaster KBS, told Yonhap. "Overseas music fans are attracted by their professional features in a situation when barriers blocking local singers' advances into overseas markets became weaker thanks to people's easy accessibility to Internet-based media like YouTube," he said.
Kim was in charge of a K-pop concert hosted by KBS at Tokyo Dome, a 55,000-seat stadium located in the Japanese capital, last Wednesday. The concert reportedly drew an audience of 45,000.
Some of Japan's major labels are moving to form joint ventures with South Korean entertainment management agencies to cultivate new idol singers, according to industrial sources in Seoul.
Despite the Asian-wide fever of K-pop, many experts in South Korea are concerned about the future of the music.
They point to the fact that the popularity is limited to the dance music genre and that the industry has not produced a top-level star since the boy group Dongbangshingi, better known as "Tong Vfang Xien Qi" outside Korea. The group, which made its debut in 2004, is still popular in the Japanese market with more than 70 percent of the audience at the K-pop concert at the Tokyo Dome believed to be their fans.
Seeking short-term profits by staging under-prepared large-scale K-pop concerts and the local entertainment management firms' practices of forcing young singers being trained to sign unfair contracts were also cited as elements that could undermine the foundation of K-pop.
sshim@yna.co.kr