On March 21st in Seoul, South Korea, the K-pop group BTS marched from Gyeongbokgung Palace to take the stage in Gwanghwamun Square, for a concert that was to be streamed across the globe on Netflix. It had been three years, five months, and six days since their last live performance. Before going on hiatus in 2022 so that the group’s seven members could complete their mandatory military service, BTS was unequivocally the biggest band in the world. They set ticket-sales and streaming records in South Korea and worldwide; in 2020, “Map of the Soul : 7” was their fourth album to début at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, nearly outpacing the Beatles. After almost four years away—during which members also found time to release a combined ten albums and thirty-eight singles as solo artists—some hundred and four thousand people in Seoul, in addition to a reported 18.4 million tuning in to the live stream, would now witness the birth of BTS 2.0.

Or was it sixty thousand people in Gwanghwamun Square? Reports varied. The municipal government had prepared for crowds of more than two hundred fifty thousand. The hundred and four thousand figure came from HYBE, BTS’s management company. Some preliminary data from the city had suggested that the number was closer to forty thousand, though eventually it went up to around sixty. Owners of restaurants near the square took heavy losses, throwing out thousands of dollars of food that they had prepared in anticipation of feeding a quarter of a million hungry fans. Depending on which figures you paid attention to, BTS’s reunion concert was either a world-dominating success or a tepid anticlimax.

To be a K-pop fan is to watch the numbers. For devout followers of BTS, or their colleagues in groups like Blackpink and Stray Kids, sales figures and stream counts are not neutral matters of fact. They are a testament to both the artist’s commanding power and to the fandom’s commitment, to how far fans will go to insure that their favored act comes out on top. Ahead of the release, last week, of “Arirang,” BTS’s comeback album, members of the group’s appropriately named fan base ARMY set some ambitious targets: between two hundred and two hundred and fifty million Spotify streams across all songs; seventy million YouTube views on the music video for “Swim,” the lead single; and the No. 1 positions globally on iTunes and Apple Music. All of this was just for the album’s first day out. “ARIRANG must be streamed ×20 TOP TO BOTTOM to achieve MAXIMUM RESULTS!!!!,” exhorted a graphic that circulated in online fan spaces. When it appeared that not all of these lofty goals were met, fans of other artists, particularly of Taylor Swift, took to X to gloat: “Taylor Ended them,” one crowed; “The life of a showgirl still outsold by millions,” said another, referring to the album that Swift released last year. Both factions were speaking the new international language of fandom, in which streams and sales are the ultimate proof of an artist’s worth—which is to say, in the U.S. and worldwide, supporters of acts across genres and national origins were speaking the language of K-pop fandom.

Ten years ago, outside of Korea and Japan, fans of acts like BigBang and Loona were often seen as members of a fringe subculture. Not so today, when you can turn on the radio almost anywhere in the world and hear the K-pop artist Rosé, of Blackpink, harmonizing with Bruno Mars on “Apt.,” a welcome burst of sugary fun amid all the maudlin weepers on last year’s pop charts, or Jack Harlow starting off a verse with the line “I’m on my Jung Kook,” shouting out BTS’s youngest member. There are now non-Korean groups that are explicitly modelled after K-pop acts, such as the “global girl group” Katseye, a co-production between HYBE and the American record label Geffen. BTS reflect on this shift on their new album. “Everybody know now where the K is,” raps the group’s leader, RM, on “Aliens”—a song that celebrates their anointment as international pop stars while insisting on their particularity as Korean artists. They name-check the independence movement leader Kim Gu and remind you, in one of the album’s occasional flashes of the group’s old cheeky bravado, that this is their house, and you need to leave your shoes at the door.

