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Category: Korean music (Page 9 of 11)

Korean Music Charts – October 2007

Back when I started this blog, I included the Music Industry Association of Korea’s month music sales chart as part of my regular comments, but after a few months I stopped. It was just too depressing. Sales were miserable and the quality of music in the charts was even more miserable. I did not want to spend all my time complaining and being negative, so I decided not to write about it.

But I found myself curious about how the music biz has been doing this year, so I checked out the latest MIAK charts.

The most immediate thing I noticed is that only one album released in 2007 has sold over 100,000 albums. Pretty shocking, really, considering just a few years ago top stars would move 1 or 2 million. But these days, SG Wannabe can become the biggest selling artist of the year with just 190,000 albums sold.

The second thing I noticed was the dominance of ballads in October. The top five albums are all ballad oriented!

It also looks like that brute-force marketing is less and less useful. Super Junior’s latest has already fallen to 11th, after being released on Sept. 20. Wondergirls have dropped all the way to 17th, and have sold just 18,000 copies of their first album since it was released on Sept. 13. TELL ME might be catchy and might even be a hit at the karaoke rooms, but Wondergirl fans are not buying CDs at all.

Other notes:

  • Lee Sang-eun’s 13th album made its debut in 25th.
  • Hey, Shim Soo-bong has a new album! It’s her 11th, and it hit the stores on Oct. 25. Not so many Shim fans left apparently, as it opened in 34th. Not that time or that person anymore, I guess.
  • With foreign music selling so miserably, classical music is growing ever bigger, at least on a proportional basis.
  • Even Paul Potts (the musical equivalent of the Nixon-Kennedy debate) is selling in Korea. And Andrea Bocelli. I’m not sure whose success I find more distressing. Do yourself a favor — check out their stories on Wikipedia or Youtube or wherever, cry, emote do whatever you feel compelled to do. Then head directly to a music store and completely IGNORE their CDs. Buy something by Jussi Bjorling instead. Your ears will thank you.
    This Month Artist Album Name Release Date This Month’s Sales Total Sales
    1. Eru Vol. 3 – Eru Returns 9.19 30,978 42,228
    2. Brown-Eyed Soul Vol 2 10.31 30,095 30,095
    3. FT Island FT Island 6.08 28,746 76,097
    4. See Ya Vol. 2 5.25 27,807 81,393
    5. SG Wannabe Vol. 4 4.06 19,050 190,125
    6. Jo PD Vol. 6 10.22 17,364 17,364
    7. Cho Shin-seong Vol. 1 10.25 15,405 15,405
    8. Lee Soo-young Vol. 8 – Set It Down 9.12 15,027 51,035
    9. Lee Seung-chul Vol. 9 – The Secret of Color 2 10.18 14,604 14,604
    10. Taewangsasingi OST Taewangsasingi OST 10.17 13,841 13,841

    (source: MIAK)

    And here is the foreign sales chart:

    This Month Artist Album Name Release Date This Month’s Sales Total Sales
    1. Once OST Once OST 8.14 12,160 13,138
    2. BoA Complete Clips 2004-2006 3.21 12,000 13,258
    3. Richard Yongjae O’Neill Winter Journey 9.11 9,968 9,968
    4. Luciano Pavarotti Pavarotti Forever 9.20 3,730 5,606
    5. Orchestra de Nodame Orchestra de Nodame Live 8.23 3,552 12,074
    6. Richard Yongjae O’Neill Lachrymae 2006.9.07 3,222 30,703
    7. BoA Love Letter 10.04 3,189 3,189
    8. Andrea Bocelli Best of Andrea Bocelli 10.25 3,063 3,063
    9. Ennio Morricone Gold Edition 10.02 2,445 2,445
    10. Paul Potts One Chance 8.02 2,113 2,113

    (source: MIAK)

  • Concert Calendar

    Just a quick note to say that Kongjung Camp is having a good bash tomorrow (Saturday) night. Fourth anniversary, I do believe. Several acts will be playing, including Byul. Show starts around 7 or 7:30 or so. (Kongjung Camp is close to Sanullim Theater).

