How Kpop Actually Works (with So Yoon Lee)

For an industry that’s dominated charts, sold out stadiums, and (likely permanently) remade American’s assumptions about “global” music, there’s shockingly little written in English about how Kpop actually works. And even less about who makes Kpop work—not just the idols themselves, but the interlocking teams of choreographers, video designers, A&R representatives, social media managers, and hardworking PAs of all kinds.To learn more, we talked with So Yoon Lee, a researcher who has spent significant time within the Korean music industry, and whose work develops a clear-eyed view of its labor structures: good, bad, and exploitative.

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