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Category: Korean music (Page 5 of 11)

Number Won — Korea Gets a Music Chart

It is long, long overdue, but at last Korea has its music charts back. The Ministry of Culture has put together GAON, an “official” music chart that is going to measure online and offline music sales and put it all together to form a chart of the most popular music in the land.

Music charts in Korea have long had problems. Most notable were the scandals and problems that plagued the TV music charts, on the terrestrial stations and on music video channels. After so many payola investigations and other legal problems, most channels pulled their countdowns for years.

More serious, imho, was the loss of the “official” sales charts. MIAK (the Music Industry Association of Korea) disbanded in 2009, as part of some larger government reorganizations. But even before MIAK was disbanded, it had stopped keeping track of music sales (and even then, they only tracked physical sales, which have lagged behind digital sales in Korea since 2003).

MIAK is supposed to be replaced by the KMCIA, which will include online as well as physical sales. There are no charts at KMCIA yet, but it looks like they are taking steps toward adding CD and online sales charts.

So why care about music charts? Certainly I am not interested in bragging rights between one K-pop band or another. What is important, though, is transparency. Transparency may not be as sexy as Lee Hyori or as flashy as a 2PM dance move, but it is far more important for having a successful pop industry.

Look at Korea’s movie industry, for example. Ten years ago or so, it was really hard to find good information about how movies were doing in Korea. If you saw a chart, it was most likely only for Seoul. Nationwide data came weeks later, if it all, and was pretty unreliable. Theater owners fought for years that their box office data was proprietary and releasing it would put their business in danger. It was against the interest of each individual to release that data.

But guess what, it was in the overall industry’s interest to have that data. Without reliable data, distributors could not be certain how well their films were doing, and therefore how much money they should be making. Poor numbers increase risk, which makes the whole system work much less efficiently.

The Korean government put a real emphasis on improving the quality of box office data, and it is no coincidence that better box office data happened at the same time as overall box office went up up up. And I think it is also no coincidence that lousy numbers in the music industry have gone along with that industry’s decline over the past eight years.

Hopefully, Gaon will work out, and that more reliable information might lay the foundation for better days for the music industry.

Of course, if you want to know more about Korean music, movies, charts and all that fun stuff, you should pick up a copy of POP GOES KOREA.

Shin Joong-hyun’s Fender Guiter, Other Random News

  • Jason Strother has a fun and interesting article about Korean rock great Shin Joong-hyun getting honored by Fender with his very own guitar. Apparently it was the first time Fender has given that honor to an Asian artist. There is a longer audio version of the story, too.

  • The Korea Times just published a surprisingly thorough look at the year ahead in movies. The article lists a lot to look forward to, from big names to long-time-coming sequels.
  • An interesting article on Asian-American hiphop, particularly in the Los Angeles area.
  • Dave Stewart (of the Eurythmics) is producing The Wondergirls’ new album? (Okay, apparently this was announced a couple of weeks ago, but I just noticed it. And am rather stunned).
  • Hey, Darcy Paquet’s book, NEW KOREAN CINEMA, is out at last. Very cool. Looking forward to reading a very different take on the Korean film industry than I wrote about. Hope to get some sort of review up here before too long.
  • You have undoubtedly heard plenty about Korean TV dramas and other entertainment doing well all over Asia and beyond… But here is an intriguing story about the old MBC drama JUMONG becoming a bit hit in Iran.

    With the country being rocked right now by a democratic uprising, it is fascinating to learn a little bit about the changing going on these days to popular culture in Iran. I have met with several Iranian filmmakers and poets over the years (and regular folk, of course), and I am constantly intrigued at how different life is there compared to how most people in the West think it is.

  • From the Kim Sisters to ‘Oh Brother’

    I grew all excited when I saw the headline in the Chosun Ilbo this morning: “5 Decades of Korean Girl Bands.” It even started promisingly, with an opening graph about the Kim Sisters.

    But then came sadness, as the article jumps abruptly from the Kim Sisters of the 1950s to SES in the late 1990s. From there, it merely lists the major girl groups of the past decade — SES, FinKL, Baby VOX, Jewelry, Wondergirls. Sigh.


    Strangely, the article even asks, how did we go from groups like the Kim Sisters to the manufactured eye candy of today? But then it leaves a non-answer by critic Lim Jin-mo and gives a vapid rundown of a few vapid groups. While, of course, posting as much eye candy as possible. Thereby kind of answering their own question.

    “Why are today’s girl groups just eye candy?”
    “I don’t know, but here are some pretty pictures.”

    That Mr. Lim is quite the go-to guy for music analysis these days. He is quoted heavily in this recent Korea Times story about K-pop. Heck, even I interviewed him for that Rain documentary on Discovery Channel that I worked on earlier in the year.

