Speaker 1: Hyatt's West Kasova. We're taking a break this week, so
Speaker 1: here's an episode you might have missed. Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for listening. We'll be back on Monday with a new
Speaker 1: big take. Even if you're not a teenager, chances are
Speaker 1: these catchy songs have hit your ears at one time
Speaker 1: or another.
Speaker 2: The best news is coming You like yourself coming more.
Speaker 3: The mock Madame.
Speaker 1: There's some of the biggest Korean pop or k pop
Speaker 1: hits of the last few years from a band called BTS.
Speaker 1: They've built a huge international following. Their songs have more
Speaker 1: than thirty two million monthly listeners on Spotify, and the
Speaker 1: band's fans are extremely devoted. And now the man behind
Speaker 1: these artists' success has an even more ambitious global plant
Speaker 1: stream economy. Bangshi Huck is partnering with Universal Music Group,
Speaker 1: one of the world's biggest music companies, to try to
Speaker 1: recreate the success of BTS with a new band outside
Speaker 1: of Korea. Its members will be young women from all
Speaker 1: around the world.
Speaker 4: This is the first US based K pop international girl bands.
Speaker 5: They have built into this process a lot of steps
Speaker 5: that they hope will cultivate a fan base before the
Speaker 5: group even debuts.
Speaker 1: That's Bloomberg, So He Kim and Lucas Shaw, they're here
Speaker 1: to tell us how BTS became so big and whether
Speaker 1: Bang can do it again. I'm wes Kosova today on
Speaker 1: the Big Take How to Build the Next pop music Sensation.
Speaker 1: I asked Lucas to tell us a bit about Bang
Speaker 1: Shehie Hook. He's very well known in South Korea, but
Speaker 1: those of us in the US and some other parts
Speaker 1: of the world might not know much about him.
Speaker 5: So they don't know him per se, but they are
Speaker 5: very familiar with BTS, which is the group that he helped
Speaker 5: form and create through his company, which at the time
Speaker 5: was called Big Hit Entertainment and is now called HIBE.
Speaker 5: The success of BTS made hib the biggest music company
Speaker 5: in South Korea, made Bang the richest and most powerful
Speaker 5: music mogul in South Korea, and really, I think is
Speaker 5: credited by a lot of people with helping to bring
Speaker 5: K pop to the masses and bring K pop all
Speaker 5: around the world. Following the success of BTS, you know,
Speaker 5: you've seen a lot of different groups come to the
Speaker 5: US tour Europe, whether that's Black Pink, which is a
Speaker 5: girl group with a rival company, or twice We've seen
Speaker 5: this steady influx of Korean music all over the world,
Speaker 5: and I think Bong gets a tremendous amount of credit
Speaker 5: for that, and no small part because of his work
Speaker 5: with BTS.
Speaker 1: So he's been in the business a long time and
Speaker 1: he has this storied career. Can you tell us just
Speaker 1: about how he got started?
Speaker 4: He grew up listening to British pop US he pop
Speaker 4: and started writing songs inspired by Duran, Duran and Timberland.
Speaker 4: He kept playing composing music with his band and he
Speaker 4: won a national song contest in nineteen ninety four. Not
Speaker 4: long after that, he was outed by a pop singer,
Speaker 4: Parktin Young, and both founded JYP Entertainment in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 4: Park also spent his childhood in New York, and both
Speaker 4: had the American dream. They had confidence with their huge
Speaker 4: success at home. They soon based a tough reality because
Speaker 4: the K pop had not landed in the US and
Speaker 4: no one actually knew how to monetize or adopt K
Speaker 4: pop model in the US. The Board of JP at
Speaker 4: the time opposed to their bold ambitions to establish business
Speaker 4: in the US, and they didn't give the financial support.
Speaker 4: Park and Bank had to move into a friend's house
Speaker 4: in La and live together. So his time in La
Speaker 4: later became like valuable lessons for his US ambition. Maybe
Speaker 4: the major part of his lesson was the attitude toward
Speaker 4: music was completely different because he worked like a machine
Speaker 4: while his fellow US producer seemed to enjoy music itself.
Speaker 4: That completely changed his attitude, and he came back to
Speaker 4: Seoul and left JIP to establish his own company, Bikit
Speaker 4: Entertainment in two thousand and five.
Speaker 5: And when Bond came back to South Korea after the
Speaker 5: time in the US and split from JYP, one of
Speaker 5: the things that he wanted to do was try to
Speaker 5: bring some of the American sensibility over to his home country.
