Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Pop: Production, Consumption

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Asianizing K‐pop: production, consumption

and identification patterns among Thai youth
Ubonrat Siriyuvasak & Shin Hyunjoon
Version of record first published: 01 Mar 2007.
To cite this article: Ubonrat Siriyuvasak & Shin Hyunjoon (2007): Asianizing K‐pop: production, consumption
and identification patterns among Thai youth, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8:1, 109-136
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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 8, Number 1, 2007
Asianizing K-pop: production, consumption and identification

patterns among Thai youth
Ubonrat SIRIYUVASAK and SHIN Hyunjoon
‘Asian Pop’ cultural products, which include a wide range of media artifacts such as
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649370601119113
RIAC_A_211845.sgm
1464-9373
Original
Taylor
8102007
subonrat@chula.ac.th
UbonratSIRIYUVASAK
00000April
and
& Article
Francis
Cultural
(print)/1469-8447
Francis
2007 Ltd
Studies (online)
ABSTRACT
film, music, television drama, comic books, magazines, websites and fashion, have emerged as a
popular choice for youth in Asia in recent times. These cultural artifacts feature prominently in the
Downloaded by [Laurentian University] at 16:35 27 March 2013
lives of urban youth in major metropolitan centers throughout Asia. This paper examines how Thai
youths have become consumers of Korean pop (K-pop), following the trend of neighboring countries.
The popularization of Japanese pop (J-pop), Taiwanese-pop and more recently, K-pop, is welcomed by
the Cultural Industry as a sign of expanding borders and as a major step towards expanding its
Asian market. On the one hand, growing consumption and mainstreaming of Asian pop might
become problematic due to the notion of cultural ‘McDonaldization’/standardization, in the future.
On the other hand, perhaps nationalism and national ties will manage to overrule this projected
standardization. This paper explores the Thai youth’s consumption of K-pop in the process of cultural
appropriation vis-à-vis their ‘national’ cultural formation in changing socio-cultural contexts.
KEYWORDS: Popular music, K-pop (Korean pop), Asian pop, cultural industries, youth
culture, fandom, Asianization, cross bordering
Introduction
Since the turn of the 21st century, Korean popular cultural items, such as Korean movies,
computer games, television dramas, books, music and food, have become popular among
Thai middle-class youths. In the early 1990s, before the ‘Korean Wave’, Japanese cultural
exports dominated the popular youth imagination. In fact, Japanese manga and anime have
been common household pop items for urban children for more than three decades (Tidarat
2002). In recent years, the focus has shifted from Japan to Korea, as Korea is suddenly
viewed by fans as ‘hip’ and ‘trendy’. This paper explores the ‘Korean Wave’ phenomenon in
Thailand and to some extent its industrial networks in East Asia.1 It seeks to understand
whether the success of Korean pop culture (K-Pop) follows the trajectories of J-pop in its
trans-border cultural flow or whether the Korean Wave illustrates how waves of popular
culture are bundled together as ‘Asian pop’ by the culture industries in the region. In this
new milieu, what is the relationship of youth culture to everyday politics? This paper
further hopes to problematize the political economy and the Asianization of an emerging
genre/category of ‘Inter-Asian pop culture’ in the present Asian mediascape.
Thai–Korean relations and the emergence of Korean popular culture in Thailand

Contemporary History dates Thai–Korean relations to the Korean War (1950–1953) during
which Thai troops, as a part of the UN and Western forces, were sent to defend ‘South
Korea’ from its ‘northern aggressors’. The ideology of ‘Anti-Communism’ brought the two
ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/07/010109–28 © 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649370601119113
110 Ubonrat Siriyuvasak and Shin Hyunjoon
nations together under the US-led political and security pact. After four decades of political
transformation and economic development, Korea has moved from being a developing
nation to becoming an OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
member in 1996. Along with Korea, the ‘Asian Tigers’ – Taiwan and Singapore – also
succeeded in their efforts to compete with some of the most powerful capitalist nations of
the world. The Third World social and economic critic Walden Bello views this kind of
structural dependence on globalization as endemically fragile and crisis prone (Bello 1992).
Although Thailand had a similar history of military dictatorship followed by a series of
national development schemes in the 1980s–1990s, it failed to realize the economic dream of
emerging as the fourth Asian Tiger. The sudden economic crisis of 1997 wrecked thousands
of business companies. The financial market in Thailand and neighboring Southeast Asian
countries – primarily Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, but also Korea and Taiwan
to a lesser degree – crumbled. By then, neo-liberalism and globalization were pinned as the
main threat to the growing economies of Southeast Asia, persuading the region to open up
and accommodate a US market penetration. The Thai government accepted the bailout
package offered by the IMF to the detriment of the banking sector, and medium and small-
scale businesses. The ‘economic surrender’ was bitter and the politics of resentment were
tantamount. There was an outcry against such neo-colonialism and economic nationalism
was proposed as the ultimate salvation (Pasuk and Baker 2004). However, intellectuals and
non-governmental activists suggested that the only way out was to implement a twofold
plan: first, it was imperative to deglobalize the economy while building solidarity among
nations in the South. Second, it was necessary to restructure the economy for the large
majority of the people who live at the threshold of the poverty line (Bello 2001; Pibhop
2004).
The new world economic order and globalization, which circumscribed the political
economy of East Asia, laid the basis for our analyses and problematization of the emergence
of Korean popular culture in these regions. For us, the political economic processes of
globalization are ‘cultural’ as much as ‘political’ and ‘economical’. Since the 1997 IMF crisis,
Korea has regained economic strength using the IMF restructuring program. Korea was
able to resume a fast-track capitalist economy. One of the key strategies in this process was
to invest into and open a new consumer market, which included cultural products to
expand exports into China and Southeast Asia. Korea’s aggressive economic policy brought
about a broad range of bi-lateral (and some multi-lateral) activities as a result of these newly
formed relationships.
These relations are international not only in traditional terms (‘diplomatic’ ones) but also
as components of the wide and complicated network among Northeast and Southeast Asian
countries. From even the most cursory perspective, these are evidently new phenomena.
First, the trade relations between Korea and Thailand show that Korea has continu-
ously increased its trading value during the last decade, whereas Thailand has maintained
an unbroken record of trade deficit with Korea since the 1990s. In 2004, the deficit amounted
to US$1716 million from the total trade figure of US$5437 million.2 Furthermore, Thailand
has increased the number of laborers being exported to Korea. In 2004, there were
approximately 20,000 Thai workers, with legal permits, working and living in Korea.
Secondly, Korea and Thailand are members of two key regional economic and political
organizations – APEC and ASEM. In order to strengthen the tie between the nations an
ASEAN + 3 collective was organized in 1997. This collective included ten ASEAN members
in addition to China, Japan and Korea from Northeast Asia. This group denotes a shift away
from the former security relations towards a new economy and a firm foothold in the
globalized economy.
Owing to the political and economic ties between Korea and Thailand, there has been a
substantial growth in cultural relations between the two. Thailand is in fact the fourth most
Asianizing K-pop 111
popular tourist destination for Korean visitors; 700,000 Korean tourists visited Thailand in
2002 – a 15% increase from the previous year (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2005). The Korean
business community is also growing in the central districts of Bangkok. In addition, several
new aspects, such as official initiatives for private cooperations between businesses,
tourism, culture and education exchanges, have emerged. It appears that there is a direct
correlation between the economic strength of a nation and the outreach of its language and
culture. The emergence of the ‘Korean Wave’ in popular culture could be viewed in this
context.
Globalizing/Asianizing inter-Asia culture

In his two-volume collection of essays on ‘Cultural Capital’, Rangsan Tanapornpan points
out that cultural capital is central to the expansion and maintenance of power in the era of
globalization (Rangsan 2003a; 2003b). He demonstrates how the dominant influence of the
English language, the Anglo-American culture, and Americanization has been dramati-
cally exacerbated – to the extent of being imperialist – by the advent of the information
society and Information Communication Technologies (ICT). The irony is that the poor,
who are the most affected by globalization, do not have access to information and are
unable to participate as true ‘citizens’. It is with the notion of centrality of cultural capital
that Rangsan demonstrates how Japanese language and culture, which were shunned
during the forced militarism and cultural expansion during the Imperial Pan-Asian
aggression and colonization up to the end of the Second World War, become more ‘desir-
able’ in the contemporary globalized economy (Rangsan (2003b: 30–35). Next in rank of
desirable cultures is China. Since the Chinese language is already one of the five official
languages of the UN, one can predict that Chinese language and culture will be much
sought after, both in the East and in the West. In the case of Korea, which is by far the
smaller polity in Northeast Asia, the diffusion of the ‘Korean Wave’ seems to be a good
indicator of how Korea’s cultural capital is already gaining influence in Southeast and
Northeast Asia.
To understand this phenomenon as something more than a globalization with an Asian
face, we need to come up with the definition of Asianization and/or Asianism. Although
Asianization sometimes might simply be tantamount to ‘globalization in the Asian region’,
we prefer to provide a more complex matrix of this cultural process. We want to point out
three observations before we pose theoretical and empirical debates and problematize these
notions.
First of all, we posit the notion of Asianization/Asianism as not just about ‘essential
Asianism’ but about ‘pop(ular) Asianism’. So the process of Asianization is closely related
with the flows of commercial products and their images and symbols. In this sense, we
agree with the ideas and concepts of ‘trans-Asian cultural traffic’ as proposed by Iwabuchi
et al. (2004). At the same time, we will employ Beng Huat’s conceptualization of ‘East Asian
popular culture’ to discuss the dynamic processes of Asianizing K-pop (Chua 2004). None-
theless, we believe that what we are witnessing at the moment is neither a smooth nor an
un-resisted process. On the contrary, our research shows that it is a complicated and
contested phenomenon.
Second, Asianization means that national cultural processes have to be examined in
relation to trans-regional cultural processes. The most apparent purely bi-lateral interna-
tional relations have to be examined with more consideration; more complicated interna-
tional and translocal relations,3 which cannot be reduced to ‘the national versus the
national’ relations. Although this suggestion could be and should be traced back to the era
where the concept of Asianization did not exist, we shall concentrate only on the ‘post cold-
war’ period.
Third, in the globalization/Asianization process, ‘the local’ increasingly refers to the

