SM has a horrible understanding of the US music market [ANALYSIS]

SM's executives really just have no idea what the West likes and enjoys, and it shows. You can easily tell by:

1. LYRICS. nonsense english lyrics like "Let me gotta be rank that zero place on it" "You make it feel me good". They seriously need a lyricist who can speak at least basic English fluently because it makes no sense to have these types of nonsense lyrics in the final drafts if they don't want Western listeners to cringe. At least have it grammatically correct.

What newjeans stood out to me besides their amazing music is that their lyrics actually MAKE SENSE. not only are they grammatically correct, they actually sound like they weren't written by 50-year old men and are relatable.

2. doing nothing with songs that do well in the West like Psycho, Bad Boy. If RV had the same playlisting and market targeting strategies NewJeans got RV would be huge (or at least bigger in the west). Instead the only promo SM does is slap an english version on the next album 8 months later.... SM seems to genuinely be surprised at how songs do, and never time promos with the right songs. I swear SM must think that Western music markets like EDM noise with how much certain NCT's releases get pushed there. No, if they even took one second to look at US charts they would see RNB clearly outcharts: ex SZA.

3. choosing the wrong songs when western-friendly songs are in the SAME ALBUM. They really need to fire whoever thought Life's Too Short would be a better Western promo than songs like Illusion; this is ALMOST as bad as whoever thought Boys Like You by Itzy was good. You can't even say SM is focusing on pushing experimental music, because nothing about Life's too short is experimental. At the end of the day, SM is grasping at straws.

4. Too focused on building company brand and 'legacy'. You can totally tell SM just wants to relive the good times with their remakes, SM family album collab bs. Did you know that aespa members have more collab songs than their own music releases? Hybe doesn't try to shove themselves down everyone's throat and lets NJ and LSF operate as individual brands. Meanwhile, SM hard pushes strange company values and brands onto their groups with new gimmicks like their new focus on environmental songs and Kwangya. Who in the west is gonna care about that?

ok wow i wrote a lot no need to read anything ill just treat this as a diary of why SM sucks and why no one should be an SM stan

Quote from SooYoung

Or maybe they have a clear understanding of the music market but just don't want their artist to be mainstream, yeah i know it must be a really hard reality to understand for kpop fans who always see things black or white

Aespa music genre is heavily influence on Hyper Pop music, hyper pop music is already a music genre who's not popular in the US just look at artist doing it like Charli XCX or Grimes... none of them are mainstream in the US but both of them have a really big and hard core of fans.

Just a question ? but do some of you know at least that any companies launching a product always do market analysis to see what the public they are trying to target like, and this market analyze often go through analyze of the most popular product on the market, little meetings with a group of consumer etc...

If there goal was to go mainstream don't you think they would just do a generic GG with just pop/ hip hop influence like blackpink or little mix....

the fact that they didn't take this road mostly make me think that their true goal is to target a market who was neglected by kpop companies for years which is Hyper pop fans who find in Aespa finally something they can like in Kpop and because fans of Niche music genre are less fugace than the GP, it often ends up in a strong fandom which is already clear that is working considering the big jump of sales they go between Savage and Girls after diving into the Hyper pop sound

and Yeah it might be a concept hard to understand for Kpop fans but maybe not everybody trying to promote in the US are trying to go mainstream (if they do they are lucky) and most people just promote there to expose their groups to new potential fans and grow their fanbase, that's the reason for example why they are sending them on big events so they can expose their music to the largest audience in the hope that some like and dive deeper into them

but also overseas promotions make the fandom stronger because it help to make he parasocial relationship that fans have for kpop idols even bigger. The reasons why 2nd gen and 3rd gen didn't have big international fandom at first was mostly because their promo were focused on Korea and Japan

so western fans didn't see the goal in invested in them considering that the chance for them to finally meet them and interact were very rare

Giving more kpop artist overseas promotion make them meet their international fans and fans are more eager to invest in their favs and in the case of Aespa it's even more clear this things when they did the free fansign at Fnac in france (which is something no other kpop group did )

or when they made Ningning do her shopping walking in contrary of moving in a van like every other kpop do, because their goal is mostly to create an impression that the girl are relatable and down to earth celebrity with who they can interact easily overseas like koreans would do and it help to create a deeper connexion to push the overseas fans to invested in their favs, as much than Koreans and japanese fans did in the 2nd gen & 3rd gen

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ok well aespa can do hyperpop and focus on niche markets without singing clearly poorly written lyrics, they really need to stop Yoo Young Jin from writing the english lyrics because we can tell that man can't write them for his life. First the misogynistic lyrics in step back and now he can't even write with correct grammar, Knetz and international fans are all starting to notice his incompetence

also if they really wanted to focus on hyperpop niche markets why didn't they promote Illusion instead of Life's too short which has nothing to do with their main genre. SM obviously doesn't know what they're doing bc their market analysis must be 10+ years old