The world’s music industry has continued its growth, overcoming three times of crisis. The first crisis was radio broadcasting, second was TV broadcasting and third was the change into digital music. The music industry took a hit but further achieved its growth by overcoming those crisis. On entering the 21st century, the music market declined sharply, facing the 3rd crisis with illegal downloading allowed from distribution through internet and mobile devices. But those illegal downloading turned into fee-charging, new music such as ringtones came out into the world, and new distribution channels like SNS emerged, thus turning the music industry into a growth stage once again.
The music industry of Korea was badly hurt from illegal downloading but with strict control and the spread of the new Hallyu (Korean Wave) allowing digital music to overtake the record market in around 2003, the portion of the music industry has been increasing itself. However, there still are limits to long-term growth due to profit sharing issue between communication services and producers as well as the breaking point of the domestic market. Thus Korea’s music industry now must go beyond the domestic market into the global market.
This process of globalization led to what is now Hallyu. The new Hallyu, centered around K-POP, began in Southeast Asia and Japan and now is spreading in Europe and South America. Surely this Hallyu fever was due to various attractions such as the artists’ vocal talent, choreography and dance and fashion style, but basically new promotion means such as SNS as well as glocalization strategies contributed much to it.
Hallyu, which can be described as a regional cultural phenomenon, is not the world’s only of its kind. There are a variety of regional cultures such as South America’s Telenovelas, India’s movie industry, Hong Kong’s movie industry and the Japanese culture. These cultural assets, Hallyu likewise, fiercely compete to turn themselves into a worldwide global culture.
In order for Hallyu to survive in these competitions and continue its fever, international copyrights, expansion of domestic music-related companies, penetration into the U.S. market, diversification of revenue source, overcoming of anti-Hallyu and bilateral exchange are all in need.
