8 - From K-Pop to Z-Pop

Summary

As an industry situated between globalization and transnationalism, K-pop has become a “glocal” economic transaction that re-localizes the regional markets across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Because K-pop’s glocal enterprise was made possible due to the internet via smartphones, social networks, and user-generated media, some scholars in Southeast Asia have noted K-pop’s major players as new forces of cultural imperialism. With Z-Pop Dream as a case study, this chapter explores how K-pop’s lesser known producers respond to such criticisms by experimenting beyond K-pop’s established system of idol production, consumption, and circulation. Part audition reality show and part idol management system, Z-Pop Dream is a multinational venture that recruits trainees in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. Accordingly, its fan consumer base is also from the seven countries. Piggybacking on K-pop’s transnational success, Z-Pop Dream sells their business model as the next step to making K-pop more accessible to non-Korean fans, cover dancers, and trainees dreaming of becoming idols. Examining how Z-Pop Dream ’s new glocal business model informs, interacts with, or resists an established transnational rhetoric of K-pop, this chapter explores how its rhetoric of “One Asia” underscores the line between national and transnational.