Management professors will use BTS' military enlistments as the most foolish business decision a company ever made in 2023.
The correct move was make them NEVER return to Korea, which represented maybe 5-10% of total income BTS derived, and make them go around world tour, of course NEVER entering Korea, and make north of $1 billion per year and put Taylor Swift into shame.
I have said before that if Bang didn't abandon BTS so he could be pampered by South Korean media in the same ranks with the owners of Samsung, Hyundai, etc , Taylor Swift would NOT have become the person of the year in 2023, a record which will last for ever, 100 years from now.
Few people remember who were the person of the year in say, 1929 or 1933, but their names, long lost to history, will always be recorded along with the more famous people of year like Gandhi, various US presidents, or Elon Musk.
Will BTS ever hit a billion? I say, no. You can record it but I don't mind.
It will do perhaps 250m in its return tour in 2026. It might even win a #1 in Billboard Hot 100, like Bruno Mars in 2021 or Sam Smith in 2022 (although Sam had to collaborate with a German trans singer named Kim Petras).
Both Bruno Mars and Sam Smith performed in Korea in 2023, which is like the last resort after exhausting all other options.
I see a similar future to BTS.
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The irrelevancy of the domestic year-end shows showed its nature this year.
The major acts showed up in only one show, SBS Year End Show, and KBS could not even hold its year end show and had to call it "Music Bank Special".
The more important Hybe acts ditched the MBC year end show.
Companies are now realizing that Korea is nothing more than a minor league for the KPop acts, an afterthought, a training ground which they should leave asap since there is no money there.
The BTS tragedy and the Fifty Fifty fiasco showed the ifans that Korea is a dungeon, full of jealous and salty people who want KPop to fail, and greedy company owners without a long term plan having their way. It has shown that the entire country is against KPop's expansion.
As a result more successful acts will increasingly ignore Korea and Melon.
2024 will show the greatest divergence between Korea and the rest of the world, since the most domestic singer of Korea will challenge New Jeans, and might actually win in Korea because most Koreans do not see what is outside of the Korean border.
However that will lead to a permanent, complete break between Korea and the rest, as the ifans finally see the nature of Korea and its tendency to support a domestic singer no matter how irrelevant she might be outside of there.
The domesticist said she will do a tour, but at most she will go to Japan, and again ignore continents not named Asia.
If she is seen to beat NewJeans in Melon , Gallup or other major polls, then that will kill the relevancy of such polls and will complete the detachment of Korea from the rest of the world, and like trot, the entire music scene in Korea will be treated as a league of its own, with the ifans completely ignoring it.