sub-national. Therefore, in this paper, ‘International Relations between Thailand and Korea’
actually means the translocal relations between the two metropolises Bangkok and Seoul.
Although other urban centers such as Chiengmai in the north, Khon Kaen in the northeast
and Haadyai in the south are part of this dynamic relationship, we will concentrate mainly
on Bangkok. Thus we problematize the idea that Bangkok and Seoul are representatives of
their ‘national culture’ although they are doubtlessly political, economic and cultural
centers of each country.
Thus, Thai-Korean cultural relations related to K-pop music and pop culture are essen-
tially transmetropolitan in the Northeast and the Southeast Asian region. It is with this
understanding that we begin to unpack and grapple with the concept of ‘Asian pop’. We
seek to investigate whether the spread of K-pop will lend itself to cultural homogeneity in
Thailand or whether it will produce cultural diversity through theoretical and analytical
discursive practices.
Apparudai, in Modernity at Large, states that culture and the media have, in recent years,
moved to center stage (Appadurai 1996). He notes five dimensions of global cultural flows:
ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. However, he
discards the cultural homogenization argument as too sweeping and over simplified. He
argues that it neglects the collective imagined worlds of agency and actor, and the indigeni-
zation processes. Appadurai calls attention to the power of ‘the image, the imagined and the
imaginary’ of various actors. His thesis is that the global cultural flow be understood from
the perspective of popular consumption of the Third World recipient. He argues that the
dynamic relationships of the flows and the ‘–scapes’ manifested in the nuances of multi-
culturalism, ethnicity, and self-representation/politics of identity of the global and
transnational popular culture are the essence of the modern/post-modern cross-cultural
phenomenon.
We find Appadurai’s theory problematic. He asserts that ‘the imagined and the
imaginary’ can, in fact, actualize the global flow of diaspora, such that those who physically
cross borders are global migrants. Who are these global migrants? Are they men or women,
the elderly or children? And from what class or ethnic groups do they come from? How is
this collective deterritorialization of the real and the imagined synchronous with the post-
national/anti-national ideoscapes, technoscapes and financescapes in Northeast and South-
east Asia? To overcome these problems and in order to contrast the mainstream cultural
industry and the nation-state with the cultural practices of middle class youth, we will
examine the case of the ‘Korean Wave’ in Thailand (and Southeast Asia). We explore
whether this process is Asianization or something else. In addition to the producers and the
consumers we will also look at the ‘mediator’ whose cultural marketing is significant in
communicating the ‘desirable images’ of the artists, their dances and their styles, and the
‘imagined worlds’ designed by the music industry and the mass media to the youth
audience.
The cultural face of Korea: Korean pop music in Korea and Thailand
Korean pop music (K-pop) was one of the later products of Korean popular culture to
penetrate Thailand. It initially grew popular due to two major Thai music companies: RS
Promotion, which introduced Se7en in 2003, and GMM Grammy, who introduced Rain in
2004.4 Korean dramas and movies both preceded K-pop’s foray into Thailand, appearing as
early as in 1997. Ragnarok,5 however, caused the biggest stir in 2001. When the game was
translated into Thai language the following year, its popularity hit the roof. Today, it has
about 2 million registered players, many of whom say they are addicted to the game
(Sasiwimon 2005 and Chat 2003). The spread of the ‘Korean Wave’ coincided with the 2002
World Cup. The whole event was a significant moment of joy and pride, national identity
and cultural politics for Japan and Korea who co-hosted the event.6 As a global event the
World Cup, which was a new projection of an Asian-global cultural image founded on the
political economic power of the two host nations, appealed strongly to Thai football fans.
The cultural economy of Korean pop

K-pop, as Korean pop music is now internationally known, can trace its roots to 1992 when
Seotaiji and the Boys (Seotaiji Wa Aideul) made their breakthrough. This group reflected a
generational change in Korean society (‘sinsedae’: new generation) and has grown into a
huge entertainment industry which boasts an ‘idol star system.’ Initially, the industry was
closely related with the broadcasting industry and both, therefore, were under government
control (e.g. pre-censorship); gradually, however, the laws grew more lax and the
government more tolerant.
The transformation of Korean pop in this era is often credited to ‘globalization’, More
specifically, however, it should be called ‘glocalization’ because from 1992 onwards,
western pop forms (such as rap, reggae, house, rave, jungle, techno, and grunge) along with
punk and Britpop have been imported to and localized within Korea. Korean Pop music has
become one component of a teenager-oriented star entertainment industry closely related to
the television industry. As a result, music production companies have converged into
‘complex entertainment companies’ or ‘total management companies’, which do not
specialize exclusively in music. They are vertically and horizontally integrated to
encompass an entire range of productions, from music to drama, radio and television
programs, publicity and other related businesses. Hence, singers, models, and actors are
inter-exchangeable and popular music has become a means for those seeking stardom.
Interestingly, until the mid-1990s, Korean popular music was essentially ‘domestic’ and
cross-border practices were rare. In those days music was sold on CDs and cassette tapes.
The top rated album would sell no more than two to three million copies in the music
market.7 In 1997, the Korean music industry faced a structural depression due to the IMF
crisis. Although the Korean economy recovered a few years later, it was still an uneven
recovery. It is certain that the recording industry was one of the more vulnerable sectors in
the development of IT (information technology). In fact the ‘mp3 debate’ remains one of the
most debated topics. Due to mp3s, the value of the record market was less in 2000 than it
was in 1995, even though K-pop’s success was farther reaching and widespread in the later
years. Since 1997, the infrastructure of the existing music industry nearly collapsed. The
recovery strategy for the Korean music industry had two concepts: one is digitalization.8
and the other is Asianization – which this paper is especially interested in. Since 2001, K-
pop’s popularity in China and Japan is irrefutable. Due to its success in other Asian
countries, K-pop began to develop what can be called ‘cross-bordering’ characteristics.
It is necessary to state that the (pan-) Asian pop market has not yet plateaued; it is still
in the making. For now we can only say that Seoul/Korea has become a ‘contents supplier’
located in Northeast Asia, and Bangkok is the distribution node in the Southeast Asian
region. It accompanies some kinds of division of labor in the Asian music industry and
culture industry in general. We think that this is the material base of consumption of K-pop
in Thailand.9
K-pop discourses in Korea

At present, there are several discourses on K-pop in Korea, all of which we believe to be
one-sided and over-simplified. The praise of the cultural industry is mixed with a strong
national sentiment. Reality is much more complex than it appears. The Nationalist
discourse conceals rather than reveals that the production and consumption of K-pop are in
fact both diverse and contradictory. Moreover, it obscures the fact that the markets that K-
pop appeals to are heterogeneous, revealing several concrete socio-cultural (pre)conditions
of each country (and city).10
Another qualm against the current academic discourse on K-pop is its tendency to rely
on the notion of ‘cultural proximity’, which is not only a dubious concept but also a variant
of cultural essentialism, i.e. ‘Confucianist cultural region’, ‘Chinese Ideogram (Hanja)
cultural region’, ‘Chopstick cultural region’ etc. Its vulgar version can be summed up as
simply ‘culture produces industry’, ‘ancient culture produces modern industry’.11
To counter the current discourse on K-pop, we argue that the consumption of K-pop in
Thailand is something worth investigating because both countries are ‘culturally not so
proximate’ even if they are not so distant from each other. We believe that the cultural
process between two countries cannot be pigeonholed to either ‘the local in the global’ or
‘the global vs the national’ paradigms. On the contrary, it comes close to our assumption of
‘from the local to the local’, i.e. trans-local cultural process that cannot simply be reduced to
or confined within any national boundary.12 In this case study, we attempt to tackle the
‘trans-Asian cultural traffic in the making (or not) of East Asian pop culture’ hypothesis
critically.
But before we begin, we have to explain, in brief, the recent state of the Korean music
industry. After suffering a major economic blow between the years 2001–2004, the Korean
music industry has restructured, wherein only the three most profitable production compa-
nies have survived: SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and YG Entertainment. Among
them, SM Entertainment, which has been concentrating primarily on the Japanese market
and, to a lesser degree, on the Chinese market, does not seem to care much about the
Southeast Asian market (at least at present). As a result, this paper focuses on the business
practices of JYP and YG, and their representative ‘superstars’ Rain (Be) and Se7en (Seven),
respectively. We bring into focus the practices on the side of production as well as
consumption.13
Korean pop music in Thailand

Although Korean pop music has been a minor player in the Thai music market for some
time now, it has only recently gained significant social and cultural attention. The shift can
be attributed to the practices of the two major Thai music companies – GMM and R.S.
Promotion,14 who chose to produce and distribute albums by Rain and Se7en to the Thai
public. These albums were immediately successful and they are responsible for the recent
popularity of K-pop music in Thailand. The success of these specific albums is primarily
due to smart marketing strategies by the host company in Korea and its local partner in
Thailand. The distribution processes were strengthened by the mediation of the electronic
media, radio, and television, under the GMM and RS Promotion subsidiary groups. In
addition, other entertainment media, such as magazines and newspaper columns that are
affiliated to the local music industry, were employed as an open source of information as
well as a ‘booster’ of Korean music and popular culture. This kind of cross-media publicity
is by now a standard formula, employed by mainstream pop music. Furthermore, the
organization of fan clubs with ‘unofficial support’ from the music companies contributed to
the sales and the trendy image of Korean pop music in Thailand
Before we delve into the phenomenon of Korean pop music in Thailand let us look
briefly at the Thai music industry in order to see what kind of a market Korean pop was
entering. Contemporary Thai popular music is generally classified into two major genres:
‘String’ or ‘pop sound,’ and ‘Luktoong’ or ‘rural sound’. Within these major genres we find
‘Pleng Pua Chiwit’ or ‘Song for Life’, ‘Lukroong’ – the urban sound of the 1950s–1960s, pop,
rock, jazz, soul, dance, reggae, and alternative pop music under the ‘String’ classification. In
the ‘Luktoong’ genre, there are musics from the Central region, the Northeastern ‘Maw
Lam’, which has a range of subgenres such as ‘Maw Lam (Ra)cing’, ‘Maw Lam Plern’ and
other local sound from rural artists, such as ‘Kantrüm’, and ‘Lanna’ music. In 1999, ‘String’
and ‘Luktoong’ together made up approximately 80–85% of the 4396 million baht music
industry (equivalent to US$110 million). Other genres such as ‘Dontri Thai’ or Thai classical
music, ‘Dontri Chon Pao’ or ethnic music accounted for a very small share in the Thai music
market. There is also a small Indie music market, such as Mile Stone Record, Matahari
Record & Art, and Song Bird as well as a small number of underground music makers.
Among the mainstream pop music it is ‘Luktoong’ that commands over 60% of the market
share.
The two major music companies, GMM Grammy and RS Promotion, hold 66% of the
Thai pop music market shares among ‘String’ or ‘pop’ music producers. In 1999, GMM
Grammy held 47% and RS Promotion held 19% of the total shares. Bakery Music (now
merged with Sony/BMG) was third with 6% of shares, and the rest (28%) was divided
among smaller companies (Chanabun 2000).
Foreign music, which has been made up mostly of Western pop music, held approxi-
mately 10–15% of the total pop music market value share. The five major companies that
have their local companies in Thailand are EMI (Thailand), Warner Music (Thailand), Sony
Music (Thailand), Universal (Thailand) and BMG Entertainment (now Sony/BMG). These
companies publish music from their parent companies as well as importing chart albums
from a variety of music labels including Asian pop into the local market.
Evidently, K-pop – and previously J-pop, Taiwan pop and Hong Kong pop – entered
into a diverse and multi-cultural music market. However, this market was already firmly
heirarchized wherein the local music sound scape was higher than the imported music
scene. Some believe that the urban sound or pop music is representative of the urban
middle class, whereas the rural sound of ‘Pleng Luktoong’ represents the rural peasantry
and the urban lower classes. The elite, at the top of the social hierarchy, is the guardian of
the Thai classical music or ‘dontri Thai’ and the promoter of Western classical and pop
music. How did K-pop edge its way into this cultural realm, especially into the ‘imaginary
world’ of Thai middle class youth whose tastes were already shaped? Our initial investiga-
tion to answer these questions is to look at the production and distribution/marketing
strategies of the Korean and Thai music companies.
K-pop flow and local manufacturing of the music

