South Korean K-pop boy band BTS won four awards at the MTV European Music Awards 2020 on November 9: Best Group, Best Fan Base, Best Song (Track Dynamite, 2020), and Best Online Performance. (K-pop is a mix of popular music trends of the 1990s: hip-hop, electro-pop, rhythm and blues, soul, and dance music.) Their June online concert Bang Bang Con: The Live attracted about 756,000 viewers and became the largest paid online show. Tickets were $ 26 for fan club members and $ 35 for everyone else. According to Forbes, the group could have raised $ 20 million, much less than the musicians could have earned on a world tour. But a good example of how, with the proper use of technology and a fan base, it is not wrong to make money during quarantine times, the magazine notes.
BTS is the main cash cow of their record company Big Hit Entertainment. It accounted for 88% of the label’s revenue in the first half of this year. Thanks to fans of BTS, Big Hit Entertainment was able to hold a triumphant IPO last month – by the end of the first day of trading, it rose in price to $ 8 billion, which is only half the capitalization of Warner Music Group.
Why BTS is so special
Korean studios have industrialized K-pop stars. Companies like Big Hit Entertainment are looking for young talent and are investing, according to a Harvard Business School study, up to $ 100,000 a year in a single pop star, including singing and dancing training, plastic surgery, a mentoring program, and even mental health care.
BTS is also unusual in that it expresses its position on socially sensitive issues, although usually, idols try to stay away from this, and for good reason. For example, BTS has a huge fan base in China. But last month, Namjoon attended an event hosted by the American nonprofit Korean Society in New York to celebrate the friendship between the United States and South Korea. In his speech, he mentioned that both states had gone through a lot together – for example, the Korean War. It caused a storm of indignation in China, which supported the other side of the conflict. Chinese fans began to publicly declare that they had become disillusioned with their idol, and advertisements featuring BTS from companies operating in China began to disappear on the Internet.
In 2017, BTS launched Love Myself, a global campaign with UNICEF to combat child and adolescent abuse. Billboard magazine wrote that they not only helped with campaigning but also raised about $ 1.4 million in donations. The musicians became the first Korean group to make a speech at a session of the UN Assembly. It was in 2018. In a six-minute speech, delivered by Namjoon on behalf of the whole group, as the best English speaker, young people were encouraged to believe in themselves and love themselves as they are.
BTS Way up
At first, it seemed that the boyband would die without ever being born. It was not possible to recruit a group of seven people in any way. Some rappers did not want to become idols, while others could not stand the grueling training. For a long time, the group consisted of only three rappers – Namjoon, Suga, and J-Hope. It was already 2012, while Big Hit Entertainment expected to start promoting the boyband back in 2011.
It is a Big Hit Entertainment feature, The Daily Dot explained. Competitors like YG Entertainment and SM Entertainment have many idols in production. Big Hit Entertainment prefers to focus energy on individual projects, carefully working on them. They now have boy bands TXT (debuted last March) and BTS, singer Lee Hyun and solo projects of some BTS members. But, as the practice has shown, their approach works.
BTS has even received state awards for its success. In 2018, the President of South Korea presented the members of the group with the Order of Cultural Merit, Grade 5. In 2019, BTS accounted for 24.8% of K-pop album sales in South Korea, while its closest competitor, Seventeen, accounted for only 5.9% (Statista).
Along the way, some BTS members are developing their projects with Big Hit Entertainment. Namjoon, for example, released his first solo album back in 2015 and has since recorded more than one song both alone and with other famous musicians, including American rapper Wale. Perhaps someday he will sing with his idol, the US presidential candidate Kanye West. “I want to become like West – the one who creates trends,” he confessed to Cuvism Magazine.
