YouTube has clearly played such a huge part in the growth of Hallyu since the inception of second-generation idols such as Girl’s Generation and BIGBANG. The release of music videos on these platforms creates more opportunities for foreigners to stumble upon their music, and clearly K-pop as a genre is taking over this platform by storm.
What I’ve found interesting in the past few months of K-pop’s overtaking of YouTube is the deeper integration and interaction of “behind-the-scenes” content. A recent shift I’ve noticed in the YouTube space is that many popular music broadcasting stations are releasing “individual fancams” in which you get continuous uncut shots of idols dancing to their songs. As Kent A. Ono and Jungmin Kwon state in their piece “Re-worlding culture?,” it is this type of content that helps “shorten the emotional distance between singers and fans,” which can especially help fans develop further “interactions” with their favorite members as they get to see more of their professional mannerisms in a more intimate way, and the vertical video format itself makes it feel almost as if you’re looking at them through the lens of recording from your own phone. If anything, it can also even serve as a way for fans to focus on certain members, as there can be many cases in which certain members of larger groups get lesser lines than other members, and thus not get a lot of screentime.
Furthermore, it is through this that even idols themselves can further promote themselves in rather inventive ways unseen in the music industries of other countries. Of course, there are the individual projects that members pursue, such as self-choreography videos or covers of English songs, but one particular video that caught my attention was the [Dance the X] video for Chungha’s “Gotta Go,” which featured not only Chungha herself dancing to the song, but also other famous K-Pop cover groups, such as Ellen and Brian and ARTBEAT.
What I found rather interesting with this video was not only its inclusion of cover groups but the fact that fans were just as happy to see their favorite cover groups as much as they were happy to see Chungha. If anything, fans of the cover groups were praising Chungha for dressing very casually while the guest dancers got to be more glamorous with more coordinated outfits, giving these guests to live out their fantasies of putting on the K-pop star facade. As Eun-Young Jung states in her piece “New Wave Formations,” it is because of K-pop’s “participatory culture” that enables “both the industry and the consumers to conveniently promote, circulate, appropriate, re-create, and recirculate media contents” (Jung 84) and the fact that these media conglomerates are taking advantage of the rise of cover groups and the sort of content they produce makes it evident that this sort of fan-made content is only going to become more popular, and, in turn, help popularize K-pop even further.
Clearly, YouTube has played such an important role in the way K-Pop has grown to reach international audiences, and now with the rise of new types of fan-serviced media, it’s bound to get even bigger and more popular with each passing second.
The Politics of K-Pop 
Social media is the lifeline of kpop and it is truly what has catapulted its global ascendancy. Without YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, the world would not have gotten to know or interact with their favorite kpop band, vigorously root for their ‘bias’, sing and share covers of the latest kpop song reigning the billboard charts. Kpop and many other entertainment entities attribute their successes to social media and its ability to mobilize fan engagement and develop a kind of participatory culture, giving rise to the advent of the ‘prosumer’ – that consumers are also producers in their own right and play a substantial role in marketing processes. The illusion of user generated content and participatory culture, however, is that fans have never been more empowered and motivated to create, circulate and market content for kpop artists and bands. But, this ultimately further serves the interests of corporations who want to get fans to act in their self-interest by creating dance covers, writing fan fiction, or even simply lurking on social media by liking and sharing YouTube videos, Facebook posts or tweets. Likes and shares and subscribes are the currency of our time. And, the more that kpop industries can get fans to produce and distribute content related to the artist being promoted, the more it creates buzz around said artist, their song, merch, music video, and so forth.
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The inclusion of KPop dance cover groups in Chungha’s “Gotta Go” [Dance the X] video emphasises the celebrity that is made of the more prominent dance cover artists. I never before took these dancers so seriously as to call them celebrity because to me, they simply put out dance covers on YouTube. And YouTube, being a platform which has become widely accessible, positions these video content creators on the same hierarchy as their viewers. It does however seem fit to them being a sort of celebrity or influencer considering these dancers, particularly Ellen and Brian, have been brought out several times to teach choreography at KCon, the largest annual Korean Wave convention for KPop with sites in New Jersey (KCon NY) and California (KCon LA) as well as international sites such as Paris.
JREKML has risen to become a prominent reaction video creator in the KPop fandom, having been invited out to KCon multiple times and with members of BigBang even recognizing him from the reaction videos. The concept of the reaction video creator and the dance cover group becoming social media influencers through their connection to KPop idols and their own artistic creations says a lot about how KPop is marketed through an international audience through non-traditional modes of marketing and advertisement.
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