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Foreign.
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I'm Dan Runcy. Welcome to Trap Ital. Today's topic is K Pop. The biggest K Pop artists in the world have dominated the conversation and culture. Their fan bases are some of the most passionate across all of music. But for K Pop itself as a genre, has the genre conquered the music market in the same way? That's the question that's at the center of today's episode. BTS blackpink, Stray Kids Twice and K Pop Demon Hunters can make K Pop feel unavoidable. But thanks to a recent report from our friend of the pod, Will Page, the author and the former chief economist at Spotify, and JB Kim, the Chief Data Officer at the Korean based Creators Network, have some new analysis that shows a more complicated picture. K Pop is still only around 2% of all global streams. The genre has plateaued since 2023 and the top 5k pop entities currently account for 4. 45% of the demand. In other words, K Pop may be less of a rising tide and more of a winner takes all franchise business. On today's pod, you'll hear Will Page Join me to break it all down. We talk about why BTS Comeback may not lift every K Pop act, why fans may be more loyal to BTS or Stray Kids, but not necessarily to K Pop as a whole, and what this means about the limit of super fan economics. Our conversation goes broader too. We get into demand creation versus allocation, why Western record labels still struggle to own the fan relationship, and why the music industry may be underestimating the constraints of fandom, including money, time, attention and disposable income. So is K Pop the future of music? Let's dig in a bit more to find out. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as we did. Here's my conversation with Will Page. This episode of Trapital is presented by Symphonic, which recently launched next, their new initiative focused on catalog acquisitions, royalty advances and indie artist financing. As the needs of independent artists and labels evolve, so does Symphonic. With next, they're creating new pathways to capital and strategic partnerships, giving their clients the flexibility to grow, invest and and scale on their terms. According to Symphonix CEO Jose Brea, NEXT is designed to be flexible across a wide range of opportunities, typically supporting transactions from catalogs generating around $25,000 in the last 12 months of earnings, up to larger multimillion dollar acquisitions depending on the opportunity. To learn more, click the link in our show notes to read more about next. All right, we are here to have a conversation all about K Pop and we are joined by the Economist himself, Will Page, welcome back.
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A
Like a boomerang. Great to be back, Dan. Always love coming on trapital.
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B
Likewise. Give us the latest. You recently put out a report about K Pop and some recent trends. What's going on?
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Korea still has a special place for me as an author. Please tell your audience that my book, Tarzan Economics, retitled Pivot so we could sell it in airports, has sold more copies in Korea than the rest of the world combined, which blew me away. It took off. The success of my book and career matters a lot to me, but it also matters to your audience as we discuss this remarkable country. The thirst they have for education is a really important thing. So yeah, I'm not going to say I'm famous because I sound like what Americans call a douchebag, but I'm known in Korea, so it's quite an honor. I don't know what the book says because I have no idea what those symbols mean. But yeah, it's been a success.
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B
Well, hopefully you're selling well in Korean airports. That would be the goal, right?
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Yeah. And just to share that little tidbit with your audience, if there's any listeners of Travetal planning to write a book, please reach out. I'll tell you all the do's and don'ts of that journey. But yeah, Hudson Travel and WHSMITH reached out to my publisher, Simon Schutter and said wales book, tars and economics, we love it. We really want to get behind it. We'll even put it on our tables in airports. But books with economics in our title don't sell at airports. So you got to change everything and come back. And that's when we retitled it Pivot.
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B
And this is a good segue for you because he just put out this report that digs into K pop and what it does it doesn't say about fandom. What are some of the big takeaways for you?
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It's a podcast with hip hop at its roots. Let's quote the famous Chuck D and say, don't believe the hype. K pop has got a lot of hype. It's the phrase du jour. It's what people discuss at dinner parties. Now what actually is it? If you break it down to the numbers. And before we get into the story, some of the feedback that we've been given is the fact that it's only 2% of global streams. 2%. I would rough guess say that distrokid is bigger than K pop. And we're not discussing distrokid. As at dinner parties, we're discussing K pop. Not just it's just 2%, but it's actually trending down. So all of this hype about a market that's 2% and shrinking, I kind of think that's a bit of a showstopper. I was posed, a dear friend, Gaddy Aron asked me, he said, will, in that brain of yours, can you just have a look at this market and work out what's really going on? Because I don't think K pop is sways and sways at artists. It's just a handful. And that intuition kind of led me to ask, well, how many K pop artists can you name? And I, I would ask around and at no point did anybody need more than five fingers on their hand. Most people needed two or three. That doesn't apply to other genres. So I think that's where this whole piece came from is let's break it down to the facts. That's what a trap audience likes. Don't believe the hype, just give me the facts. Evidence based policymaking, not policy based evidence making. And we built it up from there.
