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| Helena Chang, the content business lead at HYBE, speaks at the 2022 BroadCast WorldWide (BCWW), which took place at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in central Seoul, Thursday. Courtesy of Korea Creative Content Agency |
By Dong Sun-hwa
K-pop stars have fans in every nook and cranny of the world, which makes it difficult to meet their followers frequently due to their hectic schedules and the long distances between them. Thus, in an effort to promote interaction between these singers and their fans, HYBE, the record label behind K-pop superstar group BTS, has opted to create more "artist-driven" content featuring their stars, capable of reaching a wide audience anywhere, anytime.
"K-pop artists are often constrained by time and space, but we believe we can help them transcend these limits by making more artist-driven content," Helena Chang, the content business head at HYBE, said during the 2022 BroadCast WorldWide (BCWW) conference, at a session titled "K-Contents and the Korean Wave: Expanding the Cultural Horizon for World Citizens," Thursday.
Hosted by the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), the BCWW is the largest international broadcasting content market in Asia. This year's event took place at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul under the slogan "Play the New Content, Dive into the BCWW."
Chang explained that artist-driven content can reveal more unexplored sides of singers, and play a crucial role in marketing them. Some of HYBE's flagship artist-driven content includes "BANG BANG CON: the live" ― a paid online concert played by BTS ― and the "IN THE SOOP" reality show featuring various HYBE stars.
"Our creations are durable, too," she said. "Even the content that we produced one to two years ago can still be appealing to a lot of people, because the number of global K-pop fans is rising constantly. We believe our dissemination of artist-driven content has also contributed to the growth of hallyu (Korean wave) especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when hardly any singers could go abroad."
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| K-pop boy band BTS / Courtesy of Big Hit Music |
"As can be seen from these cases, we have attempted to distribute our content on various platforms," Chang stressed. "To date, we have mostly showcased our content in Korea and Japan, but we are planning to set our sights on more regions, because we just realized the power of content and how it can create great synergy with our artists."
Another project in HYBE's pipeline is called "What Sub," in which the company seeks to help improve international fans' understanding of K-pop stars' play on words in their content.
"Most of the time, subtitles alone cannot help foreigners understand the full context, when our stars pun around in Korean," she said. "So we are working on the 'What Sub' project, hoping we can help them overcome language and cultural barriers through our detailed explanation."
The conference was also attended by Adam Steinman, the vice president of Warner Bros. International Television Production, and Shim Doo-bo, a professor of media communication at Sungshin Women's University, among others.
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