i was into dbsk back in '04, casually listened but got more into jrock around that time. then, when all my favourite j-bands were disbanding/members i loved were dying, i noped myself out of the fandom and fell headfirst into kpop around '12. THEN, when members of groups i liked started leaving the groups because of various scandals (ravi from vixx, kris from exo, himchan from bap, junhyung from beast…my track record is impeccable), i got out of that fandom as well LOL
i find that i’m a casual listener of older kpop now. very rarely do i find groups appealing anymore. the music is a bit too jarring and, especially now since i’m older, a 18yo dude in mascara and tight pants bopping around does nothing for me lol
As someone who has never listened to K-Pop a day in his life, but can see the parallels between K-Pop and Visual Kei, I leave the topic with this nugget of knowledge:
Change is the only constant. Your favorite genre will morph into something you don’t recognize and then wrap right back around again. It’s perfectly okay for you to fall out of love with what K-Pop currently is while still enjoying K-Pop from the last decade. Things get better. Things get worse. Then things get better again.
I remember the rise and fall of boy bands and girl bands in the 90th and that got a lot less after some years as well and I think that concept came to somewhat like an end at some point. Not just because the teenage girls grew too old, there’s always younger ones coming next, I don’t think that’s the main problem. But people often get bored and seek something new.
Personally I don’t understand how so many people moved away from VK to K-Pop except for they only listened to the sparkly light-mooded VK stuff. I don’t like pop music, I find it boring even though I know it’s easier to reach a wider range of people but I’m not one of them, that’s simply it. So I never even gotten close to listen to K-Pop and I don’t even want to. If I came across a song by chance and liked it, great, but aside from this I don’t care about that and was pretty surprised about so many people who also mostly leaned to the more metal like, hardcore whatever of all that type of VK suddenly headed over to K-Pop and VK was done for them. Changes, boredom, alright, yeah, I get that, but Pop? That’s not just some “I need some new sound” but far beyond this. But that’s my thoughts out of my very own perspective. It’s fine, if people do, of course, I just can feel this, to me it’s not fitting, because I feel things differently (like I could see how it came to switch to pop rock or any softer rock stuff but not full pop).
So I can’t say, if K-Pop’s getting worse, maybe it’s just oversaturation, maybe it’s truly is getting worse.
I think the game changer at the end of the 90s was the sudden shift to piracy as the primary way to discover new music.
For younger people who had no “ins” into alternative subcultures, it opened up tons of new genres that would have never gotten airplay on radio/tv until people created a demand for it.
People certainly weren’t happy with the status quo of pop music around that time. Singles as a format had kind of fallen out of favour and the prices of albums had been increasing, with many complaining that the radio singles weren’t always representative of the content of the full albums. P2P downloading was an inevitable consequence of that dissatisfaction.
The unintended effect was a lot of teens deciding to not just stick to songs they had already heard, but to try out new music that had been recommended to them that they couldn’t feasibly afford to buy impulsively.
Used to love kpop during the early 2010s when bigbang, 2ne1, miss A and super junior were at its peak followed by the gangnam style hype. I started losing interest around 2016 as I got hooked to jpop and thai pop. I feel that this gen of kpop is nth much abt music and heavily emphasize on aesthetic appeal to instil toxic beauty standard to the viewers. The songwriters and producers just scribble through their scripts and come up with templated dance moves to tell everyone that “hey look at my girls. They have A4 sized waist and younger than 25. U shld look like this so that the society accepts u.” I’m sure u realized most groups are short lived and they disband them when most of the members reach above 25.
@zeus was so deep but true. As expected of a kpop one mod
@ridley this is what I have been saying for ages but MH ppl thought I was trolling lmao yes, early kpop copied a lot of vk trends because its just. what was working! aka being exported and Hallyu had a Goal so.
The reason why it’s happening the other way around now might be that kids looked at kpop history or just history of Asian pop music by asking other fans in their fandoms and whatnot and went “oh what’s this weird thing” and got to know the origins of some trends (cough fanservice) etc. Streaming services that recommend Asian music might help too … lastly the ‘aesthetic’ thing is trending and a lot of jfashion that got popular worldwide intersects with vk - I can tell at least that a lot of girls got into the “ryousangata otaku” aesthetic → fell into the jirai comm → oh whats that vk thing. Lolita too.
Regarding “is kpop bad now” seconding that Trends Cycle. Lately I have noticed a ressurgence of the late 00s kpop dubstepish sound and I loathed that era so I personally fell out of it lol. Mid 10s kpop used to do angst and drama and strong feels (the BTS albums that got popular in the West by telling a story were why many fans went It Sucks Now when Boy With Luv or Dynamite happened) but it’s safe nowadays in comparision. Every explanation here makes sense - generational trends changing, fear of social media backlash, staying safe because fans will buy it anyways, being in another stage in the West (not one of “I have to break through” but one of “just keep things like this” ) A lot of groups fell through bc of the pandemic as well, meaning no concerts for years and some of them would go as far as holding Korean fan-only virtual fanmeetings which seems to be proof that they don’t know how to deal with overseas fans all that well. And military issues are a thing in Korea too.
Lastly IMO I beg to differ from @Kaishiki I think genre burnout is totally a thing. I personally find it weird when people associate with Only One Genre of music and don’t listen to anything else at all. Might be bc I was born with MP3s or because I am built this way or whatever else really …
This might not be every kpop album (I actually have one from DBSK I like quite a bit overall)
Funny how tastes work because DBSK made me have this exactly same experience in the oughties which is why I figured kpop wasn’t for me for ages lol SNSD on the other hand had an album I still like. But then again, it’s really a matter of era + artist + taste - I had an acquaintance who went through the vk → kpop pipeline swear by ATEEZ albums for their narratives, meanwhile I swear by Teen;age by Seventeen which is cough prob my fave album I own. I think it’s really less of a kpop-wide issue and more of a case-by-case issue tbh
Its huge, same as kdramas, korean dramas in Geo/Tsutaya stores normally have more shelves of kdrama than shelves there are for japanese or western (american) dramas… its nuts when you think about it.