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B
And one of the key stats that you had in it was that based on the Luminate data, the top five entities in K Pop accounted for 45% of the demand. And you could look at this at first and say, okay, music power, law driven, the top artists often get most of the attention. But would you say that this is pretty similar to rap rock pop, at least what we see currently from a demand perspective? Or do you think this is even more pronounced in K pop?
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So before we baffle the audience with stats, let's just keep it with intuition. If I say how many K pop artists you can name, Dan Ronci will not need all the fingers on one hand. I'm guessing if I say how many rap hacks you can name, you're going to need all your fingers and all your toes and all your family's fingers and toes as well. And that tells you that this K pop market is very heavily concentrated around a few, not the many. One stat I can give, which I designed at Spotify back in 2013, was to ask how many artists make up the top 90% of streams? Hey, you're in the top 90% of streams, Dan. You must be a big success. And in 2013 it was about 13,000. And it grew to 20,000. It grew to 25, 36, 42. It's well over 100,000 now. And I called that head fattening. More artists are sharing in the spoils of success. The head of the distribution, the Paralor, used to be a closed shop, only few people got inside. Now you've got over 100,000 artists making up the top 90% of streams. There's a lot of people in that head. If you take that as a statistical data point and then you look at the fine work that Chris Makowski and the Spotify team have done, it loud and clear, it's very clear that the head is getting more populated, not less. So I think the key point here is in every other genre we're seeing head fattening. In K pop, we're seeing head consolidation for the few, not the many. Whereas for the rest of the market, it's for the many, not the few.
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It does seem unique with K pop because the other thing you mentioned is that the genres grow. Growth has actually plateaued since 2023. And okay, well, BTS has been on hiatus. But your data is also showing that BTS is also a big deal. And in some ways it's worth calling that out.
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Specifically, it's the biggest deal. They rank at the very top of that famous chart that we published. Even when on hiatus, BTS still are kings of the castle, which you could argue two ways, Credit to bts. But I think what you're alluding to is, wait a second, they've been on military service for years. What have you done since? Shouldn't it be new talent coming down the conveyor belt that takes that throne? And the other key point, just to pad this one out a little for your audience, was to look at Demon Hunters. There's a brilliant chart. And let's just get credit here. This is myself, Will Page and JB from the Creators Network in Korea. We worked on this article together. He was a data scientist, the magician with the charts, and he presented this work to me which showed the impact of Demon Hunters, surely the great numbers in their streams and the impact on the rest of K pop. And it's flat like the Arizona desert. And this is where the original idea of a rising tide not lifting all boats came from. Demon Hunters was the rising Tide, but none of the other boats went up with it. BTS was the Rising Tide, but none of the other boats go up with it. And this is where we get into the weeds of the article. For the few, not the many. And the many don't benefit from the few.
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I look at my own kids, they love listening to K Pop Demon Hunter soundtrack. I can't say that they are listening to much K pop music as a Result, Result of them listening to the K pop Demon Hunter soundtrack. That's very different than, let's say Drake, an artist who had recently released a bunch of music when Drake was really at his peak. He's doing features with different artists and then, oh, if you get a Drake feature, what that can do for your catalog. There was a bit of a rising tide, lifting the boats because of how much collaboration was there, how much he could connect you to someone else's catalog. But it's different in this genre.
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If you said to your kids blue Jeans, what would they say? No, I'm wearing my jogging pants. Yet that was three, four years ago. One of the greatest K pop success stories there was, and now they're history. You said to your kids, stray Kids, I'm not straight, I know exactly where I'm going. It's incredible that they'll be on one ticket, but they're not on the other tickets as well. So it's very isolated type of fan base.
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B
Right. And if you look at Stray Kids, you look at the IFPI data, they're one of the top two or three acts in the world in terms of the revenue that they generated in 2025. But again, that feels very localized. I'd say the way that the others may be a bit more cross pollinating in other genres.
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I think Bernie Cho, who has taught me more about K pop than anyone else, nailed it and says, you're a fan of bts, you're not a fan of K Pop, you're a fan of Stray Kids, you're not a fan of K pop. K pop is the brand, the mainstream conversation. But the way that you associate with the bands is you're not looking around hip hop culture. You discover Public Enemy, well, you discover De La Soul, you discover De La Soul, you discover Tribe Called Quest, you discover Boogie Down Productions. While you go to, you work around the block. That's not happening here. Very different genre, very different branding.