As described in the previous section, the growth of Korean pop music abroad is a significant
part of its present economic policy of cultural exportation to the Northeast and Southeast
Asia. The significance of cultural flow should not be confined within the economic realm;
new cultural flow inter-mingles with a changing music ethnoscape and mediascape, not to
mention the rapidly changing technoscape, in Korea and in the inter-regional cultural
politics. The importation of Korean pop music into Thailand, thus, is a means of survival;
not so much a hegemonic flow as it is a process of industrial and cultural politics within the
Thai music industry. As market leaders, GMM and RS aggressively compete against one
another, Korean pop music becomes the ‘desirable cultural product’ for both GMM and RS
to vie for the largest share in the local music market. This strategy coincided with the
economic and cultural contexts of the industry on the one hand, and with the ‘new technos-
cape’ on the other. GMM and RS have been hurt by music piracy and are shifting towards
the film market as a new source of income. Music sales have dropped because youths prefer
to download songs and music from the Internet, writing music files freely and sharing them
among friends. Both GMM and RS have voiced concern about the government’s sincerity in
pursuing a long-term anti-piracy program (Bamrung 2004). The mainstreaming of K-pop is

an industrial strategy to enrich the music content of GMM Grammy and RS, increase their
competitiveness, and to expand their share of the pop music market, which has been more
or less static for the last few years (Bamrung Amnatcharoenrit 2004). Hence, the economic
interests of the Korean and Thai music industries work in reciprocity at this particular
juncture.
In order to import and publish Korean pop music, Thai music companies must deal
directly with Korean music producers. GMM dealt with DR for Baby V.O.X. and with JYP
for Rain. RS dealt with YG for Se7en in the hope of manufacturing its music albums. The
contract is secured separately for each artist on an ‘exclusive right’ basis. This means that
the Thai music companies are entitled to publish all recordings and related artifacts of the
artist under the contract. With modern production technologies on both sides, the manufac-
turing process is readily standardized. The music files are sent from the Korean music
companies to their Thai counterparts and these are then, published in their original form.
For the cover of the album, sample proofs have to be sent to the DR, JYP or YG for final
approval (Glenn La Sallle, interviewed 27 May, 2005; and Bongkod Phusathorn,
interviewed 9 June, 2005).
In Thailand’s consumption of K-pop, we are exposed to the institutionalization of a
‘standardized practice’ both in the manufacturing of music and in the copyright laws
between inter-Asian entertainment corporations. In their economic relations, they must
work within shared and standardized rules that both sides understand and agree upon. The
economic relations, over the years, have developed into a common professional cultural
practice. This is one of the forms of ‘homogenization’ that is finding shape in the trans-Asia
production of K-pop.
In the distribution/marketing processes, however, there are clearly varied strategies
derived from the real conditions of the mediascape and the ethnoscape of the local music
market. In order to succeed, ‘Homogenization’ in the production process must give way to
local differences in the distribution and marketing processes. Therefore, many layers of
business practices, some standardized, and others often discordant or innovative, must
work together. These processes are, in fact, not mutually exclusive. We believe that the
cultural field of pop Asianism is a fluid one. The field must allow a certain degree of varia-
tion in order to manufacture these value-added products and to appeal to the taste and
culture (or to avoid the taboo) of youth consumers. The following section shows some
examples of local creativity in strategizing and re-packaging the musical product.
Product and marketing variation

Baby V.O.X. were unique to the local music scene when GMM brought them to Thailand.
They were the first ‘girl group idol’ band in Thailand to perform pop dance. Since it was one
of the first Korean pop groups, GMM made a special karaoke album. The 11 track album
has three tracks, ‘By Chance’, ‘Get Up’ and ‘Missing You’, which are not only karaoke tracks
but are also video clips of Baby V.O.X.’s promotional tour and their private visit to
Thailand. Roughly 30,000 copies were sold at 199 baht (US$5) – around 100 baht lower than
the regularly priced Asian music CD album (Glenn La Salle, interviewed 27 May 2005).
More recently, Rain’s third album, ‘It’s Raining’, has a special track with a Thai version
of the song ‘I Do’. It is a duet between Rain and Panadda Ruangwut,15 one of the Grammy
Gold artists. The track creates a fusion of Korean, English and Thai. The recording was done
in each individual country and the Korean file was sent to Bangkok for re-mixing. The same
album in Japan, contains a special Japanese track of ‘I Do’. This kind of variation produced
by using the local languages is a strategy to popularize K-pop in each of the local markets.
The Korean-Thai version of ‘I Do’, interspersed with some English phrases by both singers
sounds like a translation or dubbing of the original version. It is a familiar process in

making cross-cultural products accessible and meaningful to the local audiences. Dubbing
of movies or television program is a case in point. Music itself is a language with a special
characteristic that deterritorializes cultural boundaries. This multi-lingual version brings
music closer to the hearts of the audience who can now enjoy a Korean tune with Thai/
English lyrics. In addition, ‘It’s Raining’ is accompanied by a bonus VCD of Rain’s music
video plus some clips of his promotional tour in Thailand (1–6 April 2005) where he
appeared in a concert, a television program and an autograph signing session with fans.
This bonus VCD ends with promotional clips from China and Japan. These clips are
inexpensive to produce compared with a full production of a three to four minute music
video. Yet they have a special appeal to the fans as it enables them to identify closely with
the ‘real’ artist.
We suspect that this is only the beginning. The next step might be a more tailored prod-
uct similar to instances visible in the Japanese market. Although the mixing of languages is
a useful strategy in mainstreaming the product, it is deemed insufficient to popularize the

music instantaneously. We can take Rain and BoA singing in Japanese as an example.
Young Korean artists are now trained to sing in Japanese to appeal more directly to the
Japanese consumers. Some artists learn a second Asian language in the early stages of their
entry into the idol system of the music industry. The juxtaposition of the Korean music/
artist and Japanese language turns out a product that has a Korean pop tune sung by a
Korean artist in the Japanese language. The quality of singing or its reception is another
story. What we can point at is that various types of translation and linguistic transcultura-
tions are making an appearance. One of the strategies is an adaptation of a song to other
national or local languages by original singers or other singers, the other is to let foreign
singing talents sing new songs in their national language (Japanese language). In our
research, the former is common in Greater China, while the latter is dominant in Japan.16
The former and the latter are completely different strategies, which reflect the position of
China and Japan in this region. A certain form of N-pop (here ‘N-’ is the abbreviation of
‘national’) or Korean pop is Sinofied and Japanized respectively, i.e. nationalized, though in
different ways, and the circuit of trans-culturation through Asianization ends at this point.
The interesting outcome of these strategies, however, is a shift in production conditions
of music, which shows how music, and other cultural products, can be produced in the
same way as non-cultural goods. It reiterates the commodification of culture. The ‘authen-
ticity’ of the original song is partially erased for another kind of ‘authenticity’.17 Or, to put it
differently, a ‘double authenticity’ is created. It is really ‘multiple authenticity’ that we are
looking at. Through the sound of pop music, the ‘imaginary Asia’ is, in a sense, fragmented
and whole, nationalized and de-nationalized simultaneously. In so doing, English is
expressly bypassed. Inter-Asia national languages with their music are the trajectories of the
future rather than an Anglo-American medium. How the ‘imagined nationalization/de-
nationalization’ process effected by these aesthetics and the ‘brand image’ of the artist work
together in pop-Asianism, is a question that needs further problematization.
Although a detailed analysis of the problem is indicated, in this paper, we limit
ourselves to the case of Korea-Thai or Seoul-Bangkok. This case is different from the rela-
tions with China and/or Japan, because neither Korea nor Thai operate as hegemonic
economic, political, or cultural powers.
Media orchestration
The mass-media are central to the marketing strategies of K-pop in Thailand. Radio and
television broadcasts are essential for popularizing music. Both GMM and RS operate their
own radio stations and have some television music slots. GMM’s A-Time media operate
five FM stations in Bangkok.18 RS’s Sky High network operate three FM stations.19 Thus,
they can efficiently promote the music they produce through their media networks. Korean
pop songs manufactured by GMM and RS, therefore, broadcast daily on their radio
networks in Bangkok and around the country. They are on the air in the same slot as the
Thai pop songs and other ‘Asian pop songs’ – Japanese and Taiwanese songs. In putting
these Asian sounds in the same program each music company is drawing the audience into
its system, creating a mass base of listeners and consumers. Hence, fans of Se7en who do
not care much for RS music are tuning in to some of RS’s artists (Oummy, interview 13 July
2005; and Parichart, interview 11 July 2005). In some programs, the Asian sounds are played
along with Western pop sounds. These recent changes by the industry have significant bear-
ings on the expansion of the real market and on the ‘imaginary Asia and the West’. It is still
to be seen whether this kind of re-packaging of the sound-scape is meaningful to the youth
audience. It is also worth investigating whether this repackaging will pose a challenge to
the hierarchy of Eastern and Western music established by the global/Anglo-American
industry or not.
In addition to Bangkok, the urban centers of Thailand are also getting a taste of similar
cosmopolitan soundscape on their local radio. Both GMM and RS, in their effort to become
national media networks, connect their programs to several radio stations in the provinces.
These province stations – such as Smart Radio 100.75 FM, Dontree Season 101.5 FM,
Number One 105.75 FM and Chiengmai Radio 93.70 FM in Chiengmai (Northern region),
Dontree Season 89.5 FM, Youth FM 90 and Sunshine Radio 94.5 in Haadyai and Songkhla
(Southern region), Happy Time 100.5 FM, MSU 102.25 FM and Kiss FM 105.7 in Khon Kaen
and Mahasarakam (Northeastern region) – are linked up with major radio stations.
Together, these programs bring the Asian (including the Thai) and Western sounds to a
nationwide audience.
On television, pop music videos appear in the middle of the night or after the mid-night
music programs. For example, GMM has ‘Pop Up Live’ on Channel 5 (Sat-Sun 12:30 am),
Sony Music has ‘Oxygen’ on Channel 3 (Mon 1:00 am) and ‘Fun Overtime’ (Sun 12:30 am),
and on J-Zone (Sat 12:30 am) Channel 7. However, the Asian television channels have
schedules that are different and complementary to the local channels. Channel V, for
instance, broadcasts Korean music videos in its daily morning program, ‘Big Breakfast’
(9:00–10:30) and in the early evening slot, ‘Remote Control’ (18:00–20:00), as well as in the
mid-evening during the weekend, in a show called ‘Magix’ (20:00-22:00). The late night
program, ‘Addict’, is scheduled at 23:00 hours, Monday through Friday. The new addition
to this milieu is Arrirang TV, which has several programs such as ‘Pops in Seoul Weekly
Chart’, ‘Show Music Tank’ and ‘Show Biz Extra’. These are special programs that bring K-
pop to the homes of youth. The replay format of three times a day on cable television is an
effective way to reach the audience in Bangkok and other urban centers in the country.
From the wide range of radio and television programs, on both local terrestrial
channels, and cable and satellite channels, K-pop has been well orchestrated into the music
culture of Thai youth. In addition, there are music and pop culture/entertainment maga-
zines such as Sincere, I-Spy, J-Spy, Ming Xing, Myo Jo, and Starpics, which provide supportive
information, commentary, and visual images that contribute to the increasing popularity of
Korean pop fandom.
We have demonstrated in this section how Korean pop music is being manufactured
and marketed by the mainstream media. While the local companies and media orchestrate
this K-pop sound in Thailand, there is parallel orchestration by JYP and YG in two ways:
First, through the Korean media networks and second, through their promotional tours that
are organized almost synchronously in the Northeast Asian countries – China, Japan and
Taiwan. This marketing strategy is significant in attempting to create an ‘Asian image’ of
the Korean artists. From ‘Korean idol’ they are made into ‘Asian star’ or ‘imaginary Asian
star’ circumscribed by the media hype easily linked to by the modern Asian technoscapes.
Hence, apart from Korean artists, the chain of ‘Asia stars’, such as F4, Rain, Dylan and
Se7en, has been popularized during the same period in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.
Questions on the categorization of K-pop and Asian-pop

