K-Pop Catalogs Are Booming — How Korea’s Music Investment Market Is Changing the Game

As mainstream involvement successful the catalog concern marketplace grows and investors look for opportunities extracurricular of accepted Western popular and rock, the runaway occurrence of Netflix’s Kpop Demon Hunters — which has 4 songs successful the apical 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 — has helped spur involvement successful K-pop catalogs.

The K-pop catalog marketplace retired of South Korea functions otherwise than that of the United States, however. So, Billboard asked Jinwoo Jo, CEO of South Korean concern steadfast Beyond Music — which has built 1 of the largest collections of Korean and Asian fashionable music, including megahits from BTS and BLACKPINK — to stock his position connected the existent marketplace and immoderate of the organization contented that Beyond has learned implicit its four-year history.

Founded successful 2021, Beyond has invested astir $250 cardinal to get much than 35,000 songs, making it acold larger than different Asian catalog concern firms and putting its portfolio alongside U.S.-based HarbourView Equity Partners successful presumption of fig of songs successful its portfolio.

“We are similar a specialized plus absorption company,” says Jinwoo, whose steadfast has reportedly raised much than $400 cardinal from Korean backstage equity and organization investors including Pax Capital and KB Securities. “We effort to absorption connected what we are bully at, which is K-pop.”

This twelvemonth the Seoul-based steadfast acquired publishing rights from the autarkic K-pop songwriter and shaper Bekuh Boom, including to BLACKPINK hits “Kill This Love” and “Ice Cream,” arsenic good arsenic a involvement successful BTS’ monster deed “Butter.”  Beyond besides has an extended room of older Asian classics from groups similar Panic and Kim Sung Jae, and it precocious expanded into the Latin marketplace with the acquisition of Yandel. 

Here are 3 takeaways from Billboard’s speech with Jinwoo.

Struggling Korean absorption companies are looking to merchantability catalogs.  

Jinwoo says Korea’s euphony absorption manufacture is going done a changing of the defender with overmuch enactment and creator roster turnover, and respective companies are looking for ways to enactment up their finances. 

For absorption firms that are struggling financially, Beyond Music offers a mode to liquidate portion of their catalog and reinvest successful their company.

“It’s beauteous overmuch similar an industry-wide contented astatine this point,” helium says. “It’s a winner-takes-all situation. If you don’t person a BTS oregon a BLACKPINK, what are you going to do? The agelong process of those absorption companies has a beauteous important existential issue. We are a liquidity and solution supplier to them.”

Although Korean absorption companies are structured similar one-stop shops with songwriters connected staff, Jinwoo says acquisitions hap astir the aforesaid mode they bash with Western euphony companies. Beyond negotiates with the songwriters to get publishing rights and the institution to get masters. He says the superior quality is that, due to the fact that the catalog concern marketplace is nascent successful Korea, getting a Korean songwriter to merchantability their rights “requires overmuch much [and] deeper trust, handholding and a greater sensitivity to taste nuances.”

Name, representation and likeness rights, which Pophouse utilized to make the ABBA Voyage virtual performance successful London, and that Primary Wave utilized to marque Nirvana merchandise similar bosom shaped boxes and peculiar variation Converse shoes, bash not beryllium successful South Korea.

Beyond’s catalog is comprised mostly of publishing rights and maestro recordings, and portion it has explored name, representation and likeness deals with the catalogs it holds from extracurricular of South Korea, Korean instrumentality is inactive evolving astir the close to one’s representation arsenic it relates to music.

Beyond generates returns successful different ways, including done synch placements successful Korean dramas, films and advertisements. One caller occurrence came from the Japanese brew institution Asahi Super Dry, which utilized BLACKPINK’s “Kill This Love” successful a planetary advertisement run — a woody Beyond timed to coincide with the miss group’s astir caller satellite tour.  

The institution besides collaborates with societal media influencers.

“First happening each morning, we look astatine our interior information system, and it volition amusement that [for example] 78 songs moved precise dramatically implicit the past 48 hours,&rd...