ABSTRACT
Music industry revenues from digital music sales in 2012 were estimated at $5.6 billion, up from an estimated 9 percent in 2011, and accounting for 34 percent of total industry revenues (IFPI 2013). Digital music consumption has become an integral part of the global music industry since the birth of MP3 players and computer programs like iTunes in the early 2000s, and has been accelerated by the rise of social network services such as Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), and the video-sharing website YouTube (2005). According to a Nielsen study of consumer interaction with music in the U.S., more teens listen to music through YouTube (64%) than any other source, followed by the radio (56%), iTunes (53%), and CDs (50%) (Nielsen 2012). Social media channels such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook now play a central role in this changing music industry landscape and the new mode of global cultural flows. These flows form the basis of a new cultural distribution model that I call “social distribution” (Jung 2014), a model that is becoming central to the cultural economy in the global pop culture marketplace. Most recently, East and Southeast Asia have become the fastest growing region for social distribution with tech-savvy youth consumer groups as a key driving force, and one of the most dynamically social-distributed forms of pop content in the region is Korean popular music (K-pop).
