Bernie Cho, CEO of DFSB Kollective, an artist and label services agency based in Seoul, says K-pop’s success around the world was not just about good music but also about the ability to make that music findable.
“The issue was discovery,” Cho said to Resonate Voices. “It wasn’t the volume of music. It wasn’t the quality of the music. It was something as boring and as mundane as metadata; the information on the song, on the album, on the artists.”
For Cho, who worked for years in Korean music television before creating DFSB Kollective, the discovery came from an unusual source – the Starbucks menu.
“Everywhere I’d go, I went to Starbucks. In Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, I had no problems ordering at Starbucks even when I couldn’t speak the language,” Cho recalls. “I looked at the menu, and the menu was in the local language with the English translation side by side. I realised if this is how Starbucks is finding success in Asia, this is exactly how I want my stars to make bucks: bilingual metadata.”
That became the core principle of DFSB Kollective – presenting Korean music with accurate bilingual information allowing overseas listeners, playlists, platforms and journalists to discover it.
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“The discovery was instant,” Cho said. “And then from that point on, I could not unsee that.”
Cho believed that previous attempts of exporting J-pop, C-pop and K-pop failed not because of the music itself but due to poor ability of labels and distributors to let overseas listeners to discover it.
“Whether it was Japanese, whether it was Chinese, or whether it was Korean music, the ability to discover, the ability to find, and more importantly, fall in love with music was nearly impossible because record labels and music distributors at that time were pushing out Asian music only in Asian languages,” he said. “If you’re not Asian, you [are] out of luck… If you happen to be Asian and you see Asian words written in English, it makes no sense, or worse, it’s translated horribly into English, so you lose both sides.”
He also explained that feedback from early K-pop fan communities proved his thoughts.
“I reached out to a lot of early Korean music fan sites, particularly outside of Korea, and I asked them, ‘What is the biggest frustration?'” Cho said. “Time and time again, whether it was an indie rock site in Sweden, US-based K-pop fan sites, or wherever, the answer that came back time and time again was discovery.”
Bilingual metadata was not the whole solution for Cho. He also reevaluated how Korean music was tagged in global music services.
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“At that time all the music services around the world didn’t even have J-pop, C-pop, and K-pop as genres,” he said. “Even if you put it out there globally, the music could not be discovered because there was no category for it.”
To solve that problem, he used both genre tags for Korean acts: the primary one was for style, the second for nationality.
“If it was Korean hip hop, I would have the primary genre as hip hop. If it was Korean rock, I would have it as rock. And then the secondary genre, I would say it’s Korean,” Cho explains.
It allowed acts such as Epik High to appear on hip-hop, electronic and rock charts rather than on a narrow “Korean” tag.
“These Korean music acts, Epik High [and] soon after many other acts, started charting on the hip hop chart, or the electronic chart, or the rock chart, and all of a sudden, these international music platforms took notice,” he said.
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Epik High became the first Korean artists to top the US iTunes hip-hop chart in 2010, according to the group’s history.
As Cho claims, the strategy helped to change Korean music from an exception on global charts to an everyday occurrence on various charts and markets.
“Soon after, because Korean music acts were starting to move up and down the charts. It was becoming less and less the exception and more and more the rule; it was becoming the new normal,” he said.
“That’s when K-pop became the first Asian music genre to be recognised on Apple, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, et cetera.”
DFSB Kollective became the first company to start direct distribution of Korean music acts on iTunes in 2009, starting with more than 50 Korean artists in alternative, hip-hop and electronica genres.
For artists outside of English-speaking mainstream, discoverability depends on unexciting details such as translated titles, accurate artist information, genre tags, credits and categorisation.
