Visibility of K-pop in the U.S.: Global rankings,‘audience mis-aggregation’,and mainstream attention to niche genre

Abstract

K-pop, a niche genre appealing to certain audience segments in the global market, has now attracted mainstream attention of music industries and general audiences within and beyond Asia. Previous studies often attribute niche genres’ visibility in a cultural market to audience segmentation and the prominence of niche tastes; however, K-pop’s mainstream visibility in its transnational spread complicates this argument. Integrating the sociology of quantification to studies on audience metrics and social quantification, this paper takes BTS as a case and examines how they gained mainstream visibility in the U.S. as the consequences of institutional audiences construction by Billboard’s global rankings – Social 50 and Top Social Artist Award. We argue that although Billboard’s charts and awards are not designed to favor exotic music, their institutional construction of global audiences is inherently a quantification process, the nature of which inadvertently eliminates regional differences in available audience sizes and consumption cultures when aggregating artists’ worldwide social engagements into ordinal numbers. Consequently, Billboard-constructed global audiences are mis-aggregated, over-representing certain regional tastes. Billboard initially interpreted mis-aggregated audiences as BTS’s global social popularity, increasing this then niche group’s mainstream visibility in the U.S. market. Focusing on measurement regimes, such as Billboard, this paper suggests an alternative mechanism for niche genres’ visibility in a culture market – audience mis-aggregation. When measurement regimes use metrics to synthesize diverse audience segments to represent the whole market, tremendous information is eliminated through this quantification process, resulting in over-representation of certain segments’ tastes and increasing mainstream visibility of niche genres.