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Some of this is also tying back to the business model that a lot of these artists have where a lot of the fans, especially in Korea, have specific subscriptions to be part of the artist fan club, getting new releases, exclusive drops, advanced notice. There are artists in the US that do have their own Patreon or some type of direct to fan subscriptions or product sales. But still that business model, that approach to fandom lends itself to just having that very direct relationship that is a bit more tunnel vision perspective as opposed to having more of a broader base that does cross pollinate in that way.
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And a Simple way of explaining this is to look at the very complicated accounts of the K pop labels. They are not just record labels, they've got everything in there. And that means, you know, management, promotion, agency, it's all there and they're line by line on their P and ls. And that also means they're a lot closer to the consumers than a simple record label ever could be. One of the anomalies of when we talk about getting close to the fan, who actually engages with the fans? It's the streaming platforms, not the record labels. And because of GDPR legislation, at least here in Europe, that applies globally, you don't get to know who those fans are. So before you pass go, before you collect £200, you've got a problem on your hands. I don't get to know who my fans are because of regulation. And all songs are worth the same. So the value of Superfans is what?
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Even if you go back to the booming days of 80s 90s when CD sales were dominating the business, they could still sell those CDs and they didn't need to have that end relationship with the customer. It was Tower Records or the distributors. But now when you're in this position where oh, these platforms and these DSPs have the relationship, it does flip it. So even trying to have the partnerships and have the collaborations to bring some of that fandom in there, it's not just adding and tipping, it's a whole infrastructure tied to what that artist fan relationship looks like and what the infrastructure around it is.
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Right. And then just flip it back to the west. The incentive structure over here, I use that terminology, is not quite the same. Like the variable costs of streaming platforms, the effect of revenue share model, if I double the size of my business, I just simply double the size of my cost base. That doesn't allow for incentives to explore this easily. You got to keep that at the back of your mind when you look at what's happened over there and why that's not happening here as well. There's straitjackets all over the place. Straitjackets and regulation straitjackets and variable costs. And we look in envy at what's happening over there. But it's worth reminding ourselves the limitations of what we can achieve here.
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B
The other thing that's interesting about the K pop relationship with fans, if someone is an active fan of K pop artists and they're paying them the equivalent of a hundred plus dollars a year, it probably precludes them from also being a super fan of another artist. These are people that are basing their money off of disposable income. They only have so much of it. So if you flip that over to the Western world, where so much of the talk on superfans has been concert tickets or vinyls or trying to find new tiers to add on to the current streaming platforms. Yes. Not only are Fans, not unlimited ATMs to just go put money towards, quote unquote, super fandom, there's only so much of the money to go around.
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Yeah. The world is not flat and constraints really matter. Shock, horror, gasp. When we look at this as well, when we talk about exploiting super fans, I mean, you just mentioned live music and I think music business worldwide read an article about Michael Rapinoe's view about superfan strategy. We can talk about it all day and all night, but the promoters have been doing this since time began. I'm going to give three times what it costs for Spotify for a year to spend three days at a summer festival this summer. Let's just do the math there. Three days in a muddy field and that's just a ticket price for the equivalent of three years of Spotify. So when you're looking at that type of budgeting, I call it mental budgeting. And I think this is a great way to say it's constraints. It's not a 0su game. I'm not saying you can't. I'm just saying you have to think about the mental budget. There may be one mental budget in the consumer's head, which is this year I'm going to spend $500 on music, my streaming account, an arena concert and a summer festival, and that's it. I've got to pay my rent, bills are going up and that's my budget. It could be that I'm going to look at my bank statements and say I'm going to give $200 a month for media subscription channels and my YouTube TV account costs X in America, that's a big thing. And somewhere in there is my music subscription service. The decisions of Michael Rapinoe will affect the superfan strategy. The decision of Netflix, who have now got me paying more than £20amonth. I started at seven. I'm using it less. It's more than tripled. That's going to affect the superfans strategy. Doesn't mean it's not doable. It just means there's a mental budget in the consumer's mind and we got to read across the columns, not down them to see it.
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Why do you think that people Missed the boat on this if you think that they did.
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I wouldn't want to be selfish, but saying a lack of economics or lack of economists might contribute because you can look at this from a business case, data science perspective, your willingness to pay analysis or whatever. But economics is always asking, what am I missing? There's this joke that Jo Caulfield always tells at the Edinburgh Festival. I'm not sure whether it will translate, but she goes into a grocery store and she picks up her groceries and she goes to the till and she's going to the till to check out. She brings out her loyalty card and halfway through putting the price together, the woman behind the counter says, looks at her chest and realizes she works for a different supermarket. The point of this joke is, ha ha, mistake. I was at Sainsbury's, but actually the loyalty card is for Tesco's. But the point is you're not loyal to just one thing. Underneath the joke is this beautiful story of I have a Tesco loyalty card. Oh, data science says he's loyal to Tesco. I carry seven or eight loyalty cards. And you can translate this for American grocery stores as well. And I think that's where the data scientists misunderstands the market. But the Economist thinks more holistically. Going back to what I said earlier, you read across the columns, you don't read down them, right?
