Does the name “J. Y. Park” ring a bell? If so, chances are that you have brushed shoulders with the K-pop industry. While not a household name outside of K-pop fandom circles, this Korean songwriter and entertainment CEO also maintains the almost unexplainable role of “weird dad of the K-pop industry” – from overly-autotuned and painfully-2016 performances and memeable slick back dance challenge videos, Park Jin-young, stage name J. Y. Park, has taken on many different roles indeed.
Park’s latest role pushes his range to new extremes, this time leading him to report directly to South Korean President Lee Jae-myung himself. The entertainment CEO’s appointment to a ministerial-level political position to the Presidential Committee on Popular Culture Exchange reveals something deeper about K-pop industry dynamics than another weird trend: it demonstrates how South Korea’s government leverages the power of a colossal music industry that built the Korean Wave and its accompanying global acclaim of the nation.
Even so, the South Korean government is not the only one starting to take notice. As the Korean music industry continues to evolve, the demonstrably successful “K-pop model” itself is a new addition to the export list—both in aesthetics and in strategy. As South Korea continues to capitalize on the success of its industry, artists and agencies in several other countries have begun to debut their own adaptations. These external case studies, as well as South Korea’s political responses to K-pop, further legitimize the model’s power and contribute to its global recognition through its ongoing expansion.
Teaser: A Short History of K-Pop and K-Politics
K-pop, short for “Korean pop,” originated in South Korea in the early 1990s and has dramatically expanded around the world in recent years. Starting with Psy’s “Gangnam Style” back in 2012 and cemented into mainstream with BTS’s global success throughout the late 2010s, K-pop has continued to gain recognition from audiences around the world. In recent years, a variety of K-pop groups have become mainstays at Coachella, and the globetrotting arena tours from groups like BlackPink, Seventeen, and Stray Kids continue to break records at a breakneck pace.
Often, the success of modern K-pop is attributed to its hyper-polished, high-budget aesthetic curation, as well as its effective use of social media and organized digital fan bases. Compared to other music genres, however, K-pop often adds a noteworthy cultural fingerprint to the mainstream pop aesthetic. Jo Elfving-Hwang, an associate professor at Curtin University tells the university’s newspaper, “The Korean Wave has thrived not just because of its content, but because of its adaptability and the sense of belonging it fosters among fans worldwide.” Google Trends search popularity also indicates that K-pop presents as a rare instance of a music trend not headquartered in Hollywood–or anywhere in the West. Rather, the popularity of K-pop draws on its unique showcase of South Korean national identity, while simultaneously crafting a palatable and modern globalized identity. This novel mix has massively succeeded in drawing in global fans regardless of borders or language barriers, and strongly contributed to the “Korean Wave” of global South Korean cultural diffusion since the late 1990s, also dubbed “hallyu.”
The power of K-pop has not been lost on the Korean government, either. Various foreign leaders have formally recognized the impact of Korean entertainment in the digital age, including U.S. President Barack Obama, saying, “It’s no wonder so many people around the world have caught the Korean Wave.” Various K-pop groups have played notable roles in Korean foreign diplomacy, with one famous example being girl group Red Velvet’s 2018 performance for Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, North Korea. Notably, however, K-pop’s forays into diplomacy have not been solely limited to music showcases. Also in 2018, boy band BTS spoke at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly for a campaign on youth education and empowerment. Subsequently, they have appeared at the UN two more times. More recently, boyband TXT also launched a global partnership with UNICEF in support of youth mental health awareness. These trends deepen the impact of the industry beyond its usual lighthearted digital landscape and demonstrate how K-pop carries a unique political voice given its primarily youth-populated fanbases.
Title Track: The Hard Impacts of Hallyu
In traditional international relations theory, the impact of the South Korean music industry is often dubbed as a prime example of “soft power:” the ability to shape preferences by co-opting rather than coercing. The K-pop industry has skyrocketed international recognition of Korean culture, and many people who listen to the music go on to also consume other Korean media, try the country’s food, and even learn its language. As a result, K-pop facilitates massive levels of widespread cultural recognition and diffusion, as well as stimulating economic growth in a country that began to industrialize just six decades ago.
Before K-pop gained international popularity, Korean culture had a very limited presence in most mainstream environments, especially in the West. In the United States, Korean culture was generally limited to immigrant communities in isolated local enclaves. This led to very limited literacy about Korean culture and identity: several Korean content creators have shared online stories of their Korean food being called “disgusting” in school cafeterias, and traditional media has long noted a broad deficit in Asian representation.
However, K-pop has contributed to a recent turning point in these trends. In 2025, the movie “KPop Demon Hunters” became the most-watched original title in Netflix history, both reflecting and encouraging the soft power phenomenon. The movie draws on the popularity of the 2010s K-pop sound and the music genre’s model of curated girl and boy groups, then uses this established scene to introduce other aspects of Korean culture: popular Korean foods, traditional mythological creatures, and other aspects of both modern and historical Korean culture. Traditionally, such cultural details are often left absent from films for fear of alienating the mainstream demographic, though there has been a recent push for change around such “oriental” misrepresentations. The everyday effects of normalized Asian representation can also be felt in campaigns like #StopAsianHate during the COVID-19 pandemic. K-pop is thereby one of many different puzzle pieces that introduce everyday diversity into the wider world, with significant effects on both people of Korean background and those who would otherwise never experience the culture.
