An Addition To The Melting Pot: The Growth of Asian Entertainment in the West

BTS at the 2019 Grammy Awards / Wireimage

Korean Group ticket sales from 2015-2019 in the U.S. by region

Over the past few years, a rather untraditional music genre began to take center stage in the western hemisphere: K-pop.  Though it has historically been connotative as exotic and foreign, it has become deeply integrated with the American music industry as the fanbase in western nations continually grow by exorbitant proportions.  Korean music artists had penetrated the global market way back in the 1990’s with the revolutionary Seo Taiji and Boys (서태지와 아이들), but it wasn’t until recent years where the industry has seen such widespread growth.

In addition to the growth of consumer markets, Korean entertainment groups have outsold all American artists when it comes to physical album sales.  

Director Bong Joon Ho after winning three Academy Awards in 2020 / Getty Images

The overall prosperity of industry titans such as BigHit, JYP, SM, and YG beg the question: what changed in recent years to catalyze this so-called “yellow wave”?  Aside from hard numbers, there has been a distinct cultural shift in all entertainment platforms as we observe the increased number of Asian/Asian-American content creators on YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok.  

Though Asian entertainment, media, and music has seen enormous growth in regards to consumption, there are still many limitations and red tape around the American entertainment industry that makes it difficult for genre to truly flourish.  For example, Spotify and Billboard created new genres to separate Kpop from other pop related music- though it seems reasonable, many fans speculate that such actions are done so with malicious intent to alienate the accomplishments of foreign music producers from domestic creators.  With regards to the Grammy’s and AMA’s, people worry that Kpop artists such as BTS (방탄소년단) were used more for audience retention than for legitimate celebration of accomplishments.  Yet, even with such speculations, it goes without saying that in recent years, Asian entertainment has hit many new milestones in Western culture: Bong Joon-Ho and his creation of Parasite won Best Picture in 2019; BTS consistently ranks 1st with new releases on the Billboard top 100, and the increased viewer retention with many Asian content creators.

To come to a full circle, though Asian entertainment groups initially used Western marketing techniques to appeal to a broader audience, we now see a growth in more Asian style marketing in entertainment.  Kpop groups featured many teasers and trailers for new group releases, and such trends can be seen now with western artists; additionally, the emphasis on dancing while singing, though preexisting, has increased substantially with American performers as well.  America is well known to be a melting pot of cultures, and the recent successes of foreign entertainment groups seems to speak to the truth of it. Certainly, there are still many critics to the genre, but it can be expected that the industry is only going to be further integrated in the future.