    Oh, and here is an interesting lineup at Club FF for tomorrow, too:


    Also, on Dec. 8, DGBD is having a toys for tots show. Show starts at 6pm and includes Kingston Rudieska, Galaxy Express, and Johnny Royal.

    And on Dec. 22, Asia Kungfu Generation is playing at … uh, I forgot. Somewhere in Hongdae. Rolling Hall?

    The end of the year is always a big concert time in Korea. As I hear about more shows, I will post.

    UPDATE: I forgot to mention this year’s Bud Rock Concert coming up on Nov. 17 at Olympic Stadium. Most of the bands do not excite me terribly much — Starsailor, Lee Seung-hwan, Rize, Supercard and Dr. Core 911. But the most interesting part of that show, imho, is the Japanese band Ellegarden. At just 22,000 won, it is not a bad deal at all.

    Catching up on the Past

    I had a nice little surprise at Kyobo Books yesterday — the Korean Film Archive has put out yet another box set of great old films. This set is called THE PAST UNEARTHED, and it is a collection of movies from the Japanese colonial period. Included are ANGELS ON THE STREETS (1941), SPRING OF KOREAN PENINSULA (1941), VOLUNTEER (1941) AND STRAITS OF CHOSUN (1943).


    The set comes with a booklet about the films and the period (in Korean and English) and a photo reproduction of the original script for ANGEL ON THE STREETS, in Japanese and Korean. It’s all pretty funky stuff.

    Nothing in English about the film at the Korean Film Archives website yet, although you can read their Korean entry here. More about the DVD set at the Kyobo Books website here. And at less than 30,000 won, it is quite worth purchasing.

    —-

    As long as I am on the subject of the olden days, I should mention a couple of other interesting things I ran across recently.

    First, there are these old Korean singers’ videos on Youtube. Totally worth checking out:
    Kim Choo-ja
    Kim Choo-ja
    Kim Jung-mi
    Kim Jung-mi (short clip)
    Sandpebbles

    And apparently the nice people at Brothers Entertainment have set up a Kim Choo-ja website.

    From Mokpo Tears to Vegas Cheers

    I went to an eclectic little party yesterday evening for a new production company that is dedicated to putting together a film and a musical about the Kim Sisters.

    The Kim Sisters were Sook-ja, Mi-a and Ai-ja Kim, a trio that began singing of US troops in 1954. They were the three of the seven children of Kim Hae-song, a classical music conductor who was captured and killed by the North Koreans during the Korean War, and Lee Nan-Young, one of Korea’s most famous singers before the War, perhaps best known for THE TEARS OF MOKPO.


    Lee had been singing for the foreign troops, to earn enough money for them to survive, when one day she got the idea of having three of her daughters sing, too. The girls did not know English, so they learned the songs phonetically. Just 13, 12 and 11 years old at the time, the first song they sang was the Hoagy Carmichael tune OLE BUTTERMILK SKY.

    The show went well and soon the sisters were singing regularly, all the popular music and early rock’n’roll of the day. Soldiers would give them chocolate bars, which in turn they would trade in for real food on the black market, but it was enough to get by. In 1958 they were discovered by an American agent who booked them into the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas, as part of a show called the China Doll Review. The three of them earned $400 a month. After a month at the Thunderbird, they were picked up by another Vegas hotel, the Stardust, where they played for eight months.


    In 1959 they got their big break when they were asked to play on the Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan was, of course, huge back then, and being on his show made the Kim Sisters a nationally known act. Over the next 14 years, they would perform on Sullivan 22 times, the most of any performer (at least according to what I have read). They were on all the big TV shows of the day, they were featured in LIFE and NEWSWEEK and other magazines. Far from singing for chocolate, the Kim Sisters eventually were making around $13,000 a week.


