Bias & Beyond

  Apologies for the long gap between posts! I have been extremely busy with daily life here including getting ready to change jobs and hosting my sister for her first ever visit to Asia for the Seollal holidays. We are now slowly escaping the end of the extreme winter we have been having here in South Korea. At one point in January the average daily temperatures in Seoul were not creeping above -6c. For the most part I was simply trying to keep myself warm so I don’t freeze off my extremities while commuting to and from work. During one of those freezing days, I was at the gym with one of my closest friends who currently works at an entertainment company. We were on the treadmill gossiping about life when NCT 127’s Fact Check came on over the speakers. We both paused in mid conversation and ended up dancing on the treadmill, cracking up as we had realised what had happened. After our mini jam session on the treadmill, we continued as normal but a thought crossed my mind at that po...

  Despite my lack of concert activity towards the end of 2025, I was pretty active at the beginning of this year. And that was in part to how many ATEEZ concerts I was able to embark on. It’s no secret how much I enjoy ATEEZ’s music- they have always somewhat been on my radar since their debut but they weren’t a group that I followed closely until I was lucky enough to see them perform live towards the end of 2023 for another one of those “K-pop Award Shows” businesses create to ‘recognise’ groups (but in reality are just a glorified indoor music festival) They only performed one song that night, ‘Bouncy’, but I was IMMEDIATELY sold. And I haven’t looked back since. I have been blessed to have the rare feat of seeing them on three different continents this year alone- Asia, North America, and Europe. A couple of people wanted to know what each concert and atmosphere was like; if there were any similarities between the three or if they were all vastly different. I had a thought abou...

As of the middle of 2025, all of the members of BTS had served their mandatory military service and were out in the wild, wild world again. ARMY (and I am sure a few media people as well) were crying, sobbing, and shaking in relief. I had a few people asking for my opinion on what I think will be the next step for them. As if I am some sort of oracle able to predict the future of what is going to be the future for one of the biggest names in K-Pop. I mean, I could hazard a few guesses but the reality is… I don’t know. When BTS really started making waves outside of Asia, they were still one of the very few to be doing so on a base level. But what made them and their promotional campaigns different was that they were the first to try and market to a widespread international market. At the time of their debut, companies were only using YouTube as a means of uploading their music videos (and the odd dance practice) on the platform, wanting to instead focus their video efforts on the homeg...

The world of social media is definitely not one to just be joining in without much forethought. First of all, I would like to ask you all- if you were in the world of social media marketing and wanted to have a K-Pop group to work with an influencer or influencer team, what would be the most important factor with regards to your decision making? Is it who the influencer is and what they are known for? Is it the number of followers they have? Or is it if the artist is a fan of the influencer? Or is it how the audience skews in terms of their geography and audience? The reason I ask this was due to the questions that I was having after seeing the influencers that Stray Kids were linking up with during their US/EU leg of their world tour. Now, Stray Kids are by no means a small time group. They are currently one of JYPE’s biggest successes, taking on sold out stadiums in locations such as the U.S., the U.K., France and so on. Their albums consistently chart on the Billboard charts glo...