Forbes

JULY 2016 FORBES ASIA | 51

CREDIT TK

Bigbang pulled

in $44 million this

year, offering a window

into the campy K-Pop

genre—and a blueprint

for making money

on music anywhere

in the world.

BY ZACK O’MALLEY GREENBURG

A

s record executive Joo-

jong Joe weaved through

the packed crowd at the

19,000-capacity Honda

Center in Anaheim, Cali-

fornia, there to see Korean boy band

Bigbang, he spotted a young Russian

woman crying. She couldn’t explain

why. Confident that she wasn’t in any

actual distress, he moved on.

“It’s like the Backstreet Boys back

in the day,” Joe says with a shrug. “A

lot of people cry.” Even, it turns out,

a Russian obsessed with five an-

drogynous Korean boys. Such is the

reach of the hottest global pop genre,

the campy Korean variant known as

K-Pop.

The top act in its niche, Bigbang

took home $44 million in pretax earn-

ings over the past year, easily more

than the $33.5 million collected by to-

day’s highest-paid American all-male

arena pop group, Maroon 5. Bigbang

will be appearing on the upcoming

FORBES Celebrity 100 list, though

that’s more attributable to the popu-

larity of the group’s music than the

depth of its members’ business savvy.

“We made more than Maroon 5?”

says front man Kwon “G-Dragon”

Jiyong, 27, through a translator. “Did

not know that. My mom is in charge of

my earnings.”

FORBES ASIA

BIGBANG