Preamble

This project will continue into 2025, so happy new year to one and all! The end of 2024 saw a few interesting developments, like the release of the second season of Squid Game and the release of some year-end music charts. As much as it would be nice to deal with these in a timely manner, the intention is to stick to the one post per month schedule, so stay tuned if some data-driven analysis and visualistion of those topics is of interest.

This month, though, having just marked the passage of time, it seems appropriate to think about how time is divided up. In the case of the Korean Wave, it has become convention to talk about different eras. For K-Pop, fans often discuss artists in terms of their affiliation with particular “generations”. In this report, we visualise these two periodisations and consider how they stand in relation to one another.

Eras of the K-Wave and K-Pop Generations

With no further ado, the following visualisation shows the chronology of album-length releases by a representative, judgement sampled selection of K-Pop artists over time in relation to the relevant eras of the Korean Wave.

The periodisation of the Korean Wave into eras, which follow the numbering conventions of software, is based on that proposed in the 2024 book Understanding the Korean Wave (details here). In more detail:

The first period, Hallyu 1.0, is the seed phase of the Korean Wave, which was successful mainly in Asia, from the early 1990s until 2008. The second era, Hallyu 2.0, is the rise of Korean popular culture in the global cultural scene beyond Asia from 2008 to 2017. The third period, Hallyu 3.0, is the global popularity of local Korean culture in conjunction with the growth of Korean digital technologies (social media and digital platforms) beginning in 2017 through the present.
Dal Yong Jin 2024: 16

The generations of K-Pop artists is something of a ‘folk’ periodisation that has emerged from fan discourse.

The Data

This month’s visualisation, in contrast to those which have come before, was not created at a means of analysing extant data or with a research question in mind. Rather, the idea of visualising the different K-Pop generations came first. For that reason, bespoke data was collected in a principled but far from systematic way. The artists chosen as representative of each generation are far from comprehensive. Rather, they reflect the impressionistic consensus from reading through a selection of English-language fan sites. Sometimes this meant omitting undeniably influential artists. For example, Seo Taiji and the Boys do not appear here as their position as a group representative of the first generation of K-Pop is acknowledged only in relatively few of the online articles surveyed.

Having identified the artists to include, the next question to address was how to represent their affiliation to different generations. In this case, colour was selected to represent the categorical variable.

It also seemed appropriate to somehow represent the fact that K-Pop generations are simply categorical divisions of time: a continuous variable. Representing an artist in time is a deceptively challenging problem. Single points in time are not representative of careers’ duration, but there are a multiplicity of ways to measure the duration of a career. For consistency, and to avoid subjective judgement about what constitutes the beginning or end of an artist’s career, album-length releases (which include EPs in the Korean context) under the same name were selected to represent the duration of a career.

Thus, the following data was collected for each of the artists: artist name, K-Pop generation, date of debut, date of all album-length releases. From this data, a dumbbell plot was created. Artists appear along the y-axis (vertical axis) in chronological order of their debut, colour-coded by K-Pop generation. The artist with the most recent debut appears at the top of the axis. Time in years appears across the x-axis (horizontal axis). Large points representing the first and most recent album-length releases of each artists, i.e., the ‘weights of the dumbbell’, are connected by a line segment, that is, the ‘bar of the dumbbell’, which is itself punctuated by points representing other album-length releases. Points are also colour-coded by generation.

Observations

First, we turn to the relationship between K-Pop generation and era of the Korean Wave. Other than some of the early first generation artists, it seems usual for artists’ career to span multiple eras of the Korean Wave. For example, the majority of the second generation bands taken as representative here released albums in eras 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 of the Korean Wave. It remains to be seen whether artists of the third and fourth generations will enjoy careers of such longevity.

Turning to the scheduling of releases, the only global observations to make is that it seems as if producing an album-length release is no longer a priority for K-Pop artists. For the first and second generation of artists, bands which debuted earlier also released their first album earlier. This pattern largely holds for the third generation, albeit with the significant outlier of BLACKPINK. For the fourth generation, however, the date of debut seems only weakly related to the date of the artist’s first album-length release. We now go on to discuss what, if any, generational trends are discernible from this visualisation.

First Generation Artists

The first generation artists here span a wide range of time, both in terms of their years of debut and the length of their careers. With the notable exception of BoA, the apparent length of careers represented in this chart, for example of Sechs Kies or g.o.d, can be attributed to the much later distribution of album-length releases following re-unions of the artists. Whether these re-unions were motivated purely for artistic reasons, commercial reasons local to South Korea, as an attempt to capitalise on the Korean Wave, some combination of these, or other factors remains and open question.

Second Generation Artists

The sample of second generation of artists represented here regularly put out album-length releases. Impressionistically, these releases are ‘front loaded’ on their careers, initially tending to come out at a frequency of around one per year before becoming less frequent. There is a notable tendency for artists of this generation to have longer continuous careers than first generation artists, in some cases spanning three eras of the Korean Wave. Given that such professional longevity seems to have emerged from the second generation, it is not yet clear whether the ‘front loaded’ distribution of album-length releases across a career is a characteristic of this generation of artists or an attribute of longer careers. Considering the distribution of releases of the one first generation artist with a comparably long continuous career, BoA, we may speculate that it is more likely to be the latter than the former. There are, however, exceptions to both the apparent trends of longer continuous careers and regular early-career album-length releases, as can be seen from the release schedule of 2NE1.

Third Generation Artists

For third generation artists, it was the exception rather than the norm to produce a regular stream of album-length releases released roughly annually in the years immediately following their debut. Only Twice and EXO have patterns of releases that are, upon visual inspection at least, similar to earlier generations. A notable outlier is BLACKPINK. Their pattern of releases, that is, putting out their first album-length work much later than their debut and not having many album-length releases, has more in common with the subsequent generation than the preceding one. It is notable that their first album-length release is actually later than those of some fourth generation artists.

Fourth Generation Artists

The circumstances into which the fourth generation of K-Pop artists debuted is radically different from those of the first generation. Not only had the genre achieved a position of global pre-eminence, but digital rather than physical distribution of music, and the accompanying dependence on platforms over retailers, was the norm. As such, album-length releases seem less of a priority for these artists. A substantial proportion of them released their first album-length work long after their debut and, impressionistically, such works are released with less regularity than they were for artists of the first and second generations.

Conclusion

We conclude by considering how the eras of the Korean Wave and K-Pop generations stand in relation to one another. The periodisation of the Korean Wave we present here is explicitly not tied to the different generations of K-Pop artists. It is plausible, though, that the persistence of the Korean Wave and its development have influenced generational differences in K-Pop artists. The most prominent of these are the less frequent and intense patterns of album-length releases for later generations of artists, and the tendency towards greater longevity of career for artists who debuted after the first generation. The sustained global popularity of contemporary South Korean popular culture may also be implicated in the resurgence of first generation artists in eras of the Korean Wave after Hallyu 1.0. While this visualisation is suggestive of K-Pop artists’ output being influenced by the context of the era of the Korean Wave, a larger scale examination of a wider range of artists is necessary to determine the generalisability of that assertion.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)