Speaker 5: A lot of that I think was sonically. His initial
Speaker 5: efforts with Big Hit did not work. He had three
Speaker 5: to five years of trying to figure out what was
Speaker 5: the right artist for them, and even in the case
Speaker 5: of BTS, initially they thought it might be a hip
Speaker 5: hop group and it was only after they started to
Speaker 5: develop the group that they decided to go in the
Speaker 5: pop direction.
Speaker 1: How did he form BTS because it kind of had
Speaker 1: an unusual start.
Speaker 4: So initially Big Kid had no hit songs and they
Speaker 4: tried to form a hip hop group as like a
Speaker 4: lucas mentioned, they were looking into some talented producers, talented
Speaker 4: as singers and pop stars that they could turn that
Speaker 4: into a group i ID group that K pop is
Speaker 4: known for. In twenty ten, P Dog the initial producer.
Speaker 4: He found out a demo tape from a performer Virtua
Speaker 4: Hatchet Fields and he later became a rap monster. The
Speaker 4: leader of BTS so like p Dock gave a demo
Speaker 4: tape to Bang and the band was so fascinated with
Speaker 4: this boy, like fifteen year old boy, and he immediately
Speaker 4: started to scout more members to form a hip hop
Speaker 4: boy band. They did a nationwide audition and scouted Sugar
Speaker 4: the second member who can produce songs and basically a
Speaker 4: rap line member. And Jay Hoppe was a dancer.
Speaker 3: Hello, Army is ja right here?
Speaker 4: And he is also repline member. They expanded those training
Speaker 4: pool to bring more charming and the more talented passionate members.
Speaker 4: They formed the seven member boy band at the end
Speaker 4: after years long training and the survival audition and competition
Speaker 4: among like your thirty trainees. So that was the beginning
Speaker 4: of a BTS.
Speaker 5: The crazy thing when you think about BTS and the
Speaker 5: development of the artists is that they started to form
Speaker 5: and I think twenty ten. The group doesn't debut until
Speaker 5: twenty twelve, two and thirteen, so it takes two or
Speaker 5: three years for them to even form and train. And
Speaker 5: that's another thing that's very different about the Korean music style,
Speaker 5: where there's this whole T and D process training and development,
Speaker 5: where the management companies spend anywhere from a year to
Speaker 5: several years first picking the members and then training them.
Speaker 5: And even when BTS debuts, it wasn't immediately bigger than
Speaker 5: some of the other big acts debuting at the time.
Speaker 5: It took two three four years for them to start
Speaker 5: to find a global audience.
Speaker 1: Lucas and So he report a big reason BTS really
Speaker 1: did start to break out was because of the way
Speaker 1: Bong tried to marry what he'd learned in America with
Speaker 1: the traditional South Korean model.
Speaker 5: There had been historically in South Korea a lot of
Speaker 5: restrictions around what acts could do during the training process,
Speaker 5: how they communicated with the outside world. Everything was very
Speaker 5: closely managed by the big companies. South Korean management companies
Speaker 5: exerted a lot more control over their artists than those
Speaker 5: in the West that is financial. You know, they take
Speaker 5: a piece of touring and merchandise and music and all
Speaker 5: these other areas that US record labels, for example, or
Speaker 5: US management companies don't always participate, but also just in
Speaker 5: their day to day behavior, at least while the artists
Speaker 5: are in the training process before they've made their debut,
Speaker 5: not supposed to date, there are severe limits on what
Speaker 5: they can eat, like no junk food. They're really not
Speaker 5: supposed to communicate that much about what they're doing with
Speaker 5: the outside world. And Bong encouraged the members of BTS
Speaker 5: to communicate openly with their fans.
Speaker 6: Ah Hi I, Sabrina Rubts.
Speaker 5: And really build a following. And that coincided with the
Speaker 5: explosion in Twitter. Facebook was already fairly popular, Instagram came around,
Speaker 5: YouTube was really getting big, and so one of the
Speaker 5: novelties of BTS and one of the things where they've
Speaker 5: been really a pioneer in is building these ardent online
Speaker 5: fan bases, some of it through sort of your traditional
Speaker 5: American social media channels, but then also in a way
Speaker 5: that is very kind of uniquely Korean or at least
Speaker 5: East Asian, both in terms of the apps that they use.
