- BTS members hometowns: V and Suga from Daegu, Jungkook and Jimin from Busan, not one from Seoul
Sat Aug 22 — Seoul is the birthplace of 50 of the 123 most-read Korean stars we could place — 41% from one city. BTS is the counterexample: six members, four cities, none of them the capital.
- IU is a Rooster and Go Youn-jung a Rat. We checked whether that means anything, and it does not
Sat Aug 22 — We sorted 1,047 Korean stars into twelve rooms by birth year — IU with 91 other Roosters, Bae Suzy with 102 other Dogs. Then we tested whether the zodiac picks out who ends up on a chart. Chi-square 7.77 against a threshold of 19.68.
- Psy is in 97 Wikipedias, more than any BTS or BLACKPINK member. Half of Korean entertainers are in one
Sat Aug 22 — We counted the language editions holding an article about each of 9,249 Korean entertainers. Psy leads at 97, ROSÉ of BLACKPINK is at 86, IU at 69. The median is 1, and 365 people have no article in any language.
- New Korean groups look 69% down since 2015. We are not publishing that, and here is what killed it
Sat Aug 22 — Wikidata records 691 Korean musical groups with a formation year. The 2023-25 average is 31% of the 2015-17 average. Then we ran the same count for Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom — and all three fell too.
- Ahn Sung-ki and Choi Jiwoo exist on one Southeast Asian Wikipedia, and it is not the biggest one
Fri Aug 21 — Of 1,023 Korean actors and 1,701 music acts, 1,249 appear on exactly one of the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. The Indonesian edition holds 1,155 of them — while the larger Vietnamese edition holds 31.
- BTS is read most in Vietnam and Byeon Woo-seok in Thailand. The 20 biggest are all read least in Malay
Fri Aug 21 — Across 374 Korean stars with an article on all four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, three editions share first place. The Malay edition is last for 310 of them — and there is an explanation we cannot rule out.
- IU started at 15 and Ma Dong-seok at 32. Go Youn-jung started at 23 and outreads them both
Fri Aug 21 — Across 584 Korean stars on four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, those who debuted before 18 are read almost five times as often as those who started at 26. It is not that they have had longer — the median career is 20 to 22 years in every band.
- JAY B of GOT7 is a Thai star, Tempest is a Vietnamese one, and Kim Jong-kook belongs to nobody
Fri Aug 21 — Of 214 Korean stars with an article on all four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, 86.6% of the reading about JAY B sits in Thailand alone. An evenly read star would score 25%. Kim Jong-kook of Turbo scores 27.5%.
- We said we could not count the acts our K-pop panel misses. We can, and it is 1,312 groups.
Sat Aug 08 — Wikidata holds 2,128 Korean musical groups. Our attention panel sees the 816 with an English Wikipedia article. Among singers the gap is wider — 5,408 exist, we measure 1,421, and 3,572 of the missing ones have a Korean article.
- Korea's content exports grew 63% in two years. Its viewing at the top of Netflix did not move.
Fri Aug 07 — Korean titles have drawn between 74 and 79 million hours a week from Netflix's global chart in every year that did not carry a Squid Game release. Over the same span, music and broadcast exports went from $1.88bn to $3.06bn.
- Korea exports more music than television — but only just, and not always
Fri Aug 07 — In 2012 the two were the same size to within half a percent. Broadcast was ahead again as recently as 2022. In 2024 music pulled to $1.80bn against $1.26bn, the widest gap in thirteen years.
- Most K-pop attention is flat. At the very top it is not — a quarter of BTS's month happened on one day
Fri Aug 07 — For the typical act, the biggest single day is 5.5% of a 30-day month. For the ten largest names the median is 11.0%. BTS sits at 25.1%, and all six of its measurable members peaked on the same date.
- Rank Korean musicians by look-ups and IU is not first — the top name is there for acting
Fri Aug 07 — 232 of the 1,550 individuals in our K-pop panel also appear in Korean titles that reached a Netflix Top 10. They are 15% of the names and 41% of the attention. Removing them does not correct the list. It produces a second one.
- K-pop members outdraw their own groups four to one, and the BTS exception was a hole in Wikidata
Fri Aug 07 — Across 86 groups whose full membership can be measured, the members' pages were opened 3.88 times as often as the group's. Newer groups looked like the opposite until we checked why: Wikidata lists two members for Fromis 9.
- K-pop's music exports were 81% Japanese in 2012. They are 36% Japanese now — and Japan never shrank.
Thu Aug 06 — Korean music exports went from $22m in 2005 to $1.80bn in 2024. Japan's share more than halved — but Japanese sales grew 1.7× since 2018 while North America grew 39×. The concentration broke because everywhere else caught up.
- Korea's listed pop-culture companies employ 15,072 people. They stay half as long as the rest of the market.
Thu Aug 06 — Netflix's Korean catalogue has been watched 23.7 billion hours. The listed companies in that business keep staff 5.5 years against 11.3 across Korea's listed market — and their two halves are mirror-image workforces.