K-pop Beyond the Trend
Crystal S. Anderson / George Mason University
Korean popular culture has increasingly become more visible in mainstream culture in the United States. While films like Parasite (Bong 2019) and dramas like Squid Game (Hwang 2021) have gained critical acclaim, Korean popular music is often described as a trend, only relevant for a short period of time and supported largely by younger audiences. K-pop is a music that has relevance beyond the current moment.
Ever since its entrance onto the American popular culture scene, K-pop music has been associated with current styles and preferences. Despite emerging over 30 years ago in South Korea, K-pop music and artists are consistently dehistoricized as a music tradition by American media. For example, tracks from the soundtrack of Netflix’s hugely successful movie KPop Demon Hunters (Kang 2025) generated a lot of buzz as they made their way up music charts, and garnered much attention for the voices behind the girl group at the center of the movie. EJAE, a longtime songwriter in K-pop, is one of those voices. Even though articles from outlets like The Hollywood Reporter acknowledge that she has worked with K-pop girl groups like aespa and Twice, the article also presents her as a new talent and a breakout star for a largely American audience. In other words, EJAE is relevant because of her association with a currently popular movie.
Media’s focus on the current moment in relation to K-pop is enhanced by its association with social media, a key player in the development and distribution of trends whose life cycle has gotten shorter. K-pop “idols” participate in social media dance challenges, signaling their association with younger listeners. Their music also provides the musical backdrop, particularly for short form videos on TikTok as well as Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts. While social media is open to people of all ages, younger users are the primary drivers behind this form of media and also serves as its most influenced audience.
Because of its connection to social media, K-pop music’s listeners have largely been constructed as teens and young adults. Earlier this year, Billboard surveyed its readers about K-pop, and the data revealed that nearly half of its respondents were under 25. Media coverage consistently describes the music as trendy, focusing on acts that are popular in the moment as measured by their chart success, which represents sales, musical engagement through streaming, and awards. Overall, the report defines fandom largely in terms of consumption, noting patterns in purchasing merchandise and albums, both physical and digital and concert attendance. Not only does the discourse around fandom focus on younger listeners, but it also obscures other characteristics of older fans. Even as the Billboard report acknowledged older K-pop fans, it only went in-depth with those respondents around their buying power: “Pop music is typically thought of as a young person’s genre. Paying for it, however, isn’t young listeners’ strongest suit” (17).
Media sets K-pop as having value largely in the moment. Awards and chart position fuel the idea that K-pop’s primary value is how much it is worth now. Awards mark excellence within a bounded time throughout the previous year. Charts measure progress and longevity in terms of weeks. When artists fall off on the chart or below a certain threshold, they are largely forgotten. Like other types of popular music before K-pop, this perspective does a disservice to K-pop by miring it in the present and locking it to younger audiences.
However, K-pop music has relevance beyond the present. K-pop fans do not only encounter the latest K-pop but also engage regularly with older K-pop. This includes social media channels who increasingly feature a wider variety of K-pop on their channels after their initial encounter. One such channel is TRC Reactions, a YouTube channel that started posting videos in 2017. The channel initially posted reactions to black popular culture, including the television shows like Power (Kemp 2014) and The Chi (Waithe 2018) and music ranging from singers like Tamar Braxton to hip-hop artists like Wiz Khalifa. The channel expanded to reacting to popular American television shows like The Walking Dead (Darabont 2010).
By 2019, the channel started to regularly feature reactions to K-pop content. Like other K-pop channels, it featured contemporaneous content, keeping up on the most recent happenings within K-pop and current artists. Beginning in 2021, the channel began a feature called “Throwback Thursday,” where YouTubers would react to videos suggested by members of their audience. Their first “Throwback Thursday” reaction was to 2PM’s “A.D.T.O.Y.,” which was originally released in 2013. Currently, the “Throwback Thursday” playlist features 84 reactions to older K-pop artists across the generations and musical genres.
In this situation, older K-pop artists are new to these creators. Their reaction to their music allows them to incorporate these artists into their knowledge of K-pop, right alongside newer K-pop artists. They encounter these artists out of their original context, unlike newer artists. Sometimes fans fill in the blanks as part of their pitch to have them react to the video. Sometimes the reactors look up information about the artists. Nevertheless, this connection to older K-pop artists disrupts the trendy characterization of K-pop music. By acknowledging older artists, they can see connections to newer artists. For them, K-pop extends beyond the moment.
Reaction channels like TRC Reactions expands K-pop beyond trendiness and in doing so, expands our ideas of the audience for K-pop. Whereas characterizing K-pop as trendy leads to a narrow focus on a particular type of fan (young and female; notably Billboard’s data did not ask about race and ethnicity), TRC Reactions makes visible other kinds of K-pop fans, making the fandom’s diversity visible. Especially for the “Throwback Thursday” series, the reactions are done by three black male reactors: Bang Bang Boomerang, Dame Diddy and Ambitious Ace. Once we turn our attention to older K-pop beyond a focus on K-pop as a trend, we get to see other kinds of fans.
Moreover, the focus on K-pop’s trendiness ignores the role of time in popular music in general. The popularity of artists based on sales and chart performance wanes over time. Looking beyond trendiness allows us to see the maturation of fans themselves and the input of the adults in the form of creative personnel who work behind the scenes. One such example is the YouTube channel of self-described K-pop DJ, Ben Kang. He posted an intriguing short entitled “When Millennial K-pop Fans Listen to New K-pop,” where he humorously pokes fun at his own age in his reaction to a new K-pop group. This introduces the idea that not only is K-pop not static, but shows why older K-pop remains relevant.
If we only pay attention to K-pop because it is trendy, we miss important aspects of the music that helps us to make sense of it as it continues its development in the mainstream American cultural space. To understand its true impact musically and with fans, we have to acknowledge that K-pop music is more than a trend.
Image Credits:
- In a time when Korean popular music has a short span of relevancy, K-Pop music has relevance beyond the cultural. Photo by Lucian Alexe on Unsplash.
- K-pop is enhanced by its association with social media. Younger users are the primary drivers behind this form of media. Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash.
- Creative personnel and fans keep K-pop relevant over time. Photo by ran liwen on Unsplash.
Billboard. “K-Pop Fandom in the U.S.” A Billboard Reader Survey, July 2025, pp. 17.