    In the KT article, Lim, as usual, presents his argument about pop culture in moral terms, which I rarely like.

    “The utmost value of today’s music consumers in listening to music is ‘fun.’ They no longer seek any serious messages or meanings from music as people did back in the 1980s and ’90s. I’d bet this fun-oriented appetite of listeners will continue for years to come,” he said.

    First of all, there is nothing wrong with “fun.” We are talking about pop music after all, which is supposed to be popular. “Good” in no way precludes “fun”.

    Secondly, it is such a middle-aged gripe to complain that culture used to have meaning when I was young, but now it is all shallow and garbage. He similarly complains about the media and the music labels, saying they are all shirking their responsibilities and are only about money. Zzzzzz.

    I call them “should” arguments. He should do this. They should do that. Like when he talks about Korean artists learning English to succeed in the West:

    “But their ultimate goal there should be standing on stage with Korean-version songs with a very Korean sound, which would be the completion of the Korean wave.”

    As I have argued several times before, when it comes to big picture issues, I am much more interested in systems than morals. All the “shoulds” in the world will not do much if you have a system that is pushing people toward a “shouldn’t”.

    If you want people to have wider interests, maybe you should make those options more available. I have written before about the importance of live music as the foundation to a more natural, organic music system, and how Korea does not have much of a live scene despite having so many talented, creative young people. But even if someone were to be interested in a Korean indie band, how would you find them? The resources in Korea are very few, poorly organized, and poorly supported. The live music venues have terrible websites that rarely post their schedules more than a few days in advance. Cyrock has stopped updating. Weiv rarely posts about modern Korean music anymore. Lord, I miss MDM magazine.

    (Of course, there is always Indieful ROK and the Korea Gig Guide, at least for you foreigners. Oh, and newbie site Pocket of Sky for lyric translations).

    Okay, now I am really digressing. I started off talking about girl groups and how they have evolved, then I devolved into a bunch of other issues. But it would be nice if important national publications like the Chosun Ilbo were to address issues like this with a little depth and research instead of just printing pictures of young women in short skirts. (Great, now I’m making a moral argument, too).

    (Btw, I think my headline for this post would have been better were there not a Korean band called the “O! Brothers”. It confuses the sarcasm. So apologies all any and all who read this hoping for comments about them and surf-rock in Korea.)

    Billboard and Charts in Korea

    I was surprised to read today that my former magazine BILLBOARD is at last coming to Korea, having signed up a local partner.

    BILLBOARD is teaming up with some company called ViewLife and the Korea Entertainment Producer’s Association to produce Korea music charts and a Korean-language magazine. Good luck to them.

    Has anyone ever heard of ViewLife Inc.? I have not and was unable to find any information about the company. A dubious beginning. But who knows what that really means?

    KEPA, on the other hand, does have a website.

    Will BILLBOARD really be able to put together a chart for Korea? When I worked for the magazine, I was always impressed at how countries like Malaysia could have a chart, but somehow this was beyond Korea (no offense to Malaysia, which is a fine place).

    (Hrm… Looking at the BILLBOARD.biz website now, I see not Malaysia there anymore, but it used to be in the magazine for a while.)

    Anyhow, the point is the dubious nature of the Korean music charts. Several TV stations used to keep charts, but there were so many scandals related to how they compiled their figures that most of those charts were disbanded for several year.

    With the rise of digital music sales, the telecoms and Internet portals have offered a wide array of charts, but they are all so disorganized and spread out that none really offers an accurate overview of the nation’s music tastes (although I do like Bugs’ Indie New Music Chart)

    For several years, the Music Industry Association of Korea (nee the Recording Industry Association of Korea) used to keep track of album sales. But with album sales declining by around 80-90 percent from 2000 to today, that became an increasingly fruitless activity.

    Life became more complicated in 2002 when collecting the monies for online and digital music was taken over by the Korean Association of Phonogram Producers. This went poorly, though, as much of Korea’s music industry thought the KAPP was useless, so refused to join, and instead several private collection groups were started (ironically, one collection agency for digital revenues was bought by Soribada, the group most responsible for the rise of online file-sharing in Korea).

    MIAK was finally disbanded earlier this year, replaced by the Korea Music Content Industry Association. The KMCIA is supposed to keep track of both physical and online sales in the future, but at the moment their website appears to be under construction. I have not heard from people in the Korean industry what they think of KMCIA, but hopefully it will be more successful and useful than its predecessors.