Speaker 5: You know Hibe has its own app called Weavers, and
Speaker 5: in terms of some of the different fan meetups and interaction,
Speaker 5: you know, you look at the way that Korean fans
Speaker 5: kind of support the artists that they love, and it's
Speaker 5: at another levels to you guys, am I every day
Speaker 5: anyway hope for me.
Speaker 3: BTS came into my life when I needed when I
Speaker 3: needed them the most, and they saved me from the process.
Speaker 7: So when BTS came out, their sound was really different
Speaker 7: compared to the groups that were out, and I was
Speaker 7: instantly like, this is really cool, this is really different.
Speaker 3: The dancing was great, they were really cute, and the
Speaker 3: music was really fun.
Speaker 5: One of the few US artists who has anything close
Speaker 5: to it or comparable is Taylor Swift. A lot of
Speaker 5: what Taylor Swift has done in the last three to
Speaker 5: five years is in many ways modeled off of what
Speaker 5: Bong did with BTS.
Speaker 1: When we come back Bang's plan for a new global
Speaker 1: music group. It may have taken BTS years of training
Speaker 1: and development before making their debut, but as we know,
Speaker 1: they've since become a huge hit group. They have number
Speaker 1: one singles all around the world. I asked Lucas and
Speaker 1: so he to tell us.
Speaker 5: How that happened. In the Internet era, so much happens
Speaker 5: with momentum, and so like BTS develops the following in
Speaker 5: South Korea and it gets really big in Southeast Asia
Speaker 5: and across Asia where k pop was already huge, and
Speaker 5: then it just for a whole post of different reasons.
Speaker 5: This fan base sort of propels it to fandom everywhere else,
Speaker 5: and once a few people start buying in, they become
Speaker 5: sort of part of a movement. It's almost like a meme.
Speaker 5: But they had music that people really connected with.
Speaker 4: There are songs, and their messages and their communications with
Speaker 4: fans were so powerful because they were talking about self
Speaker 4: love and empowerment of the youth. It was a very
Speaker 4: aligned with the UN's ambitions to support youth. That also
Speaker 4: helped like a BTS to make a speech at the
Speaker 4: UN and like a White House, and they were the
Speaker 4: front line speaker for youth and Asians.
Speaker 6: We've been partnering with unsuff's in Violence program to protect
Speaker 6: children and young people all over the world from violence,
Speaker 6: and our fans have become a major part of this campaign.
Speaker 6: With their action and with their enthusiasm, we truly have
Speaker 6: the best fans in the world.
Speaker 1: BTS was on top, but Bob began to think about
Speaker 1: just how long that would last.
Speaker 5: Bob was looking at his business at the peak of
Speaker 5: BTS's power and fame sort of twenty eighteen twenty nineteen.
Speaker 5: In the twenty twenty, he knew that he needed to
Speaker 5: figure out sort of what the next step was for
Speaker 5: his company, how he was going to diversify it. Both
Speaker 5: because pop groups don't last forever. Most of them tend
Speaker 5: to last sort of like five to seven years. BTS
Speaker 5: at that point was already almost a decade old. It's
Speaker 5: now more than a decade old. There was also the
Speaker 5: issue of the South Korean requirement that men serve in
Speaker 5: the military. They had gotten that sort of pushed later
Speaker 5: and later, but he had to assume at some point
Speaker 5: that the various members would have to serve as they
Speaker 5: are now and that would take them off the table
Speaker 5: for a couple of years.
Speaker 3: I've been in too kp up for almost twenty years,
Speaker 3: so I always know, especially guide groups, they're going to
Speaker 3: go to the army, so you know it's coming, but
Speaker 3: it's still like, ugh, Okay, I'm proud of you for going,
Speaker 3: because like that's really something strong and admirable, but oh man,
Speaker 3: the lack of music, the lack of concert's gonna be
Speaker 3: so hard.
Speaker 5: And so he sought out to raise money and expand
Speaker 5: his business globally. Some of that was necessity and some
Speaker 5: of that was just he's an ambitious guy. He's very humble,
Speaker 5: but he wanted to build this company into something bigger
Speaker 5: and greater. So they went public in twenty twenty. Raised
Speaker 5: some money, he went shopping and bought a big US
Speaker 5: music company called Ethical Holdings, which is run by the
Speaker 5: manager Scooter Braun, best known for his work with Justin
Speaker 5: Bieber and Ariana Grande during COVID.