While the Korean music industry is strategizing on selling its national pop stars to an Asian
audience (referring to the Northeast and Southeast Asia to a lesser degree) it needs to be
categorized to fit this ‘imaginary Asian sound’. And it is here that some of the confusions
and hegemonic categorization caught our attention. Where would K-pop be located in the
world of music genres?20 Would it be placed as K-pop in its own right or along side the
Western artists, categorized by music genres or alphabetical order? Or would it be placed
separately in the ‘Asian music’ categorization along with J-pop, Taiwanese and Hong Kong
pop? Or is there really an ‘Asian-pop’ category? If ‘Asian-pop’ does exist, why is there a
separation between music from the East and the West? Since Anglo-American pop sounds
are always in one and the same category then does it mean that K-pop and Asian-pop
become ‘the other music’ for the Western music industry which has long dominated the
global musicscape?
We begin from our personal experiences. In Thailand, Korean popular music did not
have its independent ‘corner’ in large shopping malls. In CD Warehouse – a megastore
dealing with records – Korean popular music was categorized as ‘Korean (song)’ placed
next to ‘Chinese (song),’ both of which were a sub-category of ‘J-pop’.21 Those who work for
the music industry use the term K-pop or even T-pop which means Taiwanese pop (not
Thai-pop). But we should note that we were speaking in English. It therefore seems that
while J-pop entered the ordinary vocabulary, K-pop did not. On the concert and MV
shelves in the CD Warehouse, however, Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese MVs and live
performances are placed together with the Anglo-American MVs in alphabetical order. Can
we make a symptomatic reading of these discrepancies?
We have to note that the terminology is similar in Korea. Koreans seldom use the term
K-pop, when they designate their ‘national’ pop(ular) music. They are satisfied with the
old term ‘Hanguk Gayo’ or more simply ‘Gayo’, which means ‘Korean Song(s)’ or ‘Song’.
Most Korean consumers refer to popular music of other (western) countries as ‘pop’. So,
here in Korea, J-pop is the only (national) popular music in Asia that deserves the term
‘pop’. In Thailand, it is quite similar to just use the term ‘pleng’ meaning ‘song’ or ‘music’
as an all encompassing category. But when it comes to pop music in particular, the catego-
rization is based on the genre of the music. The catergorization in terms of nationality of
music is reserved for foreign music and Thai classical music. Hence, Thai youth would call
K-pop ‘Korean song’, J-pop ‘Japanese song’, and T-pop or Mandarin pop ‘Chinese song’.
However, for Anglo-American pop it would be ‘pleng sakol’ or ‘universal song’ or some-
times ‘pleng farang’ or ‘foreign song’. Categorization is a politics of naming, and these poli-
tics go beyond national boundaries, lending to the mixed imageries of certain ‘foreign’
countries and Asia. When we call ‘national’ or ‘local’ popular music N-pop, it means that
the music has become ‘cool’ and meets the taste of the youth. The youth culture is closely
related to consumption spaces in modern Asian metropolises. In the context of the metrop-
olises of Asia, ‘pop’, including some ‘N-pop(s)’, means ‘consumerist’, ‘depoliticized’,
‘dehistoricized’, in short ‘decontextualized’ and it is the symptom of the age, which we call
‘global-postmodern’.
Asian pop and pop Asianism are closely related to metropolitan or trans-metropolitan
youth consumer cultures in Asia. They reflect a new structure of sensibility of middle class
youth and are often described with words like speed, instantaneity, momentariness etc.
They resemble the experience of shopping in mega-malls. The fact is that Asian pop, with
some variants of N-pop, became the soundscape in this consumption spaces. We can also
add that this new structure of sensibility is closely related to new technologies and new
media, which entail further research.
So, the preposition ‘N-’ comes and goes, following the rules of fashion within the
culture industry. Last month it was J-, this month it is K-, next month it might be T- (or M-),
and there may be a new one next year of some out-of-fashion or out-dated product. It both
erases and leaves traces of ‘nationality’ of a certain cultural product made elsewhere. It has
accomplished a degree of synchronicity and coexistence but not in a uniform way in terms
of time-space, because there are a number of ‘obstacles’ in mainstreaming Asian pop – time
lag, difference in taste, political reasons, ‘nationalist sentiments’ etc.
The abbreviated preposition of each ‘N-pop’ is a symptom of the fact that the national-
ity of a certain cultural product is dually and simultaneously concealed and revealed.22 So,
Asian pop is no more a ‘nationalized style of Western (Anglo-American) popular music’,
but rather a ‘trans-local (re)creation of a new global style’. Although we still have to dig into
the stratification of Asian pop, we can comfortably announce that the top level of Asian pop
is both the most globalized and trans-localized.
Roughly speaking, J-pop has already become Asian pop in the entire Asian region;
Mandarin pop has become Asian pop at least in Greater China and K-pop is an emerging
brand of Asian pop. If we restrict our perspective just to the case of K-pop, some K-pop stars
have become pan-Asian stars, other K-pop stars have become inter-Asian stars in two or
three countries, and the rest are still local stars. Therefore, we can say that Asian pop has a
kind of pyramid structure with some levels and demarcations, which intersect and overlap
the circuit of Asian pop. We can argue again that it is no more ‘the national vs the national’
but ‘the local in the regional’; more exactly ‘the trans-local in the Asian’.
However, Asian pop is still a ‘Northeast Asian’ thing when we consider it just in terms
of production, although not just so in terms of distribution, mediation and consumption.
This reflects the economic hegemony of the Northeast Asia over the other Asian regions, not
the aesthetical superiority of cultural products made in Northeast Asia. Therefore, we can
say that some successful K-pop began to enter into the circuit of Asian trans-metropolitan
consumerist youth culture. This circuit is laden with movements of trans-culturation,
hybridization, and syntheticization. But it is not our aim to study why some K-pop stars are
successful and others are not. Our question is whether this circuit produces some ‘anti-
national’ effects in each country (in this paper, in Thailand) in their movement. If it does,
does it subvert hegemony of the national ruling class? If it does, does it lead to the forma-
tion of an inter-Asian cultural capitalist class? To answer these questions, we have to enter
into the imagination of not only those who produce and distribute K-pop, but also those
who consume and listen to K-pop in Thailand.
Thai fandom and the consumption of Korean pop music23

Thai youths were initially drawn to Korean pop through Korean dramas and music.
Although the fans of Korean pop music see themselves as the real fans of K-pop they are,
nonetheless, interpellated by the drama series aimed directly at youthful consumers on ITV
and Channel 7. The industry has manufactured a comprehensive image of these Korean
stars in many forms in order to capture the imagination of the youth. For our research, we
will look at Rain, who comes from a dancing background, and Se7en who was a university
student aspiring to be a singer. Under JYP, Rain became both a singer and an actor, staring
in “Full House”, a major television drama.24 His appearance on his MV revealed him to be
an outdoor type, masculine, athletic, active, and Western. This is coupled with his role in
“Full House”, which showed his toughness, as a no-nonsense husband and a strong leader,
albeit hiding his weaknesses from the heroine. His image could be summed up as one of
ruggedness and sturdiness. This is a type of artist brand personality that is in the manual of
star manufacturing of the Big Five (Aaker 1996). On the contrary, RS chose to import Se7en,
who has a different kind of image. YG has made Se7en into a sort of prince charming. He is
gentle, smooth, sexy, and effeminate. There is also a mix of sentimentality, friendliness, and
warmth that bring out a cheerful personality. Se7en is purported to be spiritual and
imaginative which is a softer image compared with that of Rain. Nonetheless, it is another
standard image of the ‘Big Five’ formula.
Consuming the image and the music

