Katseye’s Global Strategy, Mental Health for Artists Among Insights from K-pop’s Entertainment Blueprint Panel

“How would I define K-pop?,” said Jonathan Yip a music producer who has written for the Far East Movement and Bruno Mars and works often in the space.

“This has come up recently for me, within prestigious companies ,” he notes. “And I think everybody in the audience might be able to hear a song and understand ‘that’s a K-pop song.’ But if you have to put it into words, it’s making it a little bit tougher. One could be language, two could be the sonic space where it is performance driven…it has a lot of excitement and dance routines…But to be able to put that in words is not the easiest. So for me, I look at it as a phenomenon.”

Joon Choi defined K-pop as an IP business (more than music), integrating fans as part of the artist journey and making them a key partner in the artist’s career.

Rick Choi defined K-pop as global music that is becoming mainstream.

Joon Choi said when he came to Weverse about five years ago, it had 2 to 3 million active users but has since expanded to 12 million active users.

Fueling this massive growth was the BTS advantage: starting with an already highly engaged fanbase allowed the Weverse team to test out elements and see what worked best.

“I was very surprised by the fact that the traffic from Korea for K-pop [on the platform] is only 10% [out of] 12 million,” he says. “There are a lot of people from Japan, China, India, the U.S. Mexico, South America. So, it’s very diverse.”

He noted that just as Bing Chen, co-founder of Gold House said in his opening speech, music is the only global language, so fandom psychology also universal.

Mitra Darab, who as President of HYBE x Geffen has been able to pour all her expertise into the phenomenally successful girl group Katseye made the point that the platform is not for every artist. To maximize its potential, artists have to be willing to learn how to create content and connect with fans.

As a music industry veteran, Mitra Darab was excited when the opportunity arose to develop a global girl group as a joint effort for the Korean entertainment HYBE and the American label Geffen.

Darab relished the opportunity for the first time, to put all of her expertise and efforts into one act.

And while there is much about Katseye that does not fit the K-pop blueprint, many things, especially the training and development process are closely aligned for what would be typical for a group based in Seoul.

“We really took it seriously,” she said of the teams training and development. “The team sat with experts at HYBE T&D and we learned like, what are the most important things we need to do to create our “future proof.”

She made the point that having the girls perform on Korean music shows was one of the ways they work within the K-pop sphere while retaining their American-coded DNA. That it’s about respecting the culture the group is based upon.

And while not the first global girl group based on the K-pop blueprint, the multicultural six-member Katseye headquartered in Los Angeles is the first group of its kind to succeed on a grand scale with two of their songs “Gnarly” and “Daniella” ranking on the Billboard Hot 100, cultural touchstone moments like their big turnout at Lollapalooza, their recent viral Gap campaign and winning their first VMA award this past weekend.

Photos: Mitra Darab, Andrew Ge for Gold House

LiveNation has a dedicated mental health program with services available for both crew and touring artists says Rick Choi.

But an artist’s mental well-being extends beyond the company and touring into the fan relationship says Joon Choi where dedicated platforms become safe spaces for artists where they can be reveal more of themselves. He used Jungkook of BTS as an example.

“Three years ago he opened his Instagram account and he posted random pictures,” he said. “He posted very pretty, well-oriented photos.” But for Weverse, the dedicated fan platform, it was different. He posted a half-eaten plate of food.

“There’s also something I think HYBE does that’s really important is there is a lot of care and attention in mental well-being and mental health,” said Mitra Darab.

“People think Training and Development is learning how to dance and sing. It’s not. It’s really helping shape these young women into understanding what they are about to get into and being there for them and their physical well-being.”

Katseye had three women on staff that acted as counselors, she says (it wasn’t clear if it was a formal role) but as seen in the Pop Star Academy documentary the women have a full-time psychologist available 24-7. “When the documentary came out,” she said, “That was their first big wave of getting a lot of negativity. And he would be there at 11:00 PM to talk to one of the members, right?”

“To me, K-pop is positive,” she continued. “I understand where there’s negativity in it, but I’m really really proud that I work for HYBE and how they treat their artists and how we in America treat our artists.