Speaker 8: I got a call and they said, would you be
Speaker 8: interested in your company joining another company out of Korea?
Speaker 8: And I had watched BTS and watched Bang from a distance,
Speaker 8: and I was curious, and I didn't want anyone to know.
Speaker 8: And I said, sure, let's meet, let's talk, and we
Speaker 8: started doing weekly zooms, telling no one about them.
Speaker 5: He went and bought another record label with Scooter Braun.
Speaker 5: He tried to buy sort of one of his biggest
Speaker 5: competitors in Korea. And at the same time that he
Speaker 5: was sort of buying these assets that would diversify the business.
Speaker 5: He was building up some technology and he started to
Speaker 5: try and develop more acts. Now he's developed a couple
Speaker 5: of big acts that are local to South Korea, but
Speaker 5: he also had this vision for applying the model that
Speaker 5: they'd used with BTS and really across South Korea, using
Speaker 5: that training and development process, but also cultivating that extreme
Speaker 5: fandom with a global group. And for help with that,
Speaker 5: he turned to Universal Music Group, the biggest music group
Speaker 5: in the world.
Speaker 1: With Universal Bangs, attempting to build out a truly global
Speaker 1: girl group with a massive publicity and social media campaign
Speaker 1: around the contest to choose its members. They're calling it
Speaker 1: the Debut Dream Academy.
Speaker 2: Dream Swapan, Dream Dream Academy.
Speaker 4: This is the first US based K pop international girl bands,
Speaker 4: so there are girls from twelve countries. It's not all
Speaker 4: Asian pop girl band that used to be. So this
Speaker 4: is a truly an international girl band that hib one
Speaker 4: to like make it as a US like a focused
Speaker 4: and they would become a more global approach, not only
Speaker 4: like attract K pop bands, but to the pop fans
Speaker 4: in general. They are doing this month long competition and
Speaker 4: audition programs online.
Speaker 2: Each step will be a gateway to the next for three.
Speaker 7: Rounds of eliminations, leading to a live final on November seventeen.
Speaker 5: They have built into this process a lot of steps
Speaker 5: that they hope will cultivate a fan base before the
Speaker 5: group even debuts. So they cast a wide net for
Speaker 5: this casting process that took almost a year. I think
Speaker 5: they said that they had more than one hundred twenty
Speaker 5: thousand applications. More than seventy thousand of those came in
Speaker 5: within the first like ten days. They did some in
Speaker 5: person casting calls throughout the world. They narrow that down
Speaker 5: to one hundred or so people, and then they've spent
Speaker 5: the last year training them and winnowing down the group
Speaker 5: in the US during this competition, you know, they unveiled
Speaker 5: the twenty finalists at this event in Santa Monica in
Speaker 5: late August. For our final limitation, we invite million and
Speaker 5: since then they've been uploading videos with different missions and competitions.
Speaker 5: Every woman in the group has a video on YouTube
Speaker 5: TikTok and weavers introducing themselves, and then they have different
Speaker 5: videos of different challenges and different videos of behind the scenes.
Speaker 5: And then when the women get sent home, they do
Speaker 5: a goodbye.
Speaker 1: Video well sen It's been a journey. It's be't crazy.
Speaker 4: Almost everybody voted me out. Maybe they're afraid.
Speaker 5: Whatever, except it's this whole different methodology for trying to
Speaker 5: cultivate a fan base. I will say that there is
Speaker 5: a part of me and a part I think even
Speaker 5: of some of the people involved in this process, who
Speaker 5: wonder if it all feels a little contrived. You know,
Speaker 5: you think about something like BTS and in retrospect it
Speaker 5: seems like banghad this master plan right, But a lot
Speaker 5: of it is just sort of kismet and right place,
Speaker 5: right time, right messaging, and it just works. It's always
Speaker 5: much harder to sort of manufacture that concept. Like New Genes,
Speaker 5: which is a different group that they have has done
Speaker 5: very well, but they didn't set out with this exact process.
Speaker 5: John Jannick, the head of Interscope GEFF and A and M,
Speaker 5: he told me that when he first got pitched this idea,
Speaker 5: he had reservations about it, but the more he got
Speaker 5: to know Bang and the more they talked about it,
Speaker 5: he just bought into this guy's vision and so.
Speaker 1: He is it working. Our people watching the YouTube videos
Speaker 1: and Netflix documentary voting online, are they participating in the hype.