While the fans are clearly fascinated by both the image and the music, it is clear that good
looks have a lot to do with Rain and Se7en’s popularity. Fans of Se7en they think he is ‘cute’
and marvel at his dancing skills. The enthusiasts would, however, argue that ‘good music’
came first. They told us that when they found out Baby V.O.X. lip-synced their music
videos, they felt the group were not ‘real singers’ and they stopped adoring them. The fans
of Rain, on the contrary, prefer his strong build and his masculine image, a ‘real man’.
However, most of the fans put an emphasis on the music and the production of the albums,
as well as that of the music videos. There is obviously a combination of an economic
rationale along with the emotional infatuation with the stars in the consumption of these
cultural products.
Since Rain and Se7en are R&B and Hip Hop artists, both must dance to the tunes of
their music. Coming from a dancer background Rain performed his dance with full physical
energy to the beat of ‘It’s Raining’, which is the cover song of his album. Se7en, on the other
hand, danced well to the tune of ‘Passion’. He danced with a sliding gliding style (also in
other MVs). Comments by the fans show how they could differentiate their idols and
choose exactly the style of artist and the music that suit their taste. To the eyes of K-pop
enthusiasts, although Rain is a perfect dancer he does not sing very well. Furthermore, his
back-up dancers were, in close range, competing with him. This was considered a weak
point for the artist. To the serious fan the dance and the overall design of Se7en was more
carefully thought out. The contrasting colors of black and white, between the artist and the
back up, made Se7en appear distinctive as he danced. His cool looks and lively style with a
bit of fun contributed immensely to his uniqueness. These well-designed personalities are
meant to communicate with youth consumers. They certainly succeed, as we will show in
greater detail below.
Club meeting: the ritual and the actualization of the ‘imaginary’

There are many fan clubs organized around Korean pop artists such as Rain, Se7en, and
Baby V.O.X. The usual activities for the fans include going to the concerts of artists on their
promotional tours, going to the airport to greet the artists upon arrival, and meeting the
artists for their autographs. These rituals are an important part of the audience’s consump-
tion of music. It is equally important for the industry to bring the artists into direct contact
with their fans. This is essentially the primal marketing strategy to package and sell the
image of the artist together with the artist him/herself. The twin processes are connected by
the pleasurable event of music making and the actualization of the ‘imagined’. The artists
become real and tangible. The fans meet, communicate, shake hands, hug or kiss their idols.
However, although the star/super-star is within their reach, there is a deliberate distance of
the ‘aura’ of an idol. In these events the realm of the ‘imagined’ and the ‘real’ work synchro-
nously. It is the instant whereby the crossing of the two worlds is made possible at once.
Let us take a closer look at one particular Se7en fan club, which was organized in 2004.
The fan club is a place where youths get together as a group and share their enjoyment and
interests, away from the watchful eyes of their families. The youth club culture is ‘homo
luden’, at its best in playing out their identity politics against the family, the school, and the
Establishment. Since these fans are teenagers in the education system, most of their time is
spent split between home and school. Thus, Korean pop music is taken as the rallying point
to go out and meet with friends, to take dancing lessons, or Korean language lessons, to
access the web and search for new information on their idol, and to save money for new
albums or magazines. The ‘individual imagination’ is turned into a ‘collective imaginary’ of
teenage girls and boys who meet on their internet networks and in their occasional club
meetings or small group meetings.
One such meeting that we participated in was organized six weeks after the promo-
tional tour of Se7en’s second album, ‘Must Listen’. The fan club organized the meeting at
the W.O.C. restaurant right in Siam Square’s Center Point area on a Saturday afternoon
(June 4, 2005). The meeting was announced on the fan club website.25 Tickets, which cost
300 baht each, were sold in advance. About 40 members came to the party. The majority
were young high school and university students. There were only a few boys in the group.
The restaurant was decorated with posters of Se7en on each and every wall in an effort to
transform it into an exclusive space for the fan club.
What interested us there was the location of the meeting right in the heart of urban,
middle class youth cultural space. The Center Point area has a good reputation for youth
fashion and entertainment. Small stores selling the latest fashions, as well as beauty salons,
restaurants and food from local to international cuisines, plus the global brand food chains,
cinema complexes, music shops and entertainment grooves where youth meet and mix, all
create a modern day wonderland. It is fragmented yet combined in a single whole. A ‘post-
modern’ space, so to speak, that that youth call their own.26
The activities at the meeting were well scripted by the ‘organizing staff’ of the club. For
about three hours the fans gathered around to watch the video footage of the promotional
tour and the Channel V music award ceremony, at which Se7en was given an award. Then
there was dancing and games. One member then appeared in his ‘imaginary Se7en’ outfit
and danced to the tune of ‘Tattoo’ to the rapturous cheers of the fans around him.
For these fans, consuming Korean songs is keeping up with the latest trend in youth
culture. They feel cool and modern. This example may be a small elucidation on youth and
its revolutionary spirit in pop consumption – for the ‘moderns’ must break with the cultural
tradition of the antiquity (Berman 1983). As one group of enthusiasts told us, they were fans
of J-pop, F-4, Jay Chow, Baby V.O.X., Rain, and Se7en. They moved from one to the other to
keep up with the new trend. Thus, they possess this revolutionary spirit that is ready to
break with its own tradition, or with itself. It is true not only with Asian pop but with their
consumption of Thai and Western pop as well. They are always on the look out for the latest
trends, such as the Titanium or Crescendo, popular among Indie fans. They like top-of-the-
chart Hip Hop and Rap. They think Good Charlotte, Eminem, Britney Spears, Black Eye
Peas, Linkin Park, Justin Timberlake (previously N-Sync), and Usher are ‘cool’. However, to
be always on the brink of modernity one has to invest in the cultural economy of pop and
this is the topic to which we will now turn.
Organizing the language and lyrics

In order for these fans to maximize their experiences on consuming K-pop they have to
immerse themselves in many cultural products. Although having only limited resources,
they must somehow invest in the music (CD or VCD)27 that will provide them with the
latest information on their idols. All this depends heavily on their language capability.
We find that many of the fans either enroll for Korean language courses (at Silapakorn
University – University of Fine Arts, Thammasat University, and Ramkamhaeng Univer-
sity), or buy Korean language books or search for some language manuals on the web.28
They want to know all the news and gossip first hand if possible. The ultimate aim is to
be able to read their idols’ responses to the fans. For those who cannot afford to take the
lessons, either for lack of time or money, they join the fan clubs. This is the best solution
to get information, exchange opinions and artifacts, and most of all, to have a group of
fans with whom one can share the same experiences. The web that Oummy created has
600 members and it has been maintained so well that it has become a source of
information for various entertainment magazines that often access it to check for new
information.
The rituals and the internalization of consumption culture would not be complete with-
out the singing of their favorite songs. How could these fans sing to the tunes that are
completely foreign to them? It is evident that Asian pop has very little common cultural
ground. There is a huge language barrier, so to speak. While in the case of ‘Latin pop’ or
‘African pop’ there are some common lyrical and musical features which can be found in
their own musical traditions or origins, in the case of Asian pop it is not that easy. It means
that Asian pop is the antithesis of Asian traditional music and that it is not socially rooted
music, at least now in its formative stage. Consequently, it is not sufficient to define Asian
pop as a form of ‘global hybrid’. Nor is it sufficient to propose that Asian pop in each Asian
country uses Western, i.e. Anglo-American, musical features (song form, rhythm pattern,
chord change etc).
Among many questions, we now concentrate on one crucial problem – the problem of
the language of the lyrics. How is it possible for a certain form of Asian pop to be cross-
bordering, namely how can it go beyond national boundaries and language barriers? The
producers layer the production, consumption, and identification with many different strat-
egies. First of all, they choose a song with English lyrics, ‘Come Back to Me’. It is a ballad
easy to their ear in both music and lyrics. But they tackle the other songs in Korean by
doing four versions of transliteration and translation. The first version is a romanized
transliteration of the lyrics. The second version is a Thai transliteration of the lyrics. These
lend them the ‘sounds’ necessary for the singing of ‘Passion’ and ‘Tattoo’ for instance. The
third version is an English translation of the lyrics and the fourth version is a Thai transla-
tion of the lyrics. These provide the meanings of the songs to the fans. Although all of the
songs in an album are, painstakingly, transliterated and translated, only the cover songs
have been picked up and are sung along with by most fans. One simple reason is that not
all of the songs, which are mostly love songs, are equally successful. The organizing of
language brings the fans to a full circle of their consumption process. Hence, it is no
wonder that the final ritual at the fan club meeting is singing and waving the insignia of
Se7en.
However, there is more to this whole process of transliteration and translation. The
Korean language has been made familiar to many foreign ears, Thais in particular; yet the
written Korean letters/alphabets are still foreign. The language has been visualized and has
gone through the Anglo-American medium in order to produce the phonetic sounds for the
reading of the lyrics (transliteration). The translated meaning is also in English before it is
re-translated to reach finally the Thai language. The ‘On Mun’ has been obliterated all
together. The reason given by the webmaster is that it is difficult to transfer to the Thai
website. With all the effort in organizing the language, there is, significantly, something
missing, something that is terribly important. Our question is how can one learn a new
language without seeing the basic infrastructure of that very language? It seems we are
going back to the ‘oral language’ communication pattern. This is memorization and
childhood learning; fun and playful. It is learning by trial and error, which is the process by
which a large number of people overcome their illiteracy and find their identity through
spoken words. By using this same pattern, Thai youths are finding their route to some
words or phrases of spoken Korean language. If the youth fans look upon this as a means of
crossing the border then we can look upon it as a strong kind of innovation to overcome a
language barrier of the ‘moderns.’
Kitsch and identity: consuming the mainstream

