But Newsweek says “K-pop hasn’t expanded it’s fanbase in Japan since it’s peak in 2010.”
Furuya, the music journalist who is familiar with Korean Music industry points out “Most of current fans of K-pop in Japan are fans of 東方神起 (known as TVXQ! in South East Asia)”.
The male idol group made Japan debut in 2005, has gained solid fanbase through traveling aroung Japan for promotion just like any other sprouting Japanese bands. They got big breakthrough in 2007, but ended up being stuck in legal battle against their agencies, and disbanded in 2009 at the their career peak in Japan.
“The number of fans of TVXQ are said to be more than hundreds of thousands, and these people began to get interested in other K-pop bands as they are convinced a Korean band can be so adopted to Japanese entertainment industry by TVXQ’s success. And in Korea, it’s so happened that SNSD was dominating the music scene at the time. Simply put, SNSD could become so popular in Japan all thanks to TVXQ’s enormous success. There’re of course people who have become K-pop fans after TVXQ, but overall most of current K-pop fans are, the people who play a major role to make K-pop still in the game in Japan are those who started listening K-pop because of TVXQ.”
90% of K-pop fans in Japan are females. When you go to K-pop concert in Japan, most of audiences are women. People in the industry first thought female K-pop bands would never go big in Japan since in Japan marketing idols as sex symbols can never go mainstream. Several bands tried to break the ice, but all ended up failures.
But in February of 2010, young girls flocked to Kara’s first event in Japan. Thr group surely caught young Japanese girls hearts. Media wrote a headlines hyping there may be an early sign of K-pop boom in Japan.
But it’s the rule of the world that those who can easily get hooked on new stuffs are those who are easy to get tired of them. There’s no way that other music acts can reproduce TVXQ’s success in Japan, which was the result of their years of ground work in Japan. But at the time of 2011, Japanese record labels were crazy about purchasing contracts with K-pop acts that the Korean music industry was producing unrestly. Because it financially makes sense to buy already professionally trained K-pop bands at “cheap” price instead of finding domestic talents and invest a bunch of money to develop their music and presentation skills.
So when this K-pop bubble, which seems just consuming the asset created by TVXQ and if you remember Bae Yong-joon who is still incredibly popular in Japan, will burst?
Usami, the chief editor of Korean Entertainment Magazine “Han Fun!” expressed his concern, saying “If dozens of idols groups flock to Japan at once, people may be overwhelmed and lose interest in K-pop in general.”
There’s another famous story that Japanese people as well as Koreans who take the future of K-pop in Japan seriously It’s a question that “Is K-pop just trying to make easy money off of Japan? If so, won’t it hurt K-pop in the long run?”
The amount money people pay for K-pop events such as fan meetings or concerts are more expensive than price for the events of Japanese idols like Johnny’s or popular Western artists like Lady Gaga. K-pop is about 30 to 50% more expensive than these music acts.
Usually fan meeting of K-pop bands in Korea is free, while in Japan, they charged fans a whopping price – normally somewhere around 100 USD – even though actors or singers only sing one or two songs, playing casual games, enjoying a brief talk with fans.
Bae, the writer at Korea online news paper My Daily complained about the way Korean music industry doing business in Japan, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to pay little attention to long term satisfaction of fans in order to focus on near-term profits. Current system where fans have to pay unreasonably expensive fee will never affect K-pop’s long term growth in a good way.”
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