    They kept performing in Vegas and elsewhere for years, although after they got married in the 1970s, the act pretty much came to an end. Ai-ja died in 1987 of lung cancer, but they other two sisters are still alive and living in the United States still.

    It certainly looks like a pretty interesting story. Given how popular musicals are in Korea these days, I am guessing they could have the most luck with that genre. But who knows?

    They definitely have some interesting people helping them out. At the opening party was a broad mix of producers, actors, artists, writers, and assorted bigwigs. I’ll restrain myself from dropping names, but it was quite a cool event.

    Btw, I am not skipping the production company’s name to be coy or because I am forgetful. They had a name chosen, but they found a problem with it, so now they are looking for a new name.

    Btw 2, that first link about the Kim Sisters in turn linked to a long and rather interesting interview with Kim Sook-ja, aka Sue Kim Bonafazio, as part of some oral history project at UNLV.

    Btw 3, I also found this link interesting.

    Rank Music

    Fairly lame article at The Korea Herald today (big surprise, I know) about pop music television programs that manages to repeat a lot of silly notions, reverse cause and effect, and in general misunderstand the music industry’s woes. You can read it here.

    The point of the article is that Korea’s TV channels are thinking of bringing back chart shows, counting down the top songs of the week. Those shows were common and popular on Korean TV until a constant barrage of ranking scandals forced all those shows to give up their ranking schemes

    That type of program was abolished in 2001 as debate over the fairness of such criteria gathered momentum. A big part of the controversy involved the recognition that such popularity-based programs were biased too much in favor of the tastes of teenyboppers, and more seriously, regarding possible favoritism resulting from the access which artists’ agents had to programmers.

    Note: The Korean Herald story claims the chart shows were discontinued in 2001, but I believe only KBS’s Music Bank ended its countdown then. SBS’s POP CHART LIVE went until January 2003. I cannot find my notes right now, but I think MBC, Mnet and KMTV all discontinued their charts later in 2003 when some big payola scandals broke.

    Anyhow, the story was mostly okay up until that point, then it continues with this:

    With the pop music market always redefining the term “worst possible,” regarding really poor sales, (there have been only two albums which have sold over 100,000 copies in the first half of this year), networks are considering resurrecting such programs as a way of revitalizing the local pop music scene, which, once again, is triggering a controversy.

    Not really the writer’s fault, but what a stupid notion — that chart shows will bring back interest in the music scene. Ratings were falling for the music chart shows for some time, as were sales.

    “The depressed pop music market is related to the unpopular pop music programs,” Kang Young-sun, producer of Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation’s “Show Music Center” said in an interview. “The rating system should be positively encouraged if it can help the market regain its old popularity,” he continued.

    Ugh. No, the depressed music market is not a result of the unpopular music programs. The programs are unpopular because the music is unpopular.

    Whatever angle you approach it from, the controversy boils down to a dispute over the fairness of the programs’ criteria in deciding rankings.

    Well, yes and no. Having reliable, fair charts is important. Certainly in the past, Korea’s various charts were blatantly unfair, biased against artists who did not promote on a particular channel, and highly influenced by payola. Today, though, there is a lot less money being made and a lot more outlets for music (albeit the same music most of the time).

    No, the real problem is not the current lack of charts but the continual reliance on teen-pop music to the complete disregard of almost all other genres. Sure it worked for Seo Taiji and H.O.T, but you can only go to the well so many times. It has been 14 YEARS, and the Korean music industry is still cranking out the same, tired formula.

    When the Backstreet Boys stopped selling, the American music industry moved on and found new acts. Pop rises, pop falls, rock rises, rock falls, same with hiphop, country, and all the other genres. Just imagine what the American music industry would be like if, once Backstreet Boys stopped selling so well, the music industry kept pumping out more and more Backstreet Boys (and Backstreet Boys-like music). Of course sales would plummet.

    But that is what the Korean music industry has done. A little bit of “techno” has been added to the mix, some “urban” (god, I hate the euphemism), but for the most part, it is the same gruel as ever. Sure, middle school kids deserve their bubblegum pop, but what about the rest of the country? Are 25-year-old men supposed to listen to that music? Are 40-year-old women?