There are several points from which we can draw our discussion to make sense of the
current consumption of K-pop. Is this supposed to be a sub-culture of K-pop and Asian
pop fans? If we are talking about the style and taste we may say, ‘yes’. It has undoubt-
edly carved out a space that is clearly signifying some ‘Asian’ style of pop, albeit main-
stream and highly standardized in its production. The fans carry those characteristics
considered to be youth sub-culture. They come from various secondary schools and
universities with somewhat similar socio-economic background and they share the same
taste in music. Hip Hop, R&B, and pop dance music appeal to them whether they are
originally from Thai pop, Western pop, or Asian pop. These sounds have now become
predominantly popular in Asia and across the globe. It is the youth sound of the
present generation. It is a generational identity. To keep up with this modern sound is
kitsch and trendy. This kind of desire to be modern, at all times, is a reflection of the
youth spirit and the ritual of growing up. This consumption process seems to point in
the direction of a corporatized anti-national phenomenon, if you will. Although it might
be seen as anti-national, it is neither against the state nor openly subversive and hence
quite different from the kind of organic subversive politics of young people in the 1960s.
The rituals of the fan meeting appeared innocent enough. The cultural politics of youth,
however, lies with their taste for the ‘un-Thai pop music’. Their staunch adherence to ‘the
other pop’ and their seeking of knowledge in order to find their pleasurable space in the
‘imaginary’ and the ‘real’ show their defiance to the values imposed upon them by adults.29
However, while they attempt to resist their parents they must negotiate between pleasure
and school. The webmaster, for example, has to help her parents at the dental clinic during
the weekends in order to earn some extra money for her fan club activities. Initially, her
father supported her to start the website for Se7en. The challenge was for her to keep up the
activity for at least a year. The website is now holding out in its second year. She used all
her skills to work on the website and learned Korean in the meantime. She has just passed
her entrance exam this year and wants to learn the Korean language as her minor subject. In
this process of being modern, the Thai youth must similarly appropriate Korean pop and
negotiate to strike a balance at home and school at the same time.
A second point is the notion of gender. The industry has created these male idols for
young female consumption. Thai fans find Korean idols attractive even if they are Asians
(and not the standard Western pop stars). For whatever reasons, fans agree that young
Asians are also good looking, in their own different way.30 The crossing of borders
through visual images is strongly articulated in the Thai youths’ consumption of K-pop. It
might be said that Thai girls are no longer shy in expressing their sexual desire through
their ‘imaginary idol’. In reality, however, they are so shy that most of them cannot even
dance along to the music. They never express themselves in any public arena except to
greet their idols at the airport or at the concerts. Despite their shyness, it is truly extraordi-
nary that Thai girls from a middle class socio-economic background find liberation
through K-pop and Asian-pop. Through pop music they experience emotional engage-
ment, form new friendships, and feel blissfulness. They are aware that there are various
male idols to choose from, extending beyond Thai pop stars. They comment on each of
their idols and compare these idols with Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese idols
freely. We observed that the imagination of the Thai female youths is not confined to the
‘national model’ of Thai idols.
It is interesting to see how young girls who participate in fan clubs manage to organize
themselves so well outside of the domestic space, away from the watchful eyes of their
family. They learn how to network among themselves and accomplish technical work,
including the business of dealing with the restaurant for complete privacy during the club
meetings. In this way, they are able to act independently and collectively with their new
friends. Some members of the group have gone beyond a small geographical community
and have, via the web, connected with Korean friends as well as fans throughout Thailand
(who help translate lyrics). This is obviously a significant step toward crossing borders to
actualize their ‘imaginary world’ of Korean pop.
The responses to the questionnaires show that the ‘imaginary world of pop music’ has
imbued Thai youth with a contradictory perception of Korea, the nation, and the Korean
people. The positive images include beautiful scenery, a highly developed economy, and
diligent and good-looking people. For those who compare the image of Korea with Japan
and China, their impression is that Japan is a much more affluent nation than Korea while
China is lagging behind both of them. Some are not quite sure what Korea is really like
because they have not been there. Nevertheless, Korean pop carries a positive image that
becomes a conveyor of other Korean consumer products such as mobile phones, sound
systems, electrical goods, fashions, and cosmetics. Our respondents said they think Korean
products are of a good quality and they tend to purchase these products when they go shop-
ping. Perhaps the aesthetic value of pop music lies in the imagination of the Thai youth. But,
more importantly, K-pop communicates through the ‘desirable’ and ‘pleasurable,’ images
that in reality are much more materialistic than it would seem. Williams suggests in his clas-
sic article, ‘Advertising; the magic system’, that advertising is the official art of the modern
capitalist society (Williams 1980). He sees it as a highly organized and professional system of
magical inducements and satisfactions, functionally very similar to magical systems in
simpler societies, but rather strangely coexistent with a highly developed scientific technol-
ogy. If we follow Williams’ logic, the rise of pop music and the way it functions, might easily
be called the official art of both today’s modern capitalist society and the nation state.
In many ways, pop music acts as a vehicle for promoting Korea and its products to the
world. K-pop music, along with dramas and other pop culture products, sell a positive
image of the Korean nation. Once the inducement for a desirable Korean nation is created in
the imaginary world of young audiences it would extend to other Korean consumer
products as well. Thus, the cultural economy feeds back into the capitalist system, and the
cycle of this relationship continues to deepen.
Asianization in globalization: the Asian in the global, the local in the Asian
In this paper, we have addressed the rise of K-pop in Thailand. Our theoretical assumptions
investigate the industrial mainstreaming of pop music between metropolises in the region. We
see the emergence of Asianization in globalization through the diffusion of pop culture. At the
other end of the spectrum our investigation of the K-pop fan club shows that the Thai middle
class youths are actively organizing themselves in new and often unique fashions. Their ‘imag-
inary world’ has been broadened by their consumption of pop music, as has their perception
of Asia. We have some conclusions to offer as to what this amounts to, in the final section.
The search for some valuable ‘Asianism,’ which defies globalization/Americanization
in Asian pop, might not be so meaningful. There is neither ‘state’ nor ‘people’ in Asian pop,
as some ideologues and academicians have otherwise claimed. However, if Asian pop is
already beyond national boundaries, is the search for national identity in Asian pop impos-
sible? The search for identity offers a mysterious form of ‘postmodern nationalism’. Since
the imagined identity of ‘K-pop’ or ‘N-pop’ is a skewed combination of corporate and
national identity from the start, it confuses corporate identity from a certain country with its
national identity in general. Asian music corporations or conglomerates – in our particular