    Suffice it to say, I am skeptical about anyone’s ability to put together a decent music chart any time soon. And more importantly, in this age of digital downloads, file-sharing, Myspace, background music, and more, how can we really measure the “top songs” anymore? Music has become such an abstract and amorphous idea, I do not see the benefit and need for such charts, not like there used to be in the 1980s or so. And with so much information available at everyone’s fingertips, people no longer really need the charts to find out about new music or trends. The power is (increasingly) out of the music labels hands, so what do charts matter?

    Pop Goes the Contract

    There is a fairly decent overview of the contract situation faced by entertainers in Korea over in today’s Joongang Ilbo. Using the lawsuit Dong Bang Shin Gi (aka TVXQ) has filed against SM Entertainment as the peg, the article looks at the long and onerous contracts that most entertainers in Korea have to have, especially singers.


    As you have probably heard, on July 31, three members of DBSG filed suit against its management company, claiming their contract is unfair. DBSG is one of SME’s most popular bands these days, and is doing especially well in Japan, where they recently played two nights in the Tokyo Dome. The band’s complaints were mostly the same things we have heard over and over again in Korea over the years — their contracts are too long, their contracts do not pay enough, the penalties for leaving the management company are too severe, the performers do not have enough control over their own careers, the performers are not paid enough (probably the biggest issue).


    I do not want to get into the details of DBSG’s particular case. That is something for the Korean courts to decide. But I do think that cases like these bring up a much bigger point.

    Arguing about the “fairness” of idol contracts — how many years should they be, how much should the performers be paid, etc. — misses the big point. I am tempted to call it “Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” but that is probably a bit harsh — after all, the Korean entertainment industry is showing few signs of sinking any time soon. It is more like arguing about what kind of pain reliever is best for a critically ill patient. That is, such talk deals mostly with the symptoms of the disease and misses out entirely on the causes.

    Korea’s pop idols are not paid poorly and overcontrolled because the management companies are evil. The management companies are just doing their best within the current system. And judging by the long list of big stars who have emerged from Korea’s music system over the years, they are apparently doing something right.

    The trouble is, Korea’s music system itself, which is very resource-intensive and very top-down (like far too much of the Korean economy in general). Because the burden of developing stars and marketing them falls solely on the music companies, it takes a huge amount of money to create new stars. The biggest companies have over 50 performers (mostly young people) in training at a time, taking dance classes, singing classes, learning how to act like stars, and usually living in company housing, eating food paid for by the company, being driven everywhere by the company. All this adds up pretty quickly.

    So when a band gets paid pennies for an album sale, you have to remember that the performers spent years in training before they earned any money, and that for each performer earning money and doing well, there are many other aspiring young people who never make it, but who nonetheless burn through company money. How many hopefuls does each company have for each performer who makes it? Five? Ten? I do not know, but it is big enough.


    The real problem (as I argue in my book, POP GOES KOREA) is the lack of diversity in Korea’s music business, in particular the lack of a live music scene. In most countries, live music is the core, the heart. Young people pick up instruments and play in their parents’ garages or wherever. Some get good enough to play in clubs. A few get good enough to put out albums (or MP3s or whatever). A very few make money. Basically, the cost and inconvenience of developing acts falls on the wanna-be performers. By the time they get to the music labels, a lot of the winnowing and development has already happened.

    Even in Japan, where J-Pop is big business, you have J-Rock and jazz and a fairly wide range of choices. And choices drive competition, when reduces the stranglehold that music companies otherwise might have.

    Strangely, Korea used to have a great live music scene. It was a long time ago, but back in the 1960s and 1970s, most of the big performers had a live music background, whether playing on the US Army bases around the country or playing the live clubs of Myeong-dong or wherever. Even in the 1980s, as Korea’s music scene turned more poppy and synthesized (and saccharine), there was still a live foundation most of the acts had — Cho Yong-pil, Shin Hae-chul, Jo Sung-mo, and the like were all live performers first.


    But in the early 1990s, the scene began to change, especially with the coming of Seo Taiji. Even though Seo Taiji wrote his songs (well, mostly) and performed them himself, he typically performed them prerecorded, with The Boyz dancing away furiously beside him. It was the formula that Korea’s music companies would use to create their boy- and girl-bands. And soon the manufactured dance bands came fast and furious. Within a few years, they dominated the TV music shows, Mnet, and the like.

    For a generation of young people in Korea, being a “star” has meant being a dancer first, a pretty face and perhaps a singer. Very few young people pick up a guitar with dreams of making it big. Sure, plenty of kids play music, for any number of reasons. But few harbor serious dreams of using the guitar (or whatever) to become rock stars.

    And as long as the live music scene is not a viable route to becoming a star in Korea, the local music scene will remain dominated by the music labels and manufactured pop music.

