Do you feel that k-pop is getting worse and worse? Lost its touch?

Entertainment Global Music
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I know this isn’t a forum for k-pop but I thought it could be ok to have a thread about it in the general discussion board? Dear mod? :grin:

Straight to the point - (for you who also listen to k-pop) - am I the only one who thinks its loosing its touch and just getting worse and worse? I would say it peaked with Dynamite and after that it feels like it just has fizzled out. People also talk less and less about it here in the west, the streaming numbers are decreasing. BTS are still streaming like heck on Spotify, but there won’t be any new music from them for at least 1 or 2 years…

There are channels on YT who list top 100 kpop songs for the moment and I sometimes watch, and I feel its almost impossible to find ONE good catchy song recently worth adding to your playlist. The songs as a whole are truly terrible. One of the main choruses recently seem to be to repeat 2 english words… or not sing at all, like you wait for the chorus to come and it feels like an “anti-chorus”.

These new groups with extremely young girls, what were they called, New Jeans? Their songs are so flat without any real hook, I can’t imagine that they got so big, it must have been money involved there to boost them. So inoffensive safe boring music. Also it feels like Kpop groups seem to be more about getting brand deals and do tiktok videos, than having proper music written for them…

Is it because the big bands are out of the game for the moment? BTS in the army, Blackpink has semi-disbanded etc. With all this said I will say there are gems here and there, like Red Velvet’s Cosmic - a truly catchy song that you can feel they put alot of effort into, where they… sing in the chorus! Also the Rose and Bruno Mars song was good. But the gems are few, it feels like you need to get through hundreds of “popular” songs to find a few worth adding to your playlist. Maybe its the same with western music but I just really feel Kpop has lost its touch totally. It literally took over the world a few years ago and everyone talked about it, now it feels like… crickets.

At last, I was excited to see that G-dragon released a new song the other day called power, listen to it yourself… absolutely horrible song, such an annoying sound. What is such a big artist thinking & accepting to release such an, I would even say objectively terrible song? Do they just keep releasing low effort music because they know the “stans” will stream them like crazy anyway? For that eeeasy money…

Has Kpop peaked and is declining? Can it re-peak or did they get too comfortable with the current crap they are pumping out, because again, they know the “stans” will stream it to millions of views, even for the worst song if it just is a “popular group”.
Also another thought, look at all the hundred boy groups… they more or less all sound the same.

Sorry for all the rambling, TLDR and all that, sorry, but if anyone has any thoughts on this, please join the discussion! Do you agree with me? Peace to you all!

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I’m going to be honest, I never managed to get into Kpop (^^;)
I tried plenty of times, but it was never interesting to me at all lol

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Not a K-pop fan either, but I think people are gradually losing interest for a couple of reasons.

  1. The segment of the audience who were fans just because they were young and it was the “hip” thing in their childhood are teens now, and are branching out to more alternative genres (like VK, for example)

  2. The K-pop industry was more receptive to Western engagement, but they never decided to go all in by having full North American tours, deciding to hold shorter tours in major metropolitan cities, forcing fans who don’t live in those cities to have to travel farther than they would for Western pop acts, who are much more likely to tour medium sized cities as well.

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It’s kinda intresting that you mention that there seems to be a decline in k-pop in the west. When we also see a slight resurrection of VK :thinking: I wonder if this is related or just correlation without causation.

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How many k-pop fans went VK at one point??

I am not sure why it is like that, if they just got used to Asians in make up, or if k-pop just ran out of shock factor, so you need something heavier. But I am very sure that there is a trend going on from k-pop to vkei.

And also I remember, that we had that trend the other way around at one point.

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Sorry this is Ridley talking old people stuff again :older_woman:t3: -

From an outsider’s POV I think K-pop is thriving. A lot of people like to refer to K-pop “back in the day” but the “back in the day” is Girl’s Generation or something. From an era that may have been more familiar, from an era where a lot of people got introduced to K-pop but are now “seasoned” and don’t understand the new groups.

I’m from the era where BoA broke history by bridging the gap between Japan and Korea. Dominating America wasn’t even a possibility at the time. S.E.S was the biggest group in Korea but flopped until BoA made Korea cool in Japan.

Now Korea is cool globally - I wouldn’t say it’s lost its touch with the new groups. Isn’t it wild that Rose and Jennie are on the charts? I never saw that as a possibility back then.

Some K-pop boy group recently released a new single here in Japan and there were girls all over of all ages trading cards of their favorite members. I was there because I was going to a Razor instore event. Kouryu & Iza just casually walked through the crowd without anyone noticing or knowing who they were (except for us fans) because they were going nuts trading cards of the K-pop group.

In comparison Visual Kei is some weird niche and K-pop is mainstream. Even if people don’t like the new groups I don’t think it’s losing popularity. I think maybe the crowd continues to get older but there are always going to be younger people that get into K-pop and this era is gonna be a lot of people’s “Girls Generation” back in the day kind of era for them.

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Lee So Man went hard trying to make that Vkei look a thing with H.O.T and having one of the members in Shinhwa basically cosplay Kirito from Pierrot. Early DBSK/TVXQ was on that level too.

