The international strategy for Korean pop music: what makes K-pop listed on Billboard Hot 100?

Abstract

Based on a sample of most popular 300 K-pop songs between 2009 and 2021, we investigate why only 44 of them were listed on Billboard Hot 100 despite K-pop’s global popularity in terms of YouTube viewing clicks, streaming revenues from digital music platforms and international album sales. In tandem with the failure to receive any Grammy award by BTS even as their six songs had eventually made to the top position on the Hot 100 chart, the symbolic capital of K-pop in the US music market is all but reticent. Using the bootstrapping method based on the Process macro model for serial mediation effects, we find that the K-pop idol system (or the production system in Korea) negatively mediates the correlation between creative outsourcing and the rankings of Billboard Hot 100 and Spotify. However, signing contracts with global music labels positively mediates the same correlation. We provide implications of these findings.

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