With their single ‘Dynamite’ at No. 1 on the Billboard 100, how BTS is changing the definition of pop music

By Kim-Marie Spence

K-pop supergroup BTS made pop history on August 31 when they became the first Korean group to have a number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 with their first fully English single.Dynamite. The song topped Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart and rose to number one on the iTunes charts in more than 100 countries. It also set a YouTube record for the most views in 24 hours. BTS’s success, particularly on the Billboard Hot 100 recently, highlights the need to reexamine how we define pop music within the global music industry.

Billboard Hot 100 and Top 200 are the pinnacle of pop music. These charts are based on three metrics: broadcast, broadcast, and digital sales in order of importance.

The radio component of the charts is derived from monitoring the radio transmission of more than 1,200 radio stations throughout the United States. Interestingly, in the week that Dynamite topped the charts, it didn’t make the Top 50 Radio Songs list. The lack of western radio broadcasting of BTS, and to a greater extent K-pop, has been a constant problem.

The reason BTS was able to top the Billboard 100 without radio play was because of their fandom ARMY. ARMY has realized that one way to ensure the success of the chosen group and its visibility in Western media is through sales and broadcasting. Media scholars Dal Yong Jin and Kyong Yoon suggested that the lack of Korean pop content in mainstream media catalyzed the development of the social media landscape of Korean pop culture.

The role of radio

While BTS was able to rise to the top without radio play, radio is still powerful in the American market and is the largest and most influential market for music. About 272 million Americans still listen to the radio, and radio reached more Americans than any other platform in 2019. The inclusion of radio broadcasting within the Billboard Hot 100 metric keeps the major charts tilted in favor of the English language. , particularly Euro-American (American, Canadian and British), music.

Language has been identified as one of the reasons for the lack of attention from the mainstream media, and Dynamite’s success is attributed to its English content. However, the enduring popularity of BTS since 2016 and that of other K-pop groups such as BLACKPINK, demonstrate the ability of significant sections of the Euro-American audience to enjoy songs in other languages.

The fact that K-pop, despite its popularity, continues to receive such low or non-existent radio playback, is possibly due to radio control and not audience preferences.

This exclusion applies to other languages ​​on American radio. Despite the fact that there are more than 50 million Spanish speakers in the United States, only two songs in Spanish are in the top ten.

The centers of the global music industry have historically been London, New York and Los Angeles. This means that artists from these cities and music in English have a huge influence within the global music industry.

Redefining pop

Gender definitions are also an aspect of policing, which has historically kept black, Asian and ethnic minorities and non-English speakers off the hit parade. Radio stations program according to genre.

Recently, there has been a movement to define K-pop as a separate genre from pop, and the MTV VMAs include a category of K-pop, a move criticized for turning K-pop into a pop ghetto.

K-pop connoisseurs themselves do not agree that K-pop is a distinct genre. Veteran K-pop journalist Tamar Herman wrote that K-pop was a fandom and an industry, rather than a genre. Likewise, TOP of the K-pop group Big Bang, known for its R&B and rap influences, noted that:

You don’t divide pop music by who makes it. We don’t say, for example, “white pop” when white people make music.

Pop music can be defined in two ways. First, it is the music that is popular on a large scale. And secondly, since rock and roll in the 1950s, it’s a melting pot of sonic influences on the mass market, including R&B, disco, and dancehall.

K-pop fits both understandings. Among many accolades proving their massive popularity, BTS is the first group since The Beatles to have three number one albums in a single year on the Billboard 200 chart. Music scholars Hyunjoon Shin and Seung-Ah Lee noted in their book: Made in Korea, that:

[K-pop] it had the familiar pang of R&B, rock, hip-hop and soul that is used so much in contemporary Western pop music.

They also point out that (one of) their main distinctions is their origin story.

Black artists have long endured similar limiting gender definitions. In a year marked by the Black Lives Matter protests, the music industry has been forced to question the systemic racism inherent in its gender labeling. The long-criticized category of “urban” music has been overruled by record labels and the Grammy Awards.

By winning the Best Rap Album Grammy for his album 20202 IGORTyler the Creator said that:

They always put [us] in a category of ‘rap’ or ‘urban’ … I don’t like that word ‘urban’. For me, it’s just a politically correct way of saying the N word. Why can’t we be in pop?

Foreign black artists have also long been concerned with narrowing down definitions of gender. Being relegated to reggae or urban stations and award categories has severely limited the prospects of success for Jamaican reggae and dancehall musicians. Even though dancehall is the sound of successive summers, only Euro-American artists are programmed on pop stations, like Ed Sheeran’s’Form yours.

Non-musical factors like race, nationality, and language have impacted BTS’s journey in the global music industry. When the Beatles had three number 1s in a year in 1995-6, they won three Grammy Awards. BTS, for the same feat, received no Grammy nominations or awards. However, the institution obviously recognizes their importance, archiving the costumes they wore for the awards at the Grammy Museum Collection.

BTS’s experience continues to expose entrenched fissures around race, language, and national origin in an industry that claims to be global. While K-pop has its distinctive characteristics, there are far-reaching political and economic implications to leaving K-pop outside the definition of pop.

Kim-Marie Spence, Postdoctoral Researcher in Popular and Global Cultural Industries (and Adjunct Professor, University of the West Indies), Solent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

– Outstanding image: Facebook @ bangtan.official