Also, the places shown in the shoot are no extravagant locations. They are just different parts of a city — parks, roads, trains, and even toilet seats! Psy himself seems surprised at how the video became so popular. YouTube has joined the celebrations along with the rest of the world. After all Gangnam Style is the first video on the website to reach two billion views. They are displaying two small icons of a dancing Psy next to the view counter as shown in the screenshot below.
If you will click on either of these icons, the screen would display the two billion number, as shown below, composed of dancing people. It all started in February when some South Korean music industries along with YG Entertainment, the agency which represents Psy, announced that they want to enter the American market. Even before Gangnam Style went viral, YG Entertainment had millions of subscribers to its YouTube channel and its different artists had huge fan following on Twitter. Also, they must have had a large number of email subscribers, the data on which is inaccessible to us.
Such numbers are necessary to kick start any marketing campaign. They knew that because of their large following they will get huge number of views right from day one.
His voice, his dance moves, his expressions of the face — they all show off his enthusiasm towards music. In order for the video to be an international hit, it first had to be a hit in South Korea.
So they decided to bring in three popular personalities of the country into the video, apart from Psy himself. Then the second one was Yoo Jae-suk , a popular comedian and TV host of the country, who appears in a dark yellow suit in the video. And the third one is No Hong-chul , the person who has been famously called the elevator guy as he appears in an elevator in the video.
He too is a comedian and a show host of South Korea. As far as my research shows, Gizmodo was the first mainstream news site to run a story on the video on 26th July, , 11 days after it was launched. Kat Hannaford of Gizmodo wrote just a few lines about it, embedding the video in the article, and linking to the English translation of the lyrics.
Then on the 30th of that month Gawker wrote a small article on it. This article got 18 thousand Facebook likes! This was followed by Billboard who published a story on Gangnam on July 31st. PSY proved especially popular around the continent, topping charts across Southeast Asia and in China, even appearing on Chinese New Year TV specials —a valuable inroad to a burgeoning market.
Whereas he was a popular, funny meme in America, PSY ended up a popular, funny performer in Asia: He continues to release albums and videos that do well commercially across the region. With the potential revealed by PSY clear, K-pop agencies started tailoring new and rising groups towards Asian markets, featuring members from Asian countries beyond Korea in an effort to connect with those nations.
THAAD missile defense system. Despite politicized backlash, K-pop has become the standard sound in Asia. As for America, K-pop heavyweights like G-Dragon and CL have failed to connect widely here, and PSY himself never reached anything near the same level of success unless you count a Super Bowl commercial for pistachios , but still, the genre has achieved an impressive level of stateside success.
Korea has been perfecting these cultural products by creating a huge factory-like system for K-pop. A recent New Yorker article on K-pop details the regimen of a K-pop trainee: lessons in singing, dancing, acting and Japanese, Chinese and English, and media coaching.
Trainees may also be forced to follow strict curfews, diets and dating rules. The New Yorker says "Good looks are a K-pop artist's stock-in-trade" and reports that one agency "forbids its female trainees to have boyfriends and bars any food or water after 7pm, according to the Straits Times , Singapore's English-language newspaper.
While K-pop might be like Motown in how industrialized its process it is, it differs from it in one key way: Motown developed in the era of the radio and the phonograph, but K-pop grew up in the age of television and the internet, as Max Fisher says in the Washington Post.
That means that Korean pop, from its beginning, was a visual medium. NPR's Chace says :. That means the moment Koreans started listening to Korean pop music, they were listening through their screens. They were watching their music. Additionally, Korea is the most wired nation in the world, so the record labels got really good at making YouTube videos.
If the video weren't as outrageous and hilarious as it is, it would not have gotten the traction it did in Western markets. So, is there a lesson that the K-pop industry can learn from Psy, who is much older and more portly than the typical "airbrushed" K-pop star? Yes -- primarily that he's willing to make fun of himself. If the K-pop industry can let go of its focus on producing perfectly polished but kind of boring pop dolls, and still capitalize on its video-making prowess, then we may be seeing and hearing a lot more of Korean pop in the future.
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