Even went so hard he got Yoshiki to produce a K-Pop Vkei band Trax and they even covered an X Japan song.

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I have been semi interested in k-pop since the SNSD, Kara, and DBSK days. IMO k-pop always had very good individual songs but rarely good albums and most groups barely have 10 good songs. Sure there are exceptions but I’m not sure k-pop was ever actually GOOD. Just my opinion, it does seem to be getting less popular now in the west.

My favourite groups

  • BIGBANG
  • DBSK
  • EXO
  • KARA
  • f(x)
  • Dreamcatcher
  • LOONA
  • AESPA (also have less than 10 good songs but I like them)
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Not my cup of tea either. Overall, way too formated for me.

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I’m one of those people that moved from kpop to vkei! Around 2020 I started falling out for this exact reason, i thougt it started getting progressively worse. For me, I started feeling the change already once BTS released boy in luv.

I think maybe a reason for it is for the fanbase? Like, groups that debut these days might not want to venture too out of the safety zone the same way they used to for the fear of being made fun of and getting their dreams crushed. I know people have always been very critical and mean to the idols, but i feel like the animosity has doubled recently. Like, groups and idols get cyberbullied on social media to no end for having silly or weird concepts. Also, to my understanding theres a lot of people who don’t actually care about the music as much as they care about “stanning”, being part of a group and participating in the latest trends, so they’ll just eat up whatever music is made?

Apps like TikTok also overplay these songs to hell and back, so you get tired of the same sound extremely fast.

I do notice this thrend in other music as well tbh… It’s been forever since I’ve heard a song from my country that I’ve really liked. So, I’m guessing part of it is also the general current music trends. I’m not fully aware of S. Korean society, but a lot of this probably comes from that.

One of my biggest pet peeves is def the way that they have started catering to the west more, so half of the songs are sung in English which usually is kind of awkward. I get the reason why, but I wish it wasn’t like that.

i hope my ramblings make some sort of sense TT

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My take on this is that if you got into kpop during a certain generation then the sound/trends of that generation have moved on because us 30 year olds aren’t the target audience anymore. I say this as someone who got heavily into SHINee and EXO in the early 2010s and I’ve since found it harder recently to really click with newer groups to that same degree but I still find a handful of new songs I like in this genre every year. At the end of the day kpop is pop music so there is always going to be a certain amount of trend chasing and a new, younger audience to onboard.

With that said, the changing landscape of kpop is what I like about the genre. Not everything may be for me, but I find it intriguing to observe and guess what might be the next big thing.

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I think a lot of people get older and become more interested in metal and other alternative music, but are already used to Asian music so they seek out something like that and end up finding vkei.

There’s also been a good few times that vkei has “trended” and been talked about in kpop circles, so more people probably became aware of it and the overlap of fans grew.

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Well metal in itself is having a but of a resurgence again, with bands like bad omens and sleep token getting big.

I am curious but what were your rock and metal entry points?

Because I do think people who are into pop music won’t do well getting straight ass to bands like dir en grey or Deviloof, unless your into it for the dudes.

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I never got very deep into k-pop but this was definitely my experience. Coming from vkei I was used to listening to my favourite bands’ albums front to back and while not every song would be my favourite, very few ever made me want to skip them entirely. Some songs that I did no initially like as much even grew into favourites over time.

I found k-pop through music videos on YT, mostly Shinee and Bigbang at the time. And I remember listening to my first kpop album in utter disbelief over the inconsistent quality. There were the 2 hit songs that got music videos and the rest were seriously on par with mid-tier elevator music. Not a single song apart from the 2 heavily advertised hits worth listening to. This might not be every kpop album (I actually have one from DBSK I like quite a bit overall) but I could imagine people getting bored of stanning an artist if they genuinely only put effort into 1-2 big hits and the rest is utter garbage. I would imagine that at some point you will start craving more substance.

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Interesting to read that there seems to be fans going from k-pop to vkei now, instead of the other way around which many of us experienced back in the day. However, I never quite understood why people are “leaving” one genre for the other, and why people can not enjoy two or more genres at the same time (I’ve never got into k-pop but I do enjoy western pop music from time to time).

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I guess this is mainly a ressource problem. The ressources being time and money. K-pop encouranges heavily to invest time. Especially into social media. Like k-pop fans would spam every conversation with gifs of their faves at some point. And surely there is a lot of money draining merch as well.

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And surely cheki don’t drain your wallet

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Of course they do. That’s my point. You euther let your wallet be drained by k-pop merch or by vk cheki. Most people are not rich enough for both. Or you have to be very diciplined and be like “ok I will invest 50% of time and money in 3 k-pop acts and the other 50% in 3 vk acts”. It’s easier to be only obsessed with one east asian hot guys money draining hobby at once :sweat_smile:

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I get that! Even when I was into kpop I was less into the pop and more the rock-ish and rap stuff. Before I liked kpop I listened to anything emo and vocaloid as well, so vkei didn’t feel that crazy to me.

The first band I listened to was probably dadaroma? Then got into Madmans Esprit, ELYSION, UNiTE… and I had fallen in, lol

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Bringing back this picture from somewhere else in the forum

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