User:Mlmaxwell97/sandbox

In today’s world, social media can make-or-break individuals in the entertainment industry. Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter can be used as tools to promote an artist or group nationwide. With more users joining everyday, having outstanding reviews on these mediums has become crucial to the success of artists around the world. Because social media is an international concept, tweeting or posting about a group in one corner of the world, can reach a place thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds. No stranger to the magic of social media, the globalization of K-Pop has been analyzed by experts to unravel how exactly it became a global phenomenon.

In a specific case study, researchers analyzed K-Pop’s journey to Mexico – quite a distance from its home in Korea. Korea and Mexico are two vastly different countries with polarizing discrepancies culturally. However, due to the global reaches of social media, K-Pop not only spread to Mexico, it quickly became a highly popular source of music in the country.

K-Pop first entered Mexico through the introduction of mainstream TV in 1992. During this time, TV Azteca, the second largest mass media outlet in Mexico, began to broadcast Japanese animation. However, in the early 90’s, the Japanese animated series did not gain much attention or praise in Mexico. It wasn’t until the broadcasting of “Everything about Eve” aired in 2002 on an another Mexican broadcasting network that K-Pop began to gain increasing popularity in Mexico.

A tangible step for the Mexican-Korean fusion of cultures facilitated via K-Pop was the first K-Pop concert in Mexico in September 2012 Junsu Kim of JYJ came to perform for a moderately large crowd of Mexican people, illustrating the in-person interest that has taken root in the K-pop industry in Mexico. Really spiking the K-Pop buzz shortly after was the release of “Gangnam Style.” This song blew up in popularity across the globe, and grabbed even more attention due to the countless “remake’s” of the song and music video by various cultural groups throughout the world. In Mexico, “Oppan Mexi Style” was released in tribute to the masterpiece of Gangnam Style, showing their support and admiration of the K-Pop music culture. Researchers used a mass searching tool in order to catalog the total number of times the term “K-Pop” was used in Mexico across all mainstream social media networks, and in 2013, following the release of Gangnam style, K-Pop had approximately 102,000 results across Mexico on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. In addition, due to data collected over the past two decades recording the amount of public fan bases for K-Pop in Mexico, the number has grown substantially. In 2002, only 4 public fan clubs with approximately 2,000 members existed in Mexico. However, as of 2013, there were more than 70 publicly recorded K-Pop fan clubs with over 30,000 members. This incredible increase over the course of a decade can be attributed to the use of social media and its ability to spread information across the world.

Researchers who have specialized on this topic have agreed that the two most successful mediums for spreading the influence of K-Pop to Mexico have been YouTube and Twitter. YouTube has been a useful skill in this matter due to its video capabilities. Because anyone in the world can post and access videos, citizens of Mexico are able to access and view K-Pop videos, and in return are able to support than fandom from afar. Twitter has proven to be an effective platform for the spread and popularity of the genre due to its concise sharing capacity and ability to attach links. Researchers saw these as useful tools in the spreading of K-Pop because with the 140-character limit on Twitter, users must post a short and summarized version of their thoughts. This allows positive word to be digested more easily than forcing users to read lengthy paragraphs. Additionally, the ability to attach links to tweets can allow fans to attach K-Pop video links to songs and artists alike. This allows people to quickly discover K-Pop around the world because of the fast and easy user experience that Twitter promotes.

file:///Users/madeleinemaxwell/Downloads/E1CTBR_2014_v10n1_36.pdf