K-pop is an international sensation: “KPop Demon Hunters,” a Netflix animated film about members of a fictional K-pop group, became the platform’s most watched film of all time, while songs from the movie topped charts. Plus, Blackpink’s Rosé just won “Song of the Year” for “APT” at the Video Music Awards, marking the first time a K-pop song has won in the category. Despite this, reports suggest that the global popularity of K-pop may be faltering. In an industry where producers and agencies have enormous control over their artists, will some try to gain more fans by shifting their artists’ image, or would they risk losing fans? According to a new study published in Strategic Management Journal, the answer depends on the producer’s status.
The new research — from Heeyon Kim of Cornell University, Yoonjeoung Heo of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, and Chi-Nien Chung of Hong Kong Polytechnic University — expanded on prior studies that focused on the limitations of category shifting for artists. The team considered how, when social actors shift categories over time, they develop multifaceted identities, which can offer substantial advantages to the artist.
The authors proposed three ways in which an actor’s status influences category shifting: First, they suggest that middle-status actors are most motivated to follow market trends to gain more attention from the broad audience. Second, they hypothesized that high-status actors are under more pressure to create distinct identities in the short run, making them more likely to take risks and shift in a way that allows them to pursue their long-term goal of creating multifaceted identities. Lastly, knowing that status answers to larger societal and institutional norms such as gender roles, the team considered limits to status-based identity shifts.
The researchers then explored the impact of producer or agency status in the Korean pop music — or K-pop — scene on their ability to shift their artists’ image category.
“The interesting thing about K-pop is that the producers, the agencies, they are the ones manufacturing groups and the groups themselves don’t have much control over how they’re being portrayed,” Kim explains. “They’re given songs, they’re given outfits, they’re given a role to play.”
Within the K-pop sphere, the researchers were also able to explore the impact of social norms on identity shifts, as male and female K-pop idol groups are often classified into separate subcategories and are managed by agencies using different strategies.
To test their theories, the research team determined a list of possible K-pop concepts, and stratified agencies into high, middle, or low status based on the number of awards they received. They explored a sample of 680 songs by 122 idol groups from 76 agencies of varying statuses between 2004 and 2016. They measured concept category shifts of the groups by coding the concepts displayed in music videos, and matched the groups to the agencies. The results of the study supported all three of the team’s hypotheses: Idol groups from middle-status producers or agencies are most likely to follow market-dominant concept trends. Groups from high-status agencies pursue less frequent shifts in the short term — instead focusing on establishing distinct identities — but they tend to pursue the most radical shifts when they do change concepts. And finally, they found these effects to be true mostly with male idol groups, suggesting agency status is limited for changing the concepts for female groups, who are more constrained by societal gender expectations.
The fans of high-status agencies’ groups support their idols no matter what, supporting the producers’ decision to experiment with different categories for their artists and allowing them to gain even broader support. High-status producers become trendsetters, while mid-status producers will follow the trends to remain at the center of attention.
“When I was a teenager, I was a groupie for a K pop band,” Kim says. “I remember myself as a fan: I didn’t care what kind of music was released, I was going to buy all the CDs and merchandise. So the fans of high-status agencies’ groups, they just support their idols no matter what. The high-status agencies then are able to experiment to figure out what will get a broader audience’s support.”
For managers, understanding whether they’re high or middle status can determine whether to spend time following trends to solidify their fandom, or whether they have loyalty to experiment without major consequence.