    The funny thing is, for all the talk of the dominating power of the music companies, the truth is they are actually very weak. They are merely responding to the economics they are given. If young people were to choose different music, the whole system would fall apart. If playing in Hongdae became a route to fame and fortune, then the system would have to change. But as long as Korean young people show no interest in anything but K-Pop, all they will be given is K-Pop. And the system will not really change.

    Jimmy Lee Jones

    I was walking through the Yongsan Electronics Market last week when I stumbled across this fun find — the first album by Jimmy Lee Jones, from 1981.


    Jimmy Lee Jones (aka Lee Jeong-myeong) lived in Nashville for many years in the 1980s, where he won a songwriting competition and recorded a couple of albums. In the 1990s, he opened a bar/cafe in Daejeon called Palomino, where he still works pretty much every day. His open-mic nights were a huge hits in the 1990s, before the economic crisis.

    This album, like his others, is a mix of English and Korean. Basically the same songs twice, in English on side A and in Korean on side B. Although Jimmy always called himself a country singer, the country on this album is in more of a 1980s easy-listening style… a bit like Leonard Cohen’s album Various Positions or Recent Songs (think Coming Back to You).

    I remember Jimmy because I used to attend the open-mic nights at Palomino with some regularity back in the day (although I never performed… just there to listen). The old part of Daejeon is pretty forgotten these days, but back in the 1990s, before Dunsan-dong was finished, it was a pretty happening part of town. Jimmy was very nice about hanging out with a noob like myself, taking me around with his friends to some great little restaurants around town.

    There is an interview with Jimmy (although very poor quality) on a local TV show here. You can also see him perform on that program (also low quality) here.

    Oh, and here is another I found.

    Anyhow, to find Jimmy’s old album (in near-mint condition, too) was a really fun little accident. I am pretty sure none of his albums were ever issued on CD, but if that ever changes, I will be sure to update this post.

    UPDATE: Well, that did not take long. Two minutes after I post this, I discover Jimmy has a blog (mostly just Korean). Lots of good stuff there, including a pretty good timelime of his life here (English and Korean).

    From a Nappeun Namja to a Nappeun Gajok

    Okay, this is one of the stranger things I have read about in some time — the Chosun Ilbo is reporting that when Rain performed a concert in Macau at the end of June, in the audience was Kim Jong-il’s grandson.

    That makes me wonder if he was also on-hand for the filming of BOYS OVER FLOWERS, when they had those Macau episodes. Maybe Kim Jong-il’s grandson was an extra? Oh Korean Wave, is there anything you can’t do?

    Wonderwha?

    Hey, the Wondergirls are now launching their English campaign for the West. If you go to Wondergirls World, you can get their international website. Click on “videos” to see their old song Nobody dubbed into English. And there is this announcement for that site on Youtube — to be honest, a little painful.


    In case you have not heard, the Wondergirls are going to be touring with the Jonas Brothers this summer. There is a Seattle Times story about the tour here.

    And an article about the English version of Nobody appearing on iTunes here — the article is okay, but the comments following it are really interesting. It is beginning to sound like Asian pop culture is finally becoming normalized in the United States. Or at least it is becoming a lot closer to normal.

    K-Music Komes to iTunes

    At long last, K-pop comes to iTunes. Fifty acts make their debut on Apple’s music service, thanks to DFSB Kollective, starting today.

    Actually, most of the acts here are not really K-pop; most of them are more interesting, rock and electronic stuff. Vidulgi OoyoO is there, along with Huckleberry Finn, Sung Kiwan and Cocore, Chang Kiha and the Faces, No Brain, and more. Not a bad selection at all.

    On the more pop side, you do have Tasha (aka “T”, aka Yoon Mirae) (who is great, btw), Drunken Tiger, Epik High and bands like that. Oh, and g.o.d and Moon Hee Jun, who are definitely big pop names, although more of yesterday.

    For a complete list, you can check out this site. More importantly, buy buy buy, buy their music.

    A Little Rain Must Fall

    Pop singer Rain and JYP Entertainment have apparently lost their US court case and have been ordered to pay over $8 million in damages for canceling Rain’s 2007 concert in Hawaii. Ouch!


    You can read all about it in The Hollywood Reporter (and many other newswire sources).

    Rain and JYP Entertainment must each pay $2.4 million, with an additional $2.3 million for breach of contract and $1 million for damages related to the cancellation.

    Because Rain canceled other tour dates that year, this could see a bunch of additional lawsuits. The most pressing one, $30 million for the LA concert cancellation, seems quite different than the Hawaii case and I think Rain should be in better shape.

    But even if he wins in LA, that loss in Hawaii has got to hurt.

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