Throughout “Arirang,” BTS searches for their footing in a global pop landscape that they themselves, the conquering aliens, have terraformed. “Arirang” is a centuries-old Korean folk song that has, as Joshua Minsoo Kim writes, “long functioned as a polysemic anthem—of deep longing, collective resilience, even the reunification of North and South Korea.” In BTS’s hands, it acquires a more banal meaning. A sample of “Arirang” hums in the background of the album opener, “Body to Body,” a pulsating club track about the desire for skin contact on the dance floor: a vision of unity, sure, but one you can find on almost any pop record. In “BTS: The Return,” a documentary (also a Netflix original) on the group’s comeback, the members are palpably unenthusiastic about “Arirang” as a guiding theme for the album. They squirm in their boardroom seats as a rough mix of the “Body to Body” interlude plays. “It feels like I’m eating kimchi fried rice at Paris Baguette,” RM says, in a sly reference to another global Korean brand. Will the fans think the group has gone “all in on the patriotism,” wonders V, BTS’s baritone crooner? Or will they see the “Arirang” concept as a somewhat limp conceit that cannot obscure the music’s greige placelessness—which is to say, its Americanness?

“Arirang” was mostly recorded in L.A., in collaboration with star producers from the States such as Diplo, Ryan Tedder, and Mike WiLL Made-It. These outsized musical personalities often leave more distinctive fingerprints on the songs than the BTS members themselves do. “Normal,” with its patterned chord changes and pinched chorus melody, is a classic bit of Tedder pop rock—or rather, Tedder channelling the latest sounds in pop rock; there is more than a hint of Mk.gee’s downtuned guitar tones in those rumbling low chords. On “FYA,” RM and J-Hope rap over groaning metallic noises and a blown-out bass drum: the world’s most expensive-sounding JPEGMAFIA-type beat. (Indeed, JPEGMAFIA, the rapper and producer, had a hand in the song.)

BTS’s most engaging work often scans like bricolage: a song might have a rap-rock verse, a power-ballad chorus with a pounding four-on-the-floor E.D.M. beat, and a bridge with neo-soul chord flourishes. It is the ultimate post-genre music, assembled from disparate parts and then welded together, through the heat of sheer idol charisma, into a shiny pop assemblage. On “Arirang,” BTS trudges dutifully between sounds—including slick twenty-tens R. & B., antic posse raps, and moody indie-pop guitarscapes—less in a spirit of experimentation than in an effort to cover all the bases. At one point in the documentary, Suga, one of the group’s rappers, complains that there is too much English on the album. A company exec steps in to explain: all the English, a language only one BTS member speaks fluently, is necessary for the album to succeed in the “global market.” The record itself feels a bit like these boardroom scenes: the music is happening, the strategy is playing out, and the stars are more or less just sitting back and letting it all unfold.

K-pop is less a genre than a mode of musical production. At its core is the idol system, a vast infrastructure through which entertainment companies scout promising young performers at home and abroad; subject them to a rigorous, often years-long training regimen; and assemble them into groups, which tend to adhere to unifying “concepts”—a visual aesthetic, a musical or dance style, a market segment. Artist development, music production, choreography, promotion, and even fan engagement are all typically handled in-house. This system first took shape in Japan in the seventies; in South Korea, the companies would consolidate further, patterning themselves after chaebol, or vertically integrated family firms. In the mid-nineties, as South Korea’s explosive economic growth began to stagnate, President Kim Young-sam’s Administration made a big bet on the culture industries, passing legislation to help enliven the country’s artistic production. As the public learned to think of pop culture as a key national asset, and as a new generation of teen-agers encountered the liberatory energies of fully mobilized mass entertainment, the conditions were ripe for what we now know as K-pop—the term seems to have first been used in 1999—to flourish.

The figure of the idol is distinct from other pop archetypes like the rock star and the diva. Bang Si-hyuk, the chairman of HYBE, explained in a 2019 interview, “I believe in the West there is this deeply embedded fantasy of the rock star—a rock star acts true to their soul and everyone must accept it as part of their individuality, and only through that does good music come.” If the rock star is a romantic individual who expresses some inner truth through original music, the idol is an omnicompetent interpreter of material. (BTS threads the needle deftly between these identities: “You can call me artist / You can call me idol,” RM crows on their 2018 song “Idol,” before adding, “I don’t care.”) Rock stars and their equivalents in other genres often develop their craft in obscurity before being discovered; idols are apprentices, trained exhaustively by their management companies. And perhaps most important, although rock stars may gladly accept tribute from their fans, idols actively make themselves available to them, whether in appearance or in reality. The idol is supposed to be simultaneously unknowable and infinitely accessible, called upon to execute herculean feats of emotional labor: not just performing and recording but also meeting fans, live-streaming their daily activities, and constantly professing their appreciation for their supporters.

