>>23022860First of all Jpop had a huge surge of popularity overseas in the mid 80s and maintains a pretty solid fanbase to this day. Kpop succeeded because it was literally pushed and funded by the South Korean government as a cultural export because the only other thing people knew korea for was shitty MMOs or samsung. Korea literally didn't have a media export until the literal government mandated content farms began churning out music and TV shows that appealed to the world by copying american trends and putting in actors with more plastic in their face than someone who eats subway front and center. You need to realize that for any country that isn't china and has basically direct access to western media and products, american TV and music and movies dominate the global landscape to an insane degree. Only in the last maybe 4 or 5 years has america's stranglehold on the entire entertainment world weakened a bit. Korea is one of the few countries with significant economic power and a large population and a fairly developed society that didn't have some kind of recognizable export to the rest of the world. The foodies like kimchi sure, but literally less than 1/100 people even know what it is. Korea saw this as them fading into irrelivancy, so their government decided to subsidize efforts to create a marketable cultural export in the same way the thai government pays people to open up good thai restaurants overseas. But korea is a country of fierce competition and no moral quandary in completely forsaking artistic vision for the sake of profit. Thus you get Kpop, and to a lesser extent Kdramas. Everything about modern Kpop was designed from the ground up for fame, that's why they have tons of America's got talent type shows where they form boybands live on TV and literally eliminate extraneous members until they have a marketable group. See Stray Kids for reference, but that's just one of the more popular ones. And at the end of they day they still can't escape the american media powerhouse because the biggest Kpop band out there now sings in english and uses american producers. BTS hasn't even been Kpop for years, their last like 4 or 5 big hit singles have all been entirely in english. It all comes full circle.
