Speaker 1: Why Ebody and What's that.
Speaker 2: Yo?
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the Crash Course Pod, the music podcast
Speaker 3: for music heads by a music head. I'm your host, Ashtoney,
Speaker 3: and after last episode's deep dive into releases like Sofa
Speaker 3: gos Mania to Roy Woods's Project, and our other previous episodes.
Speaker 3: If you haven't heard them, go ahead and check it out.
Speaker 3: After this one, we're tuning our attention to the genre
Speaker 3: that has become a global machine. I'm talking, I'm talking kpop.
Speaker 3: So we're not just talking about a fleating trend anymore.
Speaker 3: We're talking about a dominant structural force in the American
Speaker 3: music market. And there's one recent phenomenon that perfectly encapsulates
Speaker 3: the shift, the fictional girl group Hunterricks. I know, you
Speaker 3: guys know exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: I was a ghost, I was alone.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm done hiding. Now I'm shining like I'm
Speaker 2: bin to bay me dreaming. Honw came so fun now
Speaker 2: believe we were up, up, up. It's a moment, you
Speaker 2: know what, I gether. We're glowing, gonna be gonna be golden.
Speaker 3: I know you guys know, I know I butchered those melodies,
Speaker 3: but I'm a little sick right now, I'm not sick.
Speaker 3: I was gonna lie, but I just can't hit the
Speaker 3: notes today. I can't hit the notes. But Huntricks what
Speaker 3: inspired this episode because, as you know, which you probably don't, Huntricks,
Speaker 3: that song Golden has gone like triple platinum. In my home,
Speaker 3: me and my two daughters, even my son, we'll just
Speaker 3: break out in songs like K pop Demon Hunters is
Speaker 3: our family movie, Like, we love this movie. We've been
Speaker 3: watching it for so long, and that out the soundtrack.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say the album or you can say
Speaker 3: the album, but the soundtrack has so many hits. Like
Speaker 3: Soga Boys and Hunterricks, they are both pulling their weight
Speaker 3: with the hits. So we were kind of just doing
Speaker 3: karaoke and singing all the songs the other day, and
Speaker 3: I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna do an episode
Speaker 3: on K pop inspired by hunt Tricks. It's interesting too,
Speaker 3: because if you watch Luaista on YouTube, he did on
Speaker 3: his second channel Luaista extras like two days maybe three
Speaker 3: days now, three days ago November twenty eighth, I believe
Speaker 3: he did an episode on the Dark Side of K Pop,
Speaker 3: which I watched, and that was actually the day I
Speaker 3: decided myself, I was gonna do this episode, so it's crazy.
Speaker 3: K pop is in the air. Everyone's thinking about K
Speaker 3: pop right now. However, on here, we're not gonna talk
Speaker 3: about the dark Side. You can go see Luaista after
Speaker 3: this episode and watch The Dark Side to keep it
Speaker 3: light and keep it strictly musical. So let me set
Speaker 3: the stage the post k pop reality, shall I say,
Speaker 3: let's kick this off with the shaker. Remember how I
Speaker 3: was telling you about Hunterricks it went triple platinum in
Speaker 3: my home. Well, the fictional K pop group Huntricks that
Speaker 3: I was just telling you about from the animated Netflix
Speaker 3: film K Pop Demon Hunters. What if I told you
Speaker 3: that they've been topping charts. They dropped a song called
Speaker 3: Golden and it wasn't just a novelty hit. It was
Speaker 3: a real chart topper. I'm talking about number one on
Speaker 3: the Billboard Hot one hundred, the first song by an
Speaker 3: all woman group of three or more to do that
Speaker 3: since Destiny's Child in two thousand and one. Now, I
Speaker 3: was ten years old when Destiny's Child did that, and
Speaker 3: that was like the topic of the discussion back then.
Speaker 3: And so imagine this Hunterricks. It is a fictional girl group.
Speaker 3: Mind you. EJ. We'll get to EJ in a minute
Speaker 3: wrote the song and the two other girls, all Beautiful,
Speaker 3: are performing the song, but literally Destiny's Child has gotten
Speaker 3: taken out by Hunterricks and their single Golden. This wasn't
Speaker 3: a viral TikTok moment. This was a commercial, platinum selling
Speaker 3: smash that top charts in over thirty countries. Why did
Speaker 3: an animated group succeed? Where will will wear?
Speaker 2: Real?