    Pop music desperately needs other genres to recharge its batteries. The annoying thing (to me) is that Korea once had that diversity. It had folk, rock, trot (of course) and more. But the military governments killed a lot of that, and then the huge success of dance-pop and ballads made way too many producers focus that music, which they did very well, but at the expense of almost everything else.

    The movie industry revived in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it discovered new voices and variety (although that had given way to an ominous sameness in the last couple of years). Korean TV dramas did well around Asia for a time because they were so different than local fair (although they, too, are showing signs of losing popularity due to sameness).

    When will producers in all of Korea’s media realize that it is to their advantage to keep trying new things, instead of safely repeating the same thing, over and over? Korea’s writers, directors and songwriters have all shown themselves to be incredibly talent and creative when given the chance. What is it going to take for them to get the chance again? Or, better yet, when will they demand their creative freedom again?

    Buena Hongdae Social Club

    You know that experience where you walk past some place (a sign or an entranceway or wherever) hundreds of times without giving the location a second thought, then one day, for no particular reason, you decide to go inside and discover an amazing place? Something really special was right under your nose the whole time, but you had no idea. Well, that happened to me on Thursday night.

    The location in question was MOONGLOW, a jazz club kind of in Hongdae, kind of outside the usual Hongdae limits (somewhere between Hongdae proper and Hapjeong Subway Station).

    Moonglow is owned and operated by Shin Kwan-Woong, one of Korea’s early jazz musicians. He’s apparently been playing professionally since 1966, and is an interesting character. He plays piano pretty much every night at the club, with the band accompanying him changing each night.


    I have not been there every night of the week, but Thursday nights are pretty cool, as the band consists of all his old friends and bandmates from the 1960s. Some pretty solid names playing him, and they still can groove. Somewhat like the guys in BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (to use a rather uncreative comparison).

    According to the Moonglow website, on drums is the amazing 76-year-old Choi Se-jin, who has been playing since 1947 (but last Thursday, I think someone else was playing… looked different from the photos of Choi).

    Anyhow, I’ll try to write more about these guys some time soon.

    If I have a complaint (and me being me, of course I do), it is how typical their repertoire was. If I could get through the rest of my life without hearing Chuck Mangione, I would not be unhappy (Feels So Bad). But I imagine they playlist reflects what people are always asking them to play. And at least the band played the hell out of those tunes, turning them into something special. That club is definitely a great find. Highly recommended.

    (Sorry, could not find an English map).

  • This is kind of random. STARDUST had a pretty understated opening on Aug. 14 across Korea. I saw it at the local Art Reon theater, where it was playing on the smallest screen they had. Well today I checked out the Art Reon movie listings, and lo and behold, STARDUST is now playing on the second-biggest screen in the multiplex. Is this a sign the movie is getting really good word of mouth? Or is it just one of those inexplicable things?
  • I finally checked out SHIM”S TAPAS in Hongdae. Wow, their food is really first-rate. Coffee, too. Homemade bread, plenty of choices… The group I was with ordered about eight things (not including dessert), and seven of them were excellent (their pizza was okay, but not great). Another big recommendation — if you can get a seat. I will post a map if I can ever find one. It is located in Seogyo-dong, if that helps, not far from Sanulim Theater (even closer to the bar Stereo, if you know where that is).
  • Last Chance to Hear an Echo

    One thing I am trying to enjoy, now that the weight of my book is off my shoulders, is a little more live music. Last weekend, for instance, I went to the album release party for ANAKIN PROJECT, a quirky “folk punk” band that has Zho Yoonsuk on bass. Very much a stripped-to-the-basics affair over at Yogiga (an art/music space that I quite enjoy), but it was fun little evening.

    This weekend, however, promises a fairly significant show — the last Korean concert ever for Jet Echo. And Jet Echo is not alone. They will be playing with Sato Yukie, Mineri, Galaxy Express and a bunch of other bands (which can be seen on this incredibly funky poster below).