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The amount of times I've seen people share the oh, look at how much people spend on recorded music in 1999 versus how much people spend on a music streaming subscription today. And calling that out as a challenge and it's like, sure, in a vacuum you got us there. But you need to zoom out. How much more people spending on live entertainment? How much more are people spending on all of these other subscription products? When you zoom out, how much actually is different and how many dollars are you competing for? That's the gap there that I don't know was always front of mind when people were doing this type of analysis.
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Yeah, two points. One, and it's a very, very simple point to make and I don't want to sound patronizing in any way to your audience, but I think there is in the industry still a struggle with the concept of demand creation and demand allocation. Demand creation. You talked about Tower Records. That's when I go to the till with three CDs and I end up buying five. I've just added an extra 20, $30 to the demand creation for music. Demand allocation is a fixed pot of cash and that means there's nothing else to go around for that month, for that invoicing period. I was reminded of back in those good old days of CD sales, record labels sold CDs to tyre wreckers and Virgin. And our price by the weight of palette. I mean, there's not much data science in a weight of pallet. That's a crucial point. There is just this is demand allocation world that we're working in now. I looked at the average spend by American consumers on live and recorded back in 2001. I looked at how that had changed by 2021. This is very, very rough numbers, but let's say the average spend back then was $300 and it was 50, 50 CDs and concert tickets. When you rip inflation out, what you end up with is $300, which is now 80, 20, 80% on live, 20% on recorded. Because you've had huge deflation in the value of music recorded, but large inflation in the value of live tickets. It simply makes that allocation point of the consumer still spends money on music. Back then it could have been 50, 50 tower records, three shows a year. Today it's 80, 20, 90, 10 in the favor of live spend versus recorded. You can't discuss superfan strategy by just focusing on the 20% on recorded spend. Read across the columns, people. There's much more going on.
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B
And speaking of demand, of course, a function of supply. And even within the Korean market itself, there's been some saturation. Part of it is because a lot of the people in Korea are already connected and already subscribed to these services, which does make growth, whether it's for additional artists or for additional fandom to have with K pop itself as a genre to potentially have some other factors that may play into it.
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Well, there's a lot fewer people. Point being, and I really mean this, the Korean population is shrinking. I mean, it's a big country, it's 50 million. But when you speak to Koreans, they always talk about the bigger countries. To the left of them China and to the right of them Japan. But 50 million people, it is a shrinking population. I think I mentioned this in the article. A country of 50 million people, a music subscription base of around about 15 million. There's lots of headroom for growth. Korea should be growing. Did anyone notice? This country that we all talk about and idolize was the worst performing country in the IFPI yearbook last year. The worst, the bottom, the relegation, the league table, the Jacksonville Jaguars of the music industry. It comes down to demographics. When you look at the population of, let's say 16 to 40 year olds, it's only 13.4 million of that population base. That means, and to quote my colleague JB from Creators Network, the country's fully booked. You're at saturation point. What does that mean? Well, it feeds back into something that I really learned and appreciated about the Korean psyche. I'm going to paraphrase it, it's called export or die. And we started this conversation talking about why 5K pop franchises make up 50% of demand. There's five chaebols in Korea, companies like Hyundai, LG Electronics, Samsung, who make up 50% of their global economy. This is more than just a coincidence, people. But when you have a country which is capped at 50 million people and shrinking, and it's surrounded by giant countries like Japan and China, they really believe in exporting. And you can see that in the K pop psyche. When I was out there, I'd ask Hybe, do you compete with SM Entertainment? Yes, but no. Because we can compete about some pithy chart position in Korea, but there's 8 billion people on the planet and we want all of them. When I look at the K pop Idol model that everyone talks about, what I think about is Berry Gordian Motown. He looked at how they made cars in Detroit and said, well, I'm going to do the same with artists, to be frank. And some of those contracts were a little bit suspect. And the way the artist got treated has a few concerns. The HR departments of the day might frown on that, but the history of Motown, okay, you look at K pop, it's interesting to see how they use whatever they can to make this thing export. It's almost like, how would you build a car? Where's the best place to get the chassis? Who should fit the windows? Just give me what I need to make this thing explore. And I think that export or die philosophy is deep in the K pop culture and it's worth exploring that more for your listener's benefit.