case, Korean corporations – are no longer contained within national identities discourse. In
their business networks they have extended their market into Northeast Asian countries
and Southeast Asian countries. They make serious efforts to blur their national identity, and
create a ‘hybrid identity’ as demonstrated in their production and marketing strategies.
‘Asian majors’ no longer hold each of their national identity but become transnational in
their own way within the Asian market.
Moreover, as argued earlier in this paper, in the pyramid structure created by the Asian
pop, only the upper levels can be called purely ‘Asianist’. The other levels are still local and
have an opportunity to cross borders. Most of the ‘serious’ popular music still lies in these
lower levels and most are left outside the circuit of Asian pop. This means that in the upper
level of Asian pop the content of the lyrics is not so important. Most lyrics are mixed with
plain English language lyrics, so that they just disseminate phonetic sounds with little literal
meaning. However, more ‘serious’ popular music, like local rock and hip-hop, in which the
message of lyrics matters, cannot so easily cross borders, especially since singers usually opt
to sing in their ‘mother tongue’. While instrumental sounds can convey much feeling and
meaning, vocal sound hardly translates and conveys as much as text. Overcoming these
language barriers will be a key issue in fostering a trans-Asian cultural traffic in the hopes of
yielding a cross-fertilizing cultural exchange.
The anti-national character of some Asian pop is both real and imaginary. While the real
is often found to be in the minds of inter-Asian cultural capitalists who would not confine
themselves to the original national market but to a larger Asian market, the imaginary
resides in the hearts of middle class youth audiences in each Asian country who want to be
more ‘cool’ and ‘modern’ than the one in the past. In other words, they are no more national
and in some cases actually very ‘anti-national’. As a result, if someone wants the latter to
become oppositional or at least negotiable at a national level, the politics of Asian pop would
not take the form of the protest from the outside of pop music as it had been in 1970s–1980s,
but would take the form of inversion from within pop music, i.e. post-political and post-
national form. Alternatives would lie in ‘inside out’ rather than ‘upside down’. If the latter
means ‘subversion from below’, the former ‘inversion from within’, which means that we
hope the hard shells of ‘national popular cultures’ would be turned out into the trans-Asian
traffic and gradually deconstructed into something else, something ‘new Asian’.
Finally, we should ask whether mainstream Asian pop will be another kind of ‘foreign
envy’ or not. We are now wondering whether the Thai–Korea trans-local relation is asym-
metrical or not. In the Thai audience’s imagination, the image of ‘Korea’ is clear while the
image of ‘Asia’ is still vague and obscure. This imaginary is in contrast to the hearts and
minds of the Korean culture industry, which has a clearer image of Asia, be it ‘the market
for commodity’ or ‘the object of conquest’. It is also true that when we questioned some
Korean audiences about Thai pop, they regarded Thai pop as ‘backward’ and ‘Asian’,
though actually Thai pop is virtually non-existent to Korean audience except for some Thai
film enthusiasts.31 In other words, Korean audiences, as well as producers, think K-pop is
more ‘advanced’ and ‘Western/American’ than other Asian pop (except J-pop). It is
perhaps ironic that the imagination of Asia has not yet reached a transformatory stage in the
popular psyche of Asian audiences.
In conclusion, consumption of Asian pop in Asia lies between a kind of ‘Euro-America
envy’ and a kind of ‘Orientalist exoticism’. We think J-pop consumption in Thailand and
Korea, is closer to the former than the latter. To go beyond this and move to elsewhere, first
of all, we need to historicize the development of Asian pop, with a comparative study. At
the present stage, it would be historicizing the de-historicized or re-contextualizing the de-
contextualized. In that process we hope to find a new kind of ‘Asianism’ that is neither the
essentialist Asianism nor the pop Asianism that is in vogue.
Notes
1. During the colonial period, ‘East Asia’ usually referred to China, Russia, Japan and Korea et al. However,
in this paper the term East Asia will include Southeast Asian nations since East Asia is a vast geographical
and geopolitical area. East Asia will, therefore, encompass two sub-regions, Northeast and Southeast Asia.
2. During 1985–2003, a period of 18 years, Korea invested a total of 11,023 million baht. In comparison, in
2003 Korea invested 3,505 million baht and in 2002 it invested 3,212 million baht. The amount of invest-
ment from Korea has increased manifold over the last few years. Korea is now the eighth major trading
partner for Thailand. Thailand, on the contrary, has not been able to invest in a reciprocal manner in
Korea. In 2003, Thailand invested 35 million baht and in 2002 it invested 13 million baht. Korean tourism,
more than the trade and investment, has been the main source of revenue. In 2002, 700,000 Korean tour-
ists visited Thailand and it generated 15,000 million baht whereas only 50,000 Thais visited Korea in the
same year (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2005).
3. As we shall see below, discourses on K-pop are indivisibly related to those on J-pop and other kinds of
Asian popular trends. Even ‘audience studies’ about K-pop have to be comparative because the Asian pop
market is still segmented into (roughly) heterogeneous sub-regional markets, for example Japan, Greater
China and Southeast Asia. Then what is the imagination of Asia in the pop music industry? In a CD released
by one of the Japanese companies and distributed to other Asian countries, it is said that ‘This CD is licensed
to be distributed and sold in the following territories: Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Korea, Singapore,
Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia only’. In this imaginary, Asia is ‘East Asia (Northeast Asia)
plus Southeast Asia’, although in economic terms that phrase is the result of international pricing policy.
4. Glenn La Salle, presently the International Licensing and Publishing Manager, GMM (Thailand) Co, Ltd,
recalled that in 1998 he introduced a Korean female R&B group, to the Thai listeners. It did not succeed at
all at the time. When he moved to GMM in 2001 he made another attempt. This time he introduced
Babyvox, a five-piece female pop dance group. It was quite a success. From then on GMM was confident
that Korean pop music has a place in the Thai musicscape (Interviewed, 27 May 2005).
5. Ragnarok Online (abbreviated RO) is an MMORPG created by Gravity Corp. of South Korea and powered
by Aegis. Much of the background of the game is based on the manga or comic strip (manhwa) Ragnarok
by Lee Myung-Jin. The soundtrack is provided by SoundTeMP. An anime was created, Ragnarok The
Animation, which is based on the game. Most of the game’s mythos is based on Norse mythology, but
contains many references to other cultures, such as that of Japan and Africa. Please see http://en.wikipe-
dia.org/wiki/Ragnarok_Online for reference.
6. See detailed analysis of World Cup in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5(1).
7. It might be one of the common characteristics of the star entertainment industry in East Asia, especially
in Japan and Hong Kong – the ‘idol (aidoru) star system’. The difference between the Korean music
industry and Japanese and Hong Kong music lies in the fact that the even the branches of transnational
music corporations could hardly enter into this exclusive realm and had to be satisfied with distributing
some western pop records to some music enthusiasts. This could be a short explanation of the (g)localiza-
tion process of the music industry before ‘Asianization’ in Korea. These characteristics can be applied to
Thailand also. In both countries, domestic (‘local’) popular music as well as the domestic music industry
has ruled while ‘international’(global or English) pop music has not been so popular since the 1990s. Is it
still in the stage of ‘hard globalization’ or something else?
8. In terms of ‘digitalization of music’, Korea seems to be the most ‘advanced’ country in the world. Since
the mid-1990s, the Korean music industry has been transformed into an ‘online recording market’
completely giving up the ‘offline record market’, thus bypassing the stage of mass consumption of CD/
DVDs. The main components of this online recording market are ‘ringtone download services’, ‘mini-
hompage BGM (background music) services’ and ‘online music streaming services’ which are all closely
connected to the big IT industry, especially the ‘mobile telecommunication’ industry such as SK telecom
and KTF. The experience of music has dramatically changed in these ten years along with the profound
change of technology of music consumption. The Korean music industry has become a ‘service industry’.
In 2005, the value size of the online market was three times bigger (about US$300 million) than the offline
record market (about US$100 million). By way of suggestion, the Korean music industry peaked in 1998.
The value size of the record industry is about US$400 million. So, only production companies who
provide ‘musical contents’ could survive while record companies who specialized in the distribution
could not survive or survived only as ‘record distribution agencies’, which is no more profitable. In the
near future, the Korean music industry will be transformed once again by an IT industry that wants to
expand by using digital music content. The music industry has already become one component of an
entertainment complex, which is closely tied to the IT industry ruled over by big corporations. Recently,
Doremi Record and Seoul Records, two of the biggest record companies, were sold to Music City (an
internet company) and SK Telecom respectively.
9. It means that Seoul/Korea has little comparative advantage in distribution and financing. Note that
‘major’ companies who have dominated the pop market in Korea are just ‘production companies’ or
‘entertainment companies’, neither transnational corporations nor domestic giants (Chaebol). We can
add that the Japanese music industry has comparative advantage in almost every sphere and that the
Chinese music industry has a vast potential market, whereas Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei serve as
the ‘regional centers’ of the Music Industry in Asia.
10. About various processes of transculturation in the circuit of Asian pop, see Appendices A and B.
11. About this point see Negus (1999: 14–30). He proposed conceptions of not only ‘production of culture’,
but also ‘culture of production’. The former means that ‘industry produces culture’, the latter means that
‘culture produces industry’.
12. About the case studies of trans-local spatiality or ‘the local to the local’, see Ma (2002) and Fung (2003).
But these cases are different from Thai–Korea or Bangkok–Seoul relations. In the former, trans-local
means ‘the western to the non-western’ and in the latter ‘between some locals (Hong Kong, Beijing,
Shanghai etc) in the national (China)’. The Thai–Korean relation is between two non-western local ‘with
or without’ the national.
13. Rain and Se7en represent the so-called ‘second stage’ of Korean wave and K-pop and new male
sexuality, which is not only ‘cute’ but also ‘strong’. The first stage was represented by a 3–5-piece boy
dance group or girl dance group (H.O.T., NRG, Shinhwa, S.E.S., Babyvox) and their popularities were
(trans)localized and centered on mainland China, Vietnam and Taiwan, i.e. certain K-pop stars were
popular in a certain country (or region). Now Rain, Se7en, and female superstar Boa is more ‘pan-Asian’
and dubbed as an ‘Asian star’ in Korean media, of course with some exaggeration.
14. See the company profile of GMM Grammy and RS Promotion in Appendix B at the end of the paper.
15. Panadda Ruangwut (Nad) possesses the kind of voice that could hardly be found in anyone else. With
the ability to sing as a fine instrument, Panadda won herself first position in Star Search Contest, giving
her the chance to become a part of Grammy Gold. Panadda commenced her musical career from singing
soundtracks for several dramas, before her first album, ‘Panadda Dao Kradas’ (Paper Star), took off in
1998. Panadda’s latest album, ‘Baan Mai Roo Roy’ (Forever Bloom), in 2003, is full of sweet romantic
songs, which is her trade mark that is adored by a huge audiences.
16. In the cases of most Japanese editions of K-pop stars’ records, all they did was to sing in the studio and
dance when the music videos were shot. Songwriting, arrangement, recording, mixing, mastering and
others were done by the Japanese staff. And these kinds of records have little traces that they came from
Korea. Is so-called ‘cultural odorlessness’ also applied to foreign entertainers in the J-industry?
17. GMM uses the same strategy with its 8866 music company in Taiwan. The hit albums in Thailand were
exported to Taiwan and produced in a Taiwan version. This means translating the lyrics into Chinese
and sung either by Chinese artists or Thai artists who learnt to sing well in Chinese. China Doll and other
artists made their way into the mainstream of Taiwan music chart. In the 1970s, Francis Yip, a well
known Hong Kong vocalist popular among the Thai audience, sang ‘White Lotus’ or ‘Bua Kao’, a Thai
pop classic, in Thai. She struggled through the Thai lyrics but her grain of voice was able to compensate
for all the language deficiencies.
18. 88.0 Peak FM – Western and Thai pop music; 91.5 Hot Wave – pop sound and trendy music for youth;
93.5 EFM – Thai pop music and entertainment news, some DJs are GMM stars; Green Wave 106.5 – Thai
Easy Listening music with an environmental image; Banana FM 89.0 Thai and Western Easy Listening
music. See http://www.atimemedia.com for more information.
19. FM MAX 88.5 MHz – top-of-the-chart music for youth; COOL FM 93.0 MHz – Easy Listening music catering
for white collar workers and LIVE FM 106.0 MHz – Thai music; ‘Pua Chiwit’ and ‘Luktoong’ for taxi drivers
and working class audience. See http://www.skyhigh.co.th/, http://www.fmmax.com/main.php.
20. ‘K-pop phenomenon’ has to be analyzed separately. About the details, see Shin (2005). While J-pop was
invented as the new terminology for domestic popular music in Japan, K-pop has been designated
‘Korean popular music which has been exported abroad’ and is closely associated with ‘Korean Wave’ in
general. In short, while the ‘K-pop phenomenon’ is closely related with the discourse on ‘Asian pop’, the
‘J-pop phenomenon’ is not so necessarily so. The K-pop phenomenon is also associated with the official
discourse of new-Koreanness, which is often abbreviated in the catchphrase ‘dynamic Korea’.
21. Things change rapidly even during the short period we have been revising this paper: CD Warehouse
was closed and when we recently visited another big CD store in Siam Paragon, the biggest department
store in Bangkok, there was an ‘Asian pop’ corner which displays the CDs by Northeast Asian artists by
Roman Alphabetical order. So there were three categories about popular music: (western) pop, Thai pop
and Asian pop. Here again, we can observe that ‘Asia’ means ‘Northeast Asia’, more exactly, Japan,
South Korea, Taiwan/Hong Kong.
22. When we met a Thai man who works for RS Promotion, he said, ‘Now everybody in Bangkok knows
Rain and Se7en. But more than half of them haven’t heard of their songs’. And when I asked him ‘do you
know where they came from?’ his answer was, ‘I don’t know exactly. Did they come from Korea? Not
Taiwan? Hong Kong? I don’t care much about where they came from. Last year, F4 (from Taiwan) was
popular and then Se7en was popular. Early this year Dylan (Guo Dylan from Taiwan) was popular and
now Rain is popular. Now nearly everybody seems to forget F4 and Se7en except their enthusiastic fans’
(Wittawat Sungsakijha, interviewed 26 April 2005). Maybe his answer would confirm that nationality
(‘where they came from’) became more and more obscure.
23. Our information in this section is compiled from 52 questionnaires and some in-depth interviews. Half of
these are made up of members of Se7en club, general fans of K-pop and J-pop. The respondents are
secondary school students, university students (in Bangkok and Pitsanuloke province) and university
graduates. The majority are females aged between 14–31. We were told that fans of K-pop are much
younger compared with J-pop and Taiwanese-pop fans. Hence, they have less money to spend and their
club meetings are less extravagant.
24. His latest series ‘Full House’ is on Channel 7 on Sat–Sun, 9:30–11:00 am, starting from 25 June 2006. This
has a direct effect on the overall rating of Rain. It easily hyped up the ‘Korean Wave’ once again.
25. http://www.se7enthailand.com
26. Unfortunately, Chulalongkorn University is planning to turn Center Point into a new shopping complex
adjacent to the Siam Paragon mall, modernizing Center Point to match the latest commercial architec-
tural style.
27. A locally produced CD album costs 400 baht whereas an imported album costs 600 baht.
28. The basic course costs 2,000 baht (or US$50) for 30 hours (10 lessons on Sat–Sun). A Korean dictionary
costs 300 baht (or US$7.5). There are four universities offering Korean language in their undergraduate
courses since the 1990s. These are Silapakorn University, Burapha University (Eastern region),
Songklanakarin University-Pattani campus (Southern region), Naresuan University (Northern region).
29. A number of respondents stated that they did nothing wrong in becoming Asian pop fans. They did not
understand why parents would deny them the right to enjoy what they find to be their liking.
30. Chinese migrants to Thailand went through social and political discrimination during the 1950s–1960s.
But accumulated wealth and inter-marriage between Thai and Chinese over the years have gradually put
the Chinese in top business positions and officialdom. The rigid ethnic division begins to blur as they
become more powerful. See a concise discussion about a business Chinese family and ethnicity in Thai-
land in Pasuk and Baker (2004).
31. See http://www.thailove.net, http://www.thaifeel.com/, http://migrantsinkorea.net/ and http://
migrantsinkorea.net/blog/blog/index.php?blog_code=yasoton among others. The former two are
related tourism (to Thailand) and the latter two are related to migrant labor (to Korea), i.e. different kind
of transmigration.
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List of interviews
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Author’s biography
Ubonrat Siriyuvasak is Associate Professor in mass communication, Faculty of Communication Arts,
Chulalongkorn University. She was UNESCO Chair in Freedom of Expression, a joint project between
UNESCO and Chulalongkorn University in 2003–2004. Her research areas are communication rights, media
reform and popular culture. Her research articles include, ‘People’s media and communication rights in
Indonesia and the Philippines’ (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6:2, June, 2005), ‘Popular culture and youth
consumption: modernity, identity and social transformation’ (in Koichi Iwabuchi (ed.) Feeling Asian Moderni-
ties: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, 2004), ‘On democratizing the broadcast media for Santi
Prachatham’ (in Santi Pracha Dhamma: Essays in honour of the late Puey Ungphakorn, 2001). She is the author of
The Political Economy of Thai Radio and Television System and its Impact on the Rights and Freedom of Expressions
(1999) (in Thai).
Contact address: Faculty of Communication Arts, Chulalongkorn University Phyatai Rd., Bangkok 10330,
Thailand
Shin Hyunjoon is a research professor in Institute for East Asian studies in Sunkonghoe University . He
received his PhD from the Department of Economics at Seoul National University. His dissertation work is
on the transformation of Korean music industry in the globalization age. His research interests include youth
identity, popular culture, cultural industries and cultural policy. Besides his academic career, he has worked
as a critic-cum-journalist on popular music and popular culture in general and has published many books (in
Korean) on those themes, including Global, Local and Music Industry in Korea (2001), An Archaeology of Korean
Pop Music: 1960s∼70s (2005).
Contact address: Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, Hang-dong 1-1, Guro-gu, Seoul
152-716, Korea
Appendix A: Discography
Table 1. Discography of Se7en
Country
Cover Title Label Released date Others
Se7en Korea
2003.03
Just Listen YG / EMI
Se7en Korea
2004.07
YG / EMI
Must Listen
Se7en Korea Songwriter:

2005.02
(hikari) YG / EMI D.A.I(Japanese)
Se7en Japan Songwriter:

2005.02
(hikari) Nextar D.A.I (Japanese)
Se7en Japan Songwriter:

2005.05
Style Nextar D.A.I (Japanese)
Country
Se7en
Japan 2003.09 Including VCD
Photo album
Including English
Se7en Just Thailand version and
2003.11 Instrumental
Listen RS version
Thailand Including
Se7en
RS 2004.07 Music Video
Must Listen (VCD)
Se7enz Limited edition

Thailand Including
Must Listen English version,
RS 2005.04 Remix version,
[Limited Music
edition] Video(VCD)
Se7en Hong Kong
2005.03
Just Listen Rock records
Including Remix
Se7en Just Hong Kong version, Karaoke
Listen 2005.05 version, Music
(reissue?) Rock records Video.
Table 2. Discography of Rain
Country
Rain Korea
2002.05
n001 JYP
Rain
Korea
2003.10
(The Way to Escape
from the Sun)
JYP
Rain Thailand
The Way to Escape 2004.05
from the Sun GMM
Rain Korea Most song title’s

2004.10
It’s Raining JYP are in English
Including Bonus
Track “I Do”
Rain Thailand
2005.05 Duet with Panadda
It’s Raining JYP and Music

Video(VCD)
Country
Including Japanese
(Rain) Japan
Version of “I Do”
2005.2
and DVD/Music
It’s Raining King
Video.
records
Rain Taiwan
2003.07 Distributed all over

- First Drop Warner- Asia
Taiwan
Rain Taiwan
2005.06 Distributed all over
-First Drop Warner- Asia
Taiwan
(reissue)
Rain Taiwan
2004.07 Written in Chinese
The Way to Escape Rock Letters
records
from the Sun
Distributed all over

Rain Asia, except Korea,
Universal 2005.06 Japan,. China and
It’s Raining Asia Thailand.
Including DVD /
Music Video.
Appendix B: music company profiles
YG Entertainment
YG Entertainment was setup by Yang Hyunsuk, ex-member of Seo Taiji and the Boys
(Seotaiji wa Aideul), which was hugely popular during 1992-1996. After the group was
disbanded, he setup Hyun Entertainment in 1996, and renamed it as MF Entertainment in
1997, and Yanggoon Ent. in 1998. In 1998, Yang released his first solo album, which paid
homage to Wu-Tang Clan. And since 2001 the name of the company was settled into YG
Entertainment, which was named after Yang’s nickname, Yanggoon.
YG Entertainment has argued that it introduced ‘black music’, a specialist genre, into
the mainstream, producing artists Se7en, JinuSean, 1TYM, Lexy, Masta Wu, Stony Skunk and
etc. With the partnership with M.boat, another Korean entertainment company, it has also
promoted more mainstream-oriented R&B records by Wheesung, Big Mama, Gummy and etc.
In its own words, “YG is the only record label company that deals with its own brand of
R&B and hip-hop music in the pop music industry of Korea”.
After the commercial successes of the singers and groups listed above, YG Entertain-
ment has grown into one of the big entertainment companies in Korean music industry,
encompassing a number of business practices which are divided into ‘contents creation’
(recording, mixing, et al), ‘business creative planning’, ‘PR (promotion) management’. YG
made Se7en its major success across Asia around 2004. It has launched international part-
nership with foreign music companies, especially with Unlimited (Japan) and RS Promotion
(Thailand).
YG Entertainment takes pride in being a kind of community and often use the term
‘family’, For example, it produced an ‘project album’ Famillennium released in 1999. And it
has expanded its range of business into other area of entertainment, especially running hip-
hop clubs named NB and Harlem in cool places in Seoul (Hongdae-ap and Gangnam).
Official homepage: http://www.ygfamily.com/index.jsp (English, Japanese, Chinese
and Korean)
JYP Entertainment
JYP was setup by Park Jin Young, who is a pop/R&B singer-songwriter debuted in 1994. He
setup Taeheong Enterprise in 1997, and four years later renamed it as JYP entertainment with
some investment from dot.com millionaire Daum communication. JYP is the initial letters of
his English name, Jinyoung Park.
When he made his debut, he was a university student in Yonsei University, which is not
so usual in mainstream music industry in Korea. He sang his self-penned songs in six full-
length albums during 1994-2001 as well as written many songs to numerous singers, among
which female solo singer Park Jiyoon and 5-piece boy band GOD (Ji-o-di) became big stars in
late 1990s and early 2000s. Since he had become an impresario in music industry, some sing-
ers and groups under him began to be dubbed as ‘Park Jinyoung division’.
He became the focus of hot debates concerning his lyrics in the songs like “Eleva-
tor”(1995), “Kiss”(1999), “Ceremony of Adulthood”(2000) and “Play (sex is Play)”(2001)
among others. Some conservative Christian NGO attacked him, arguing his lyrics are
‘obscene’, while some progressive NGO supported his position as ‘freedom of expres-
sion’.
Nevertheless, his musical taste is definitely mainstream and he admitted that his idol
has been Michael Jackson. And he began to enter the US market and made his camp at Los
Angeles in 2003. Since then, he has collaborated with R&B/urban artists like Mase, Will
Smith and Lil’ Kim. Meanwhile Rain, who began his career as Park’s backing dancer, has
become a superstar in Korea and across Asia around 2004. With setting up Bridge Entertain-
ment, US branch of JYP, it is going to try to enter the US music market.
Official homepage: http://www.jype.com/club/jyp/eng/index.jsp (English and
Korean)
Grammy Entertainment Co., Ltd.

Grammy Entertainment Co., Ltd. was established in 1983 by two legendary pioneers of Thai
music industry, Mr. Paiboon Damrongchaitham and Mr. Rewat Buddhinan. The company
was first set up to operate Music and Television business. Subsequently, the success led to
the expansion into other entertainment related businesses such as radio, film, concerts,
education, publishing and retail stores, which clearly enable the Group to operate on a more
complete scale in the entertainment sector. In 1994, the Group was listed on Stock Exchange
of Thailand as Grammy Entertainment Public Company Limited and the name was later
changed to “GMM Grammy Public Company Limited”. The company has 5 music groups
and 18 music labels producing pop, dance, rap, hip-hop, Luktoong pop for adult and youth
consumers from the middle and lower middle classes.
Official homepage: www.grammy.co.th (English)
R.S. Promotion
R.S. Promotion started off as Rose Sound music publishing company in 1980. It crossed over
to music production when music publishing alone was no longer lucrative. The new busi-
ness, R.S.Sound, acquired popular stature in the 1990s with the teen idols like Intanil (later
Rainbow), Kiribun, Fruity, Six Sense, Brandy and Pui Fai. Suntaraporn ‘Lukroong’ albums
re-produced by these young artists boosted R.S. image and it became a rising music brand.
In 1992, the company changed its name to R.S. Promotion and expanded into radio, televi-
sion and cinema production. R.S. Promotion is one of the two major music company which
operate the entire range of entertainment business. It is a family business with Mr.Kriengk-
rai Chetchotisak as the President of the company and Mr.Surachai Chetchotisak as the
Managing Director. The main consumers of R.S. cultural products are young adult, teenager
and pre-teen from the middle, lower middle and working classes (Urairat Vittanont, 2000).
Official homepage: www.rs-promotion.com/home (Thai)

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Pop: Production, Consumption

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

Asianizing K‐pop: production, consumption

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Asianizing K-pop: production, consumption and identification

Ubonrat SIRIYUVASAK and SHIN Hyunjoon

Thai–Korean relations and the emergence of Korean popular culture in Thailand

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/07/010109–28 © 2007 Taylor & Francis

Globalizing/Asianizing inter-Asia culture

Third, in the globalization/Asianization process, ‘the local’ increasingly refers to the

The cultural economy of Korean pop

K-pop discourses in Korea

Korean pop music in Thailand

K-pop flow and local manufacturing of the music

pursuing a long-term anti-piracy program (Bamrung 2004). The mainstreaming of K-pop is

Product and marketing variation

sounds like a translation or dubbing of the original version. It is a familiar process in

a useful strategy in mainstreaming the product, it is deemed insufficient to popularize the

Questions on the categorization of K-pop and Asian-pop

Thai fandom and the consumption of Korean pop music23

Consuming the image and the music

Club meeting: the ritual and the actualization of the ‘imaginary’

Organizing the language and lyrics

Kitsch and identity: consuming the mainstream

national identity in general. Asian music corporations or conglomerates – in our particular

Table 1. Discography of Se7en

Se7en Korea Songwriter:

Se7en Japan Songwriter:

Se7en Japan Songwriter:

Se7enz Limited edition

Se7en Hong Kong

Table 2. Discography of Rain

The Way to Escape 2004.05

from the Sun GMM

Rain Korea Most song title’s

It’s Raining JYP and Music

2003.07 Distributed all over

Distributed all over

Appendix B: music company profiles

Grammy Entertainment Co., Ltd.

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