In the most recent episode of tvN’s Hangout With Yoo, HYBE’s Bang Si Hyuk and JYP’s Park Jin Young appeared on the show and talked about the future of K-Pop. Although K-Pop is currently a hot topic, being the center of the economic and cultural industry, a K-Pop crisis is underway.
Bang Si Hyuk and Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN Bang Si Hyuk and Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN
Bang stated, “Although we have investors that are taking responsibility for HYBE, there have been indicators of major crisis markets declining.” The basis of his theory of crisis is the extremely intense consumption from the fandoms.
Bang Si Hyuk and Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN
Although it is a positive factor, it can also be seen as a limitation. There must be fans who occasionally consume the content with a light heart.
Bang Si Hyuk and Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN Bang Si Hyuk and Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN
They felt it would be best if artists had a super fan + light fan structure. They hoped to go further with that structure so that they could attract a lot of light fandoms as well. Some groups that started out strong would sometimes disappear before reaching a certain fandom level.
Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN
JYP revealed that their biggest concern is expansion. He stated the different levels of K-Pop that they have gone through in order to widen the boundaries.
Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN
The first level was Korean singer + Korean.
Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN
The second level was mixed nationalities + Korean, foreign language.
Park Jinyoung on ‘Hangout With Yoo’. | tvN
The third level of K-Pop was local singer + local language.
K-Netizens who watched this expressed their opinions on both Park and Bang’s analysis regarding “light fandoms.”
Netizen comments | theqoo “If you want to market to the public, start with the songs.” “What type of light fan will spend over $100 for a seat where you can’t even see the artist’s face.” “Make a song that we can understand before saying something like that. It makes me wonder if there’s a problem with my hearing because they make songs that I don’t know what they’re saying. Creating a song of unknown nationality while speaking about going global is my biggest barrier.” “So if I want to be a light fan, I don’t have to spend money, right?” “Is that why they encourage moving fandoms? If this is what the heads of agencies think, they don’t understand the psychology of fans.” “If you want to attract many ‘light’ fans, off-event accessibility must be made easy. Reduce the price of concert events. We need to increase the number of fans for things like fan sign events and eliminate the system of lining up people based on how many albums they buy.”
