KPop as we know ended yesterday.
I advocated for a Korea-free KPop model for years but the KPop owners cared more about how they were seen in Korea and wanted to play moguls in there, instead of expanding their reaches to the world and abandon Korea, which is not a very important market, let people like Lim Youngwoong roam around there with an aging population.
Since the Korean company owners were unwilling to give up Korea for bigger pastures, Netflix set up its own KPop-ish system, which will be what will be taken as "KPop" around the world.
It is unlikely that E.Jae, like all Netflix projects, was paid too much for her work in KDH, like hte director of the Squid Game who was paid a pittance for the first season and was paid a lot more in the subsequent installments, which were less favorably received.
The initiative of KPop has permanently passed into Netflix and other non-Korean corps, who will now use people who can be plausibly called Koreans (i.e. other Asians who look somewhat like Koreans) who are willing to work for much less. There would be no shortage of KPop trainees of other nationalities who know the system to fill this gap. They will probably avoid using Koreans holding Korean passport since they would rather not deal with all these peculiarities of Korean system.
The case of Ablume showed that it is impossible to change the might of the Koreans who would remain closed. I do not pay attention to the group which now calls itself Fifty Fifty which will be irrelevant as far as the world is concerned; it showed the Korean system cannot be reformed.
Not all Latin singers do not have Spainsh-speaking backgrounds. Latin America has no shortage of people who come from heritages other than Spanish, but if they come from a country which is better known for speaking Spanish, they will just adopt a Spanish-sounding stage name and perform as such. The barrier is lower in KPop since stage names in there are like JHope or Winter, which are not really Koran words, so they can give whatever stage names they feel like to the KPop-ish singers.
The greed and provinciality of the KPop owners brought this to themselves. They will not benefit a penny from the new style of "Kpop" promoted by Netflix and others. They had the chance to do this and get the initiative of the KPop boom, but their own short term profit mentality (Netflix had picked up the KDH project from Sony which had doubts) and their inability to shake off Korea altogether led to this.
It does not matter anymore how well BtS might do next year. They no longer control the narratives. So much for their 'longer career' argument; their longer career will be like Coldplay, which still holds large tours, with nobody in the world paying any attention to it.