BTS were famously innovators in this business of intimacy at scale. At the time of their 2013 début, their frank blog posts and member-authored tweets offered fans a sense of live connection that was nowhere to be found in other acts’ impersonal P.R. communications. Since then, there has been a proliferation of K-pop intimacy machines, including social-media platforms like Weverse, where users can receive exclusive messages from idols, and more ambitious projects like the idol group NCT 127’s “digital metaverse,” where fans can interact with performers’ virtual avatars. “BTS: The Return” fittingly opens with the group live-streaming a beach hangout session. Framed against a California sunset, the members chat and joke as they watch the comments roll in and the view count go up. Here, one can’t help thinking, is all the effortless charm and offhanded zaniness that “Arirang” is lacking. Even if the new music is largely inert, BTS are still able to make these scenes come alive with a special improvisational energy. They are geniuses of the vicarious.

Such has been the dominant model for producing and marketing K-pop over the past decade. American artists have used this playbook, too: despite the apparent animosity between ARMYs and Swifties online, there is something decidedly K-pop about Taylor Swift’s secret messages for fans to decode, her succession of musical and stylistic “eras.” Still, the BTS comeback provides an occasion to wonder if the machinery is starting to creak. HYBE’s stock fell by over fifteen per cent following the underattended Gwanghwamun Square concert. Bang was called in for police questioning multiple times last year, following allegations that he had deceived HYBE’s shareholders and pocketed more than a hundred million dollars of profits during the company’s I.P.O. (HYBE denies any wrongdoing.) NewJeans, one of the most exciting and innovative recent K-pop groups, has been largely inactive since 2024 due to a baroque legal dispute with the HYBE subsidiary ADOR. The idol system, concentrated around what’s known as the big four companies—HYBE, SM, JYP, and YG—is coming off as sluggish and conservative. If the big firms aren’t able to capitalize on their fresh talent, let alone secure world-beating numbers from their top acts, one might speculate: What purpose are they serving, beyond accumulating lucrative back catalogues?

Still, BTS dominates charts worldwide, even if “Arirang” failed to meet the fans’ exacting initial benchmarks. Their tour, which gets under way this spring, is sure to be one of the year’s most lucrative. Blackpink recently launched its own high-profile comeback, while other girl groups like aespa have stayed immensely popular. But increasingly the market for these acts may be more international than domestic. Of the Top Ten songs on South Korea’s digital chart at midyear last year, only three were by idol groups. Many of the others were by solo artists, and some even by artists with a history of self-producing. Tellingly, some of the very expensive music on “Arirang” sounds a lot like these surely less capital-intensive songs. Tracks like the melancholic alt-pop single “Swim” and the more guitar-heavy “Like Animals” resonate with songs like “Drowning,” an infectious piece of emo pop by Woodz, a singer who débuted as a member of a Chinese-Korean idol group and has since turned to writing and producing solo rock records. It remains to be seen if other idol-system alums will follow a similar path, or if more of the promising talent of the next generation will turn away from the trainee model altogether.

The entertainment companies seem to be wondering, too, whether they can produce idols without all the trouble of developing human talent. The first K-pop boy band to reach the No. 1 spot on Spotify’s U.S. chart, after all, was not BTS but the Saja Boys, the fictional group from the Netflix film “KPop Demon Hunters.” “I don’t know how long human artists can be the only ones to satisfy human needs and human tastes,” Bang told Billboard in 2023; the following year, HYBE backed SYI\IDI8, a cartoon girl group with A.I.-generated vocals. Another company, Galaxy Corporation, is at work on a line of humanoid “robot idols” who can perform choreography for live audiences. One wonders if an industry in the grips of such an A.I. fever has the will or even the capability to produce another BTS. Ultimately, the band’s legacy may be this: the first K-pop group to achieve world domination—and one of the last to be, from the perspective of the industry, irreplaceable. ♦