KPOP entertainment industry has attracted attention and gaining recognition worldwide. K-pop, or Korean pop music, includes dance-pop, pop ballads, techno, rock, hip-hop, R&B, and so on.
First Korean singers appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 was the girl group called Wonder Girls in 2009. Wonder Girls gained recognition with the song “Nobody”.
In 2012, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” reached 3 billion views on YouTube and ranked No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Since the ”Gangnam Style”, the K-pop began to spread around the world.
The worldwide success of “Gangnam Style” was followed by a surge of K-pop boy group, BTS. BTS won multiple Top Social Artist awards at the Billboard Music Awards. BTS not only has a huge number of worldwide fans but also has contributed to global recognition of K-pop as a genre.
Today, KPOP is increasingly globalizing its impact not only among their fan groups but also within their members; many groups are featuring collaboration with American pop singers as well as presenting members from other countries, notably Chinese, Taiwanese, and Thais.
Books on KPOP (Available from U of I Library Catalog)
Title: Globalization and popular music in South Korea : sounding out K-pop
Located at: Music and Performing Arts Library, ML3502.K6 F84 2016
ISBN: 9781138840010
Publication Date: 2016
This book examines a vibrant example of contemporary popular music from the non-Anglophone world and provides deeper insight into the structure of popular music and the dynamics of cultural globalization through a combined set of ethnographic, musicological, and cultural analysis.
Title: The Birth of Korean Cool
Located at: Main Stacks, DS923.23 .H66 2014
ISBN: 9781250045119
Publication Date: 2014-08-05
Euny Hong writes about her own experiences of her adolescence in Seoul, about historical and current South Korean culture, and about the Korea’s entertainment industry.
Title: K-Pop Live: fans, idols, and multimedia performance
Located at: Music and Performing Arts Library, ML3502.K6 K577 2018
ISBN: 9781503605039
Publication Date: 2018-08-07
In K-pop Live, Suk-Young Kim investigates the meteoric ascent of Korean popular music in relation to the rise of personal technology and social media, situating a feverish cross-media partnership within the Korean historical context and broader questions about what it means to be “live” and “alive.”
Title: From factory girls to K-pop idol girls
Located at: Music and Performing Arts Library, ML3502.K6 K5737 2019
ISBN: 9781498548823
Publication Date: 2019
Focusing on female idols’ proliferation in the South Korean popular music (K-pop) industry since the late 1990s, Gooyong Kim critically analyzes structural conditions of possibilities in contemporary popular music from production to consumption.
Title: K-pop: popular music, cultural amnesia, and economic innovation in South Korea (Korean)
Located at: Main Stacks,
ISBN: 9791159053757
Publication Date: 2015/transl. 2019
K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea (Eng) seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations.
Title: The Cambridge companion to K-pop
Located at: Music and Performing Arts Library, ML3502.K6 C35 2023
ISBN: 9781108837057
Publication Date: 2023
The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop investigates the meteoric ascent of K-pop against the backdrop of increasing global connectivity wherein a distinctive model of production and consumption is closely associated with creativity and futurity.
KPOP news websites
There are websites dedicated in reporting news related to the Korean Entertainment industry.