Speaker 4: There are at least one hundred thousands of events on
Speaker 4: like a viaverse, like voting online, and they are commenting
Speaker 4: on like every performance of these girls training programs, illumination programs,
Speaker 4: so they are supporting girls and at the same time
Speaker 4: they are like a selecting girls who should become the
Speaker 4: final man members. So they're on TikTok, weavers and YouTube
Speaker 4: supporting the band's debut. And I would say, well, they
Speaker 4: are already like engaging with this band event. And one
Speaker 4: of the biggest merits to do this audition program is
Speaker 4: that they already have the huge fan base online and global.
Speaker 4: When they come out as a band, they can just
Speaker 4: go straight to like a concert and like a music
Speaker 4: live shows when they're ready, and fans will be there.
Speaker 8: When we come back.
Speaker 1: Will the K pop model work in the rest of
Speaker 1: the world. We've heard about Bond's success creating bts and
Speaker 1: other popular bands, so he and Lucas say that one
Speaker 1: of the most important things for this new group is
Speaker 1: to quickly build a fan base big enough to fill
Speaker 1: stadiums for their concerts.
Speaker 4: Once they become big band, like a K pop band,
Speaker 4: they can tour globally like a US, Dubai, LA and
Speaker 4: Soul and Tokyo everywhere in the world, and then there
Speaker 4: would like a collect money from the kvivers, like from
Speaker 4: merchandise as stuff bands would.
Speaker 1: Love to buy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean the earnings are going to so depend
Speaker 5: on how popular they are. Right, most musicians don't make
Speaker 5: a lot of money from the recording of their music anymore.
Speaker 5: The people at the very very top do, but for
Speaker 5: the most part, even those big stars make a lot
Speaker 5: more money from the tour. One thing that tends to
Speaker 5: be different about some of the bigger K pop groups,
Speaker 5: I think they have preferred for doing fewer but bigger shows.
Speaker 5: They come to the US and they'll do multiple nights
Speaker 5: in LA at a stadium or at an arena, big venue,
Speaker 5: but they're not doing forty shows in fifty five nights.
Speaker 5: But each show that they do, the gross is higher
Speaker 5: because it's a bigger venue, because they sell so much merchandise.
Speaker 1: So this international girl group is really just the beginning.
Speaker 1: They're hoping they can replicate the Dream Academy model over
Speaker 1: and over again.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the idea of Hive, and right now the
Speaker 4: focus is on the US, But like, definitely, if this
Speaker 4: makes a huge success in the US. They would definitely
Speaker 4: differanchise in different cities all around the world.
Speaker 5: You know, the US is such a big focus for
Speaker 5: him right now. He bought a house in the US.
Speaker 5: He's spending a lot of time in the US. The
Speaker 5: Korean business. He feels like he has a team in
Speaker 5: place to look after it. But if it works here,
Speaker 5: there's no reason why they can't try micro versions of
Speaker 5: it or other versions of it in other markets. You know,
Speaker 5: whether they'd partner with a local label or how that
Speaker 5: would work remains to be seen.
Speaker 1: So he write that the music industry in Korea is
Speaker 1: very competitive. Are the other labels in Korea watching what
Speaker 1: bog is doing and maybe going to try to reproduce it.
Speaker 4: We wrote a lot about his friendship with JOYP founder
Speaker 4: Paktin Young, and he's actually also like trying to build
Speaker 4: out a new US girl group, partnering with one of
Speaker 4: the US record labels. And there are a lot of
Speaker 4: like agencies watching this momentum and trying to follow, like
Speaker 4: what Hype is doing. They are setting up their US
Speaker 4: office and trying to like partner with Sony Music or
Speaker 4: like a owner or like Universal to get involved with
Speaker 4: the US music scene after like seeing whether this could
Speaker 4: become a big hit and they will like definitely jump
Speaker 4: into this formula and probably like the US record labels,
Speaker 4: would find career partner as well.
Speaker 1: So, Lucas, thanks so much for sharing your reporting. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, thanks for listening to us here at The
Speaker 1: Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.
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Speaker 1: Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The
Speaker 1: Big Take is Vicky Virgalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Frederica Romanello and edited by
Speaker 1: Caitlin Kenney. Our associate producer is Zeneb Sidiki. Rafael mcili
Speaker 1: is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin.
Speaker 1: I'm west Kosova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big
Speaker 1: Take