51Bloomberg Businessweek November 2, 2020ILLUSTRATION BY MIIGO. PHOTOGRAPH BY EVA O’LEARY FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
BTS find their lifestyles and freedom of
expression tightly policed—no significant
others, no tattoos, no divisive thoughts
on politics. (The company also declined
to make the band available for comment
for this story.) So it was a big deal when,
in June, BTS tweeted a brief statement
of support for the Black Lives Matter
movement to its 26 million followers and
announced that it had donated $1 million
to the cause. “We stand against racial dis-
crimination,” the band said.
“We condemn violence. You,
I and we all have the right to
be respected. We will stand
together. #BlackLivesMatter.”
To some extent, the band
was following the lead of
its fans, many of whom
were already demand-
ing that ARMY take a
stand. Millions of BTS fans
live in the U.S. and identify as peo-
ple of color, according to researchers
and surveys of popular fan accounts.
Many are over the age of 30, repping
Twitter handles like @KpopDad and
@MomsNoonas (bio: “Never ever, ever
too old to fan-girl”). But ARMY has its
share of young people, too. Some profes-
sors attribute a recent spike in American
college students studying Korean to
K-pop fans who want to understand the
lyrics of their favorite songs.
Daezy Agbakoba, a recent gradu-
ate of London’s Middlesex University
who’s now back home in Maryland, has
a K-pop conversion story that would
sound familiar to a 4chan kid radical-
ized into QAnon. Four years ago, she
stumbled onto her first BTS video while
watching YouTube. Now, untold hours
of algorithmic recommendations later,
she’s studying Korean by day and binge-
watching the band’s videos at night, her
ARMY light stick—a vastly upgraded ver-
sion of waving a phone flashlight during
a concert—resting nearby. “When you get
into them, it’s just this steep descent,”
she says. “Kind of like how Alice falls
down the rabbit hole.”
This spring, Agbakoba was the first
to tweet the hashtag #MatchAMillion,
imploring her fellow stans to add
another $1 million to BTS’s Black LivesMatterdonation.Theydidso
ina littleover 24 hours.“It
shockedme,becauseI didn’t
realizehowmuchinfluencewe
actuallyhad,”shesays.Sincethen,
she’sbeenapplyingtogradschoolsand
workingwithotheryoungAmerican
ARMYmembersto rallyopposition
toTrumpandhisQAnonadherents.
“Thestateofourcountryis gettingto
a reallydarkplace,”shesays.“Ithink
it wouldbeimportanttotryandhelp
againstthatinanywaywecan.”Or,
asa repeatedmemepostedduring
the#WhiteLivesMatterkeyword
squatasks,“Will#Kpopa daykeep
#QAnonatbay?”TT
he business of K-pop is largely apo-
litical, but the genre’s origins are
anything but. The modern South Korean
mashup of American hip-hop and pop-
rock can be traced to 1992. For decades,
officials in South Korea had frequently
banned new music, movies, books, and
newspapers with messages deemed
outrageous or overly political. Into the
spotlight stepped Seo Taiji &
Boys, a try-hard boy band with
a punk-rock look. They audi-
tioned for a talent show on one of
South Korea’s major TV networks
with Nan Arayo (“I Know”), a hip-
hop-influenced song that mashed
together rap verses, pop choruses,
and catchy dance moves. Although the
group received the lowest score of the
night from the show’s horrified judges,
they won the popular vote—the track
topped the country’s music sales charts
for 17 straight weeks. Seo Taiji & Boys
followed up that hit with risqué songs
about censorship and youth oppression.
When officials threatened to ban their
music, fans rioted in the streets.
A few years later, with South Korea in
the grips of the Asian financial crisis, the
government reversed tack and embraced
pop culture as an economic lifeline,
boosting its official culture budget. It
began promoting K-pop, along with
homegrown dramas and video games, as
a core part of the nation’s identity. This
was the start of what’s become known
as the Hallyu (Korean wave) movement,which eventually swept the coun-
ry’spop culture westward.
K-pop stans are tightly linked
tothebands and their success. Official
fan clubs have long contributed directly
to funds set up to support artists through
their ramen days. They also coordinate
online efforts to boost the acts’ profiles,
both through word-of-mouth and by
buying extra copies of albums to push
them up the sales charts. The advent
of social media and streaming made it
possible for K-pop acts to turbocharge
fan loyalty by producing intimate videos
almost nonstop, from short clips of them
goofing around backstage to livestreams
where they open up about their daily
foibles as well as more serious mental
health struggles.
BTS, which made its debut in 2013,
expertly synthesized these market-
ing strategies. ARMY began life as an
official fan club, though it has grown
much broader as it’s fought to pene-
trate America’s parochial music ecosys-
tem. When U.S. fans began mass-calling
hundreds of radio stations to play BTS,
they came armed with
prewritten scripts for any
DJ who hadn’t heard of
the band. Grassroots
pressure from ARMY
put BTS albums on the
shelves of Walmart, Target,
and Best Buy; landed BTS on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Jimmy
Kimmel Live!; and got them ringing
in the New Year with Ryan Seacrest
in Times Square. When Ticketmaster
Entertainment Inc. put seats for a BTS
tour on sale last year, all 300,000 tickets
sold out in minutes, then the website
crashed from the overload. When band
member Jungkook told fans online that
he uses a Downy fabric softener scent
branded Adorable, two months’ worth
of the global supply sold out in a day.
And when the band endorsed the
Hyundai Palisade last year, the SUV was
on back order for months.
Many ARMY members consider BTS
their friends and revel in the band’s vic-
tories. These include the Big Hit IPO,
which made the seven band members
a combined $105 million, and thisw