Speaker 3: Ones sometimes struggle any ideas. I think it's the K
Speaker 3: pop formula applied perfectly. The music was written by industry
Speaker 3: veterans like EJ, who wrote for groups like Espa and
Speaker 3: La Seraphim. The production was world class. It bypassed the
Speaker 3: need for a year's long global promotional tour, in intense training,
Speaker 3: high come that visuals, multimedia storytelling. It was all so
Speaker 3: authentic and it rivaled real chart topping hits. Huntricks's success
Speaker 3: proves that K pop is no longer just a Korean export.
Speaker 3: It's a post k pop reality. This is a system,
Speaker 3: a factory for superstardom that can be deployed anywhere, even
Speaker 3: for a cartoon group. And as we see, it works,
Speaker 3: like would you say that.
Speaker 1: It works.
Speaker 3: Exactly and to understand how this formula is perfected, you
Speaker 3: need to know about the engine behind the music, the
Speaker 3: songwriter and producer EJ. So I was diving a little
Speaker 3: bit into EJ's story like two three days ago, and
Speaker 3: EJ's career is an open textbook on the K pop system.
Speaker 3: She trained to be an idle herself at SM Entertainment
Speaker 3: for nearly a decade, starting when she was just eleven,
Speaker 3: but she was dropped, and that disappointment pushed her behind
Speaker 3: the mixing board, where she proved that the system's reject
Speaker 3: can become its most powerful creators. So she was called
Speaker 3: back and ended up writing songs and producing songs for
Speaker 3: the same company that dropped her. And even before Hunterricks,
Speaker 3: EJ was quietly shaping the third and fourth generation K
Speaker 3: pop stars. She's a credited co writer on one of
Speaker 3: the most defining K hits of the past few years,
Speaker 3: Red Velvet's Psycho. She's also worked with powerhouses like ESPA
Speaker 3: on tracks like Drama and Armageddon. She's a proven hit maker,
Speaker 3: not a flash in the pan. She got them hiats.
Speaker 3: I think that the reason Hunterricks music feels so authentic
Speaker 3: is that it's personal. EJ didn't just write the music.
Speaker 3: She became the singing voice for Roomy, who's the leader
Speaker 3: of Hunterricks. She stated that the lyrics to the record
Speaker 3: breaking single Golden, particularly the line we dreaming hard, we
Speaker 3: came so fun now, I believe, are deeply informed by
Speaker 3: her own decade of gruelling training and feeling unfulfilled like
Speaker 3: unfulfilled potential. Her story the trainee who couldn't debut, but
Speaker 3: whose voice and pen ended up at number one on
Speaker 3: the Hot one hundred perfectly illustrates the next point. K
Speaker 3: pop is no longer about which idle debuts. It's about
Speaker 3: the unstoppable machinery of writing, production and high concepts storytelling,
Speaker 3: and that brings us to the real world masters of
Speaker 3: the machine, the fourth generation dominators. Now, if fictional Hundricks
Speaker 3: can do that, imagine what the real groups the fourth
Speaker 3: generation are accomplishing. They are the true architect of K
Speaker 3: pop's current US market dominance. The search results from just
Speaker 3: the last few months of twenty twenty five proved this
Speaker 3: era is fully realized. You have boy group powerhouses for
Speaker 3: its generation, by the way, solidified by groups with massive
Speaker 3: global fandoms and touring stamina Stray Kids, SKZ. They are
Speaker 3: arguably the biggest fourth gen group globally and in North America.
Speaker 3: The recent Dominate World Tour saw huge attendance and they've
Speaker 3: secured multiple multiple number ones on the Billboard two hundred.
Speaker 3: Their self produced high energy sound has carved out an
Speaker 3: enormous stadium fan base in hyphen and Tomorrow Together TXT,
Speaker 3: these groups are consistently mentioned as leaders. Recently sweeping grand
Speaker 3: prizes at the twenty twenty five Mama Awards roof that
Speaker 3: the boy group dominance hasn't faded, it's just shifted to
Speaker 3: a new hungry generation seventeen known as the self producing Idols.
Speaker 3: They're celebrating their tenth anniversary with the massive New World Tour,
Speaker 3: showing incredible staying power in massive domestic and international sales
Speaker 3: with their latest album, Happy Birst Day. Then you have
Speaker 3: the girl group Surge, who are absolutely charting a new
Speaker 3: path of dominance, while Hundricks is a virtual girl group
Speaker 3: breaking records. We have groups like New Genes, Ive, Espa
Speaker 3: and Laseraphim leading the charge with diverse concepts and international partnerships.
Speaker 3: This is the key of K pop the superfan economy.