The economic impact of K-pop and other Korean media is also hard to overstate. BTS itself was suggested to contribute $3.5 million annually to the South Korean economy by 2020. The financial success of the K-pop industry is in no small part due to the curated marketability that is inherent to most groups’ brands: visuals, concepts, and a plethora of brand deals are commonplace in the industry, and the fashion industry in particular has embraced a range of idols as the new faces of their luxury labels. This also enhances direct interest in promoted products, including Korean makeup, clothing, food and drink, and more, to previously unfamiliar overseas fans. As such, K-pop forms a symbiotic relationship with Korean films, Korean food, Korean skincare, and Korean tourism, with each further boosting the next to consistently unprecedented highs. Economically, this generates a multiplier effect around the profits that K-pop garners and powerfully boosts the national economy of Korea.
Remix: The K-Pop Model Goes Global
Naturally, the multifaceted effects of K-pop–including its potential for cultural showcasing, economic growth, and geopolitical soft power–easily prove attractive to artists, entertainment agencies, and governments around the globe. Especially as K-pop grows from a lone phenomenon to a facilitator of all things Korean, more and more of these actors are beginning to leverage the K-pop model for their own means and goals.
One such case is taking hold in Kazakhstan, which launched its own version of K-pop, dubbed “Q-pop” or Qazaq pop, in the mid-2000s. With music sung in Kazakh that features strong Western pop and hip-hop influences, Q-pop is curated for expansion to international audiences in hopes of putting Astana on the map just as Seoul has been. Most groups include flashy, curated concepts and high-quality production that features elements of Western pop, Kazakhstani hip hop, EDM, R&B, Toi-pop, and K-pop.
The strategy and style of the K-pop model fit Qazaq pop particularly well due to its unique ability to address Kazakhstan’s domestic political challenges. Currently, Kazakhstan is experiencing a cultural push-and-pull between the forces of globalization and strengthening national sentiment. Kazakhstan’s identity as a relatively nascent, post-USSR country with a relatively diverse ethnic makeup results in an inevitably scattered sense of national identity. Q-pop may be the very solution this country needs: a method to keep the native language alive, a subculture for national youth, a tourism magnet, and, well, a catchy trend. The K-pop model maps a perfect blueprint to these goals by both encouraging mainstream popularity and making space for traditional cultural influences.
Another initiative to apply the K-pop model is emerging out of Peru: though also called Q-pop, this new genre centers around the indigenous Peruvian language Quechua. At the forefront of this movement is singer Lenin Tamayo, who invented the concept to express his own identity and bring attention to South American cultures. Similar to the other Q-Pop, the Peruvian application has the potential to combine both modern and traditionally-oriented goals. Though the music is novel, exciting, and monetizable on its own, the K-pop model indicates its ability to expand the reach of a contracting language and showcase culture in a way that appeals to many different demographics.
Disc 2: National Identity in the International Era
As nascent children of the K-pop model, Qazaq and Quechua pop demonstrate the modern era’s paradoxical closeness between globalization and national identity. As the functional distance between the world’s farthest reaches grows smaller, different peoples grow closer together–especially in an increasingly digital world that makes the very fandom culture K-pop thrives from possible. Simultaneously, however, this closeness highlights individual and collective differences, which can in turn lead to unique levels of cultural appreciation, celebrations of diversity, and pushback against racism. Though much of the internet encourages coalescence to one particular trend, appearance, or identity, finding this global diversity allows diverse identities to be acknowledged rather than reshaped.
As digital media at large becomes an increasingly prevalent part of every aspect of society, including politics, South Korea has found itself wielding an increasingly powerful tool. The K-pop industry has significantly contributed to the country’s developmental “miracle on the Han River,” and its ever-growing popularity has steadily proven itself not to be a simple one-hit wonder throughout the past decade. Now, it seems that this success story has the potential to become a prototype for other countries looking to leverage its echoes of cultural recognition, economic growth, and geopolitical soft power. As the world continues to globalize and national borders fade on digital platforms, music industries like K-pop may play an increasingly significant role in maintaining distinct national identities despite simultaneously bridging cultural gaps and language barriers. They may also be leveraged as yet-underappreciated tools for genuine cultural conservation: keeping languages alive, showcasing traditions and norms, and facilitating cultural exchange. No matter the ultimate direction impact, the magnitude of this industry’s effect cannot be brushed off as an isolated handful of Billboard charters. K-pop has proven itself as one of the crown jewels of the South Korean economy, and it may be actively charting the path for other countries to parallel its standing down the line.
Featured Image Source: BBC