    To be honest, Jet Echo was never really my favorite band. Although the last time I saw them play, in January, it was quite a good show — a lot of energy and fun. I think they have gotten a lot better since the first time I saw them play, 2-3 years ago in Gongjung Camp. Since then, Jet Echo has become quite a staple of the Hongdae live scene. Definitely worth a look now, while you still can.

    The concert begins at 9pm at Club Ta. Strangely, though, the Club Ta website seems not to have a map of their venue (unless it is hidden somewhere my Mac browser cannot see). Somewhere in Seogyo-dong (the north side of Hongdae).

    Like Water Through a Skull…

    After all the articles about how Rain or Se7en or BoA or whomever would be invading the American pop charts, who thought that Korea’s first big chart success would be from a dredlocked guy doing dancehall reggae/hiphop? Anyone? Anyone at all?

    Well, I’m amazed — the first US single by Korean singer Skull, BOOM DI BOOM DI, has now hit the No. 5 spot on Billboard’s R&B/hiphop singles chart. That’s a solid five-spot jump from last week. He’s also No. 17 on the hot pop singles chart.

    I remember watching a video by Stoney Skunk (a duo Skull is a member of) on television a while back and thinking “What the hell?” After seeing acts like the Bubble Sisters, I was ready for the worst, and could not really listen to their music impartially.

    But having listened to BOOM DI BOOM DI a couple of times (and seen the video), I find it catchy and interesting (and that is coming from a guy who usually loathes reggae/hiphop).

    I just hope with all this success, he will earn enough money to buy a shirt. Poor guy looks chilly…

    UPDATE: Well, here is a dubious note. No signs of Skull’s single anywhere on the other Billboard singles charts except the sales charts — the easiest charts to manipulate (because CD singles in the United States are so low, it only takes a couple hundred to make a big impact).

    Look at the No. 1 song on the R&B sales chart — Big Face’s “Get My Weight Up” — which does not appear anywhere on the regular R&B singles chart. That sort of thing does not look good.

    Maybe there is a simple explanation. Or maybe I do not understand the charts well enough. I certainly hope my cynicism is misplaced. I guess we shall see…

    UPDATE 2: I just talked to my editors at BILLBOARD, and they said it is not unusual for an artist to chart on the sales charts but not elsewhere, especially when an artist is just starting out. So it is very possible that my earlier reaction was off-base. Interesting how quickly the rumors get going in Korea, though. Jealousy, I guess.

    UPDATE 3: Newest charts are out. BOOM DI BOOM DI is up one to No. 4 this week on the R&B/Hiphop Sales chart… but down two on the overall singles sales chart. You can use the same link in the main story. Apparently BILLBOARD does not offer historical sales charts (at least not for free).

    Random Notes – Vol. 2, No. 8

  • Early word I am hearing about the box office on Song Hye-gyo’s costume feast HWANG JINYI is not good. It opened Wednesday, on the holiday, but its attendance so far is quite poor. Strangely, HWANG JINYI’s distributor, CJ Entertainment, also released SHREK 3 on the same day. Maybe they were thinking the two films had a totally different target market, so would not interfere with each other? Anyhow, victory goes to SHREK 3.
  • According to local media reports in Korea (and, of course, the thousands of obsessed fans over at Soompi.com), Rain’s North American tour has been canceled “postponed.” This Soompi account is basically correct. No big surprise there. Rain is a very nice young man, but his break from JYP Entertainment was one of the more spectacularly poor career moves I have seen in quite some time (imho). Anyhow, I hope he manages to straighten out his various troubles soon and gets back to making his fans happy.
  • Speaking of JYP… Look for a big media blitz coming out soon for the opening of the JYP Entertainment office in New York. Billboard will have Park Jin-young on the cover (with substantial stories inside), along with all the major media you would expect in New York. JYP may have lost Rain, but the company still has a lot of really interesting stuff in the works.
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