Speaker 3: K pop agencies didn't just create pop stars, they created
Speaker 3: a superfan economic model. Platforms like weavers and the high
Speaker 3: production value of physical albums turned US music listeners into
Speaker 3: dedicated superfans, driving unprecedented physical album cells. Just this year,
Speaker 3: multiple Korean albums from the groups like in hyphen in
Speaker 3: eighties swept the top ten physical cells chart in America.
Speaker 3: People are buying physical media again, and K pop is
Speaker 3: the engine. So what happens when a global system gets
Speaker 3: to global? This is where the music conversation gets interesting.
Speaker 3: We're seeing groups being launched using the K pop system
Speaker 3: but with only one or no Korean members. Think of
Speaker 3: the global girl group CATSI. They're formed using the intense
Speaker 3: idle training process, but they are deployed. I mean they're
Speaker 3: deploying the method while shedding the cultural specificity. What does
Speaker 3: that mean? They're using the K pop formula, the training methods,
Speaker 3: the intense artist development and training, and they're not Korean.
Speaker 1: So what looks like K pop.
Speaker 3: Is being more than just for Korea Korean pop? It's
Speaker 3: looking more like kse system the business of it all,
Speaker 3: you know. I think K pop is still still a
Speaker 3: distinct genre, but I think the production methodology is becoming
Speaker 3: the new global standard, which is replacing the old euro
Speaker 3: US centric benchmark, euro US centric benchmark. It's a method
Speaker 3: that includes intensive training, multimedia, narrative marketing, and deep fan engagement.
Speaker 3: And I think that's what the K system is starting
Speaker 3: to stand for, opposed to the K in Korean for
Speaker 3: K pop. The demand for K pop is booming. You
Speaker 3: have major stadium level tours from groups like Black Pink
Speaker 3: with their all stadium Deadline Tour, Stray Kids, and Twice
Speaker 3: who's now doing and in the round stage production. They're
Speaker 3: not just concerts, they're multi billion dollar cultural events, proving
Speaker 3: that physical, dedicated fan base is stronger than ever in
Speaker 3: the US. The final most visceral proof of the K
Speaker 3: pop takeover is simply looking at the touring schedule. This
Speaker 3: isn't a niche market anymore. This is a stadium economy.
Speaker 3: And we already mentioned Black Pink and they're the third
Speaker 3: generation group that set this current trend, this benchmark. They're currently,
Speaker 3: like I said, on their Deadline Tour, which is their
Speaker 3: first ever all stadium tour. They kicked off in the
Speaker 3: US in twenty twenty five, so the US leg in
Speaker 3: July twenty twenty five, and they sold out major venues
Speaker 3: like Sofi Stadium and Los Angeles and City Field in
Speaker 3: New York, not once, but often with added dates due
Speaker 3: to overwhelming demand. This is a group that just returned
Speaker 3: from a period of intense solo activities. Might I add
Speaker 3: Jenny Jisu, Rosie Lisa. They all have high profile solo
Speaker 3: debuts and projects, but the collective demand for Black Pink
Speaker 3: was so enormous that they came back and immediately anchored
Speaker 3: the global live music market, Proving what did? They prove
Speaker 3: that the K pop's acceptance is stronger than ever. Their
Speaker 3: success in selling out these venues confirms that the fourth
Speaker 3: generation groups are following a newly paved path. The floor
Speaker 3: for K pops success is now the stadium, not the arena.
Speaker 3: So what does that mean now? I think that it
Speaker 3: means K pop is no longer waiting for American acceptance.
Speaker 3: It's building the new global pop template right before our eyes.
Speaker 3: And the Hundris phenomenon was a perfect viral test case
Speaker 3: that proves the method works without the human element and
Speaker 3: it's redefined pop itself. I forgot to mention, we can't
Speaker 3: talk about K pop's future without mentioning the elephant in
Speaker 3: the room, the return of bts from their military service
Speaker 3: and the next year that's gonna be epic and their
Speaker 3: reentry will catapult this post K pop landscape to new heights.
Speaker 3: So that's it for this episode of Crash Course Pod.
Speaker 3: We'll be back next time. Check our next episode. We're
Speaker 3: gonna talk about Chief Keef, so check that out. It
Speaker 3: should be out already and all the details are down
Speaker 3: below in the description box. And yeah, that's our take
Speaker 3: on K pop. Hit us up on social media and
Speaker 3: let us know what were your thoughts. What do you
Speaker 3: think did we miss something we want to know by