What Boy Band Sensation BTS Can Teach Us About Economics

Tracy Alloway (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:15)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

So Joe, you know I went to South Korea for the first time a month or two ago?

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

I know, and I was super jealous of it because you posted a bunch of awesome food pics, and it's just a place I've always wanted to go, so thank you for rubbing it in.

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

Yeah, I'm sorry. I did eat a lot of Korean fried chicken, and I sort of regretted it afterwards, but at the time, it was a really good idea.

Joe Weisenthal (0:40)

Okay, so what's the point? What do you try, other than reminding me that because of where you live, you get to eat much better food than me all the time, and you're always posting about it, what else are you trying to tell me here?

Tracy Alloway (0:54)

Okay, well, it was my first time in South Korea, despite the fact that I grew up in Asia and spent a lot of time in the region, and I learned a lot in just a few days in Seoul. And one of the things I learned, and this probably won't come as a surprise to anyone with teenage kids, is that K-Pop is really, really big in South Korea.

Joe Weisenthal (1:20)

I guess I'm not really surprised that it's really, really big in South Korea. But what I am struck by, and it's one of these facets of modern pop culture that I feel incredibly ignorant on, obviously, as one gets older, particularly when it relates to music, you sort of grow more and more out of touch.

But the degree to which K-Pop is this global phenomenon kind of blows my mind. I think I saw this piece on Axios I saw a week or two ago. There's a band called BTS, right? They're really huge.

Tracy Alloway (1:54)

Oh my gosh, Joe. Yes, there is a band called BTS.

Joe Weisenthal (1:58)

They have a little story about how any time and any news organization does a piece on them, their traffic absolutely goes through the roof. So A, as an editor, I was like, oh, we should probably write more about them.

B, we should probably, I'm glad we're sort of hitting on this in a podcast because maybe we can include it in the title and maybe we could get tons of listeners from their gigantic global fan base. We deserve some of that traffic bump.

Tracy Alloway (2:25)

Oh, you're so Machiavellian about this whole thing, Joe.

So listen, so I went to Seoul, learned a lot about K-Pop and K-Culture, came away with a minor addiction to a certain K-drama, and then I started encouraging everyone in our newsroom to actually write more about this stuff, and I got a little bit of a reputation for being obsessed with K-Pop. But the reason I'm obsessed with K-Pop is not because of traffic, as you point out, it's because there's actually a really interesting economics and market story behind how K-Pop got so popular both within South Korea and globally.

Joe Weisenthal (3:05)

Yeah, I'm really fascinated by this because even excluding K-Pop or Korea's cultural exports in general, Korea has a history of sort of turning conventional wisdom, particularly around economics on its head. And so all of the so-called rules about how a country is supposed to develop its economy tend to die when you look at the Korean story, a country that's gotten very rich at every step of the way, flouting expectations about how things are supposed to be done, how you nurture a new industry. And so this idea of cultural exports fitting into a sort of broader Korean story is an incredibly fascinating one.

Tracy Alloway (3:50)

Right, and not just nurture any industry, right? We're talking about creative industries. So how does a country or a government actually go about encouraging people to be more creative? That's what we're going to talk about today.

So to do that, we have the perfect person.

She's a journalist and the author of a book that I read a few months before going to Seoul. Her name is Euny Hong, and the book is The Birth of Korean Cool, How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture. So really everything we were just talking about. Euny, it's so nice to have you on the show.

Euny Hong (4:26)

Hi, thanks for having me.

Tracy Alloway (4:28)

Good, thanks.

So I guess just to lay the groundwork, it might be nice for you to give us an overview of where South Korea was a few decades ago. Because I think nowadays most people are used to talking about it as this sort of tech powerhouse, you know, Samsung manufacturing of a big proportion of the world's semiconductor chips. That's how most people know it. But just a little while ago, it wasn't actually anything close to that.