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B
Agreed. So at the end of the report, you had shared how you think that constraints should be the word of 2026 if superfans was the word of past years. Are there any other trends that you're seeing that you think similarly? The industry may be in denial about that. We may be coming back to in the future.
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Inflation. Inflation's rearing its ugly head again. I honestly think the music industry was asleep at the wheel when inflation occurred on the dawn of Russia's invasion into Ukraine and it sent a supply side shock through the global economy. Let's just take stock of what happened three, four years ago. We've talked enough about the price of music, the price of streaming services being too cheap. But beyond that, you've seen how tours have had to adjust. Harry Styles isn't touring anymore because the economics doesn't allow him to. He'll just do Madison Square Gardens. Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage, said that they did the maths on the Garbage tour. They did four shows, they made money, they did eight, they lost money. So the way that inflation's entered the music industry, we need a cold shower now. We have another war on our hands. We have another round of supply socket shock inflation. We have another prospect of mortgages going up, inflation underlines and exclamation marks. My point, which is there's going to be less disposable income to go around in the future than there was in the past, which makes any approach at a superfan strategy or super premium strategy just gives it more headwinds than tailwinds. But the broader point is just, I think other media industries, sporting industries you mentioned earlier, have been far more savvy with coping with inflation than music has. I think we've just been kind of naive to it in many ways.
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B
What do you think that sports is doing that music could adopt in terms
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of appealing to younger people? The sport I love most as an example of my book, Tarzan Economics, reaching out to the new vine and letting go of the old is Formula one. We're going to get Formula one on trapital because there's a sport that stared into the abyss, turned around its tanker and is now appealing to a demographic that it never expected. Young teenage girls love Formula one. The brilliant artist Sade is booming on streaming services again. One of the songs which has really taken off for a smooth operator, one of the reasons why it's because it's a Formula one driver who sings smooth operator when he completes overtakes on Formula one races. Teenage girls see this, love this, lock into it and add it to their playlist and hammer the song like crazy. Hits can come from everywhere. Anywhere. But who would have thought they could come from a Formula one driver completing an overtake? Yeah, when we talk about what we can learn from sports, I think everybody can learn a lot from Formula one and what they've achieved. I really admire them. Drive to survive, F1, the movie, the whole package. They tick all the boxes.
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B
And Apple especially has leaned all the way in. Anything else to share on K Pop? Before we let you go, I can
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just go back to a core question in media which applies to this, which is we start the article by asking what is K Pop? But if you go all the way back to when Netflix really took off, around 2014, I remember I used to pose this question to my colleagues at Netflix. I said, do I love House of Cards, that happens to be on Netflix, or do I love Netflix, which happens to have House of Cards? Pretty simple question to ask. I think that is kind of what's kicking off here in that do I love bts, which happens to be K Pop, or do I love K Pop, which happens to have BTs? I think the answer we're learning is the former. The latter part, K Pop side is relevant. You like the band, not necessarily the brand. When we do this piece of technical analysis in the article and your listeners will see it, we use the word franchisees. Is it a band, is it an act, is it an artist, or is it a franchise? And I would ask if we're going to actually make progress. The boy doesn't cry wolf this time next year. Have a think about the use of the word franchises. Some of your audience may agree with it, some of the audience may disagree with that use of that word. But if BTS is a franchise, you know blackpink is a franchise. And when you think of it that way, I think you can get more into understanding how this K Pop story has unfolded. But to repeat, for all the hype for the way it's dominated the debate, it is just 2% of global streams and it's trending down. What did Chuck D say? Don't believe the hype.
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B
Well, we'll definitely have to continue to follow along to see what the year end 26 data looks like. Will, this was a lot to consider and think about, so thank you. I appreciate you coming on and sharing the insights.
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A
As always, very grateful to come back on Traffordal and Love. Again, just to reiterate what you're doing, you're helping the music industry see around corners and that itself is priceless.
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B
And that is a wrap. Thanks again to Will for joining me on this one. Thank you to both Will and JB for putting out this report. We link to it in the show notes they released the report on music business worldwide. Thank you again to G and Eric, our audio and video producers from for everything that you do to help make Trapital possible. Thank you to Rwanda on our team for what you do behind the scenes and most importantly, thank you for listening. If there's one person you know that would really enjoy Trapital, whether it's this deep dive on K Pop or any of the conversations that we have, send them a link to the show. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow. And if you have a few moments, if you're not already following us, then tap that follow button. Make sure you're subscribed to get the next episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. And if you have a few minutes, leave a comment, leave a review that helps the algorithm do its thing so that trapital can reach the right people. Thanks again. Talk to you next time.