'Music alone can't pay the bills': Why Korean artists are turning songs into novels and films

"The cold sunlight wipes away my precarious tears. Was it always like this? I put off the dive by just one more day — I'll mend this wounded heart." (Han Roro, "Grapefruit Apricot Club")

Han Roro, a singer-songwriter born in 2000 who has been called "the rock star of Generation Z," has dominated music streaming platforms with songs that read like fiction and fiction that sounds like music. Her lyrics are etched with anxious youth and love that never quite arrives at its destination, filled with words that feel like vows or wishes. In July last year, she released an EP alongside a novel of the same name, "Grapefruit Apricot Club," and the two fed each other's success. Twelve months after publication, the book still ranks third on the Kyobo Bookstore bestseller list.

The era of simply listening to music is over. Some albums become novels, others become exhibitions, and some music meets its audience on a movie theater screen before anywhere else.

Many artists are moving beyond releasing music through a single medium and embracing a kind of "multimedia convergence," according to music industry sources.

The band Nell released an essay book alongside their 10th studio album, while Han Roro wove a short novel and an EP into a single narrative — the opening scene of the novel is the lyric of the album's first track, "Ticket from Tomorrow." Lee Chan-hyuk and IU have extended their music into physical spaces, and Thornapple premiered their new album as a film screened in movie theaters.

These moves are more than promotional stunts. An official at a mid-sized agency representing several bands said it has become important to turn a release itself into an event and an experience, not merely to put out a song. "It's the result of thinking less about generating buzz and more about how to let people engage with the work on a deeper level," the official said.

Music has entered an age of experience. Streaming made music more accessible than ever, but it also compressed the time people spend with any given song to almost nothing. Artists have found it increasingly difficult to convey their full voice and message through recordings alone, and a new question has taken hold among creators: not just how to make music, but how to make people truly experience it.

The simultaneous release of music alongside books, films or exhibitions is a strategy seen most often among independent artists and singer-songwriters at smaller agencies. Underlying it is a distorted revenue structure that has come to define the Korean pop music industry — the shadow cast by the streaming era.

An official at a music agency said that while playlist culture and short-form platforms have helped individual songs reach more listeners, they have also pulled people further from the experience of listening to a full album from start to finish. "The revenue that comes back to a creator from a single stream is only 0.2 to 0.5 won — it is virtually impossible to make a living from streaming alone," the official said.

If streaming revenue is negligible, physical album sales are in an even worse position. CDs have effectively stopped being a medium for listening to music and have become merchandise — a vehicle for photo cards and fan sign event entry tickets. The very format that once carried music has drifted away from music itself, a paradox the industry has not missed.

Kim Jong-wan of Nell, who recently released the band's 10th studio album "X," abandoned the CD format entirely in favor of a USB album. "It felt embarrassing as a creator that people were buying CDs for reasons that had nothing to do with listening to music," he said.

The central challenge for musicians has thus shifted from selling albums to making people want to experience music again. As traditional formats have lost credibility, artists have turned to new mediums that can deliver something of genuine value to fans without compromising their artistic vision.

Books, films and exhibitions are emerging as the formats best suited to sustaining a prolonged engagement with music.

Nell, long synonymous with Korean modern rock, released an essay book titled "Diary of X" alongside their 10th studio album, documenting more than four years of the creative process and the philosophical questions behind it. They also opened an exhibition of the same name. The journey that produced the title track "Sweet Delusion" and other B-sides was preserved in text and space, letting fans read and walk through the creator's time and absorb it for themselves.

Singer-songwriter Han Roro published a short novel under the same title as her third EP, "Grapefruit Apricot Club," before the album's release, building the bones of a fictional world in advance. The narrative's portrayal of despair and solidarity among teenagers suffering domestic violence and oppression found its completion in the electric guitar and drum sounds of tracks such as "Escape" and "Suspect," deepening the fandom's emotional immersion.

Some artists have gone further, using entirely new spaces to expand their musical universe beyond the pop-up store format. Lee Chan-hyuk of Akdong Musician (AKMU) brought the message of new music to life as an immersive experience through a pop-up exhibition built around the concept of wringing "the juice of inspiration" from his body and mind. The exhibition has continued as an ongoing series, each installment carrying its own subtitle. IU, meanwhile, used a media art exhibition titled "Moment," marking her 15th debut anniversary, to release exclusive content — unreleased photographs, video footage and unissued guide vocals — in an offline space.

These moves represent K-pop stars who balance mass appeal, commercial viability and artistic credibility putting a slight twist on the marketing playbook of conventional idol groups. An official at a major entertainment agency said that "space business" — which emphasizes an artist's creative world without feeling overtly commercial — has become a strong revenue stream that complements offline concerts.

Thornapple has taken the boldest step yet, recently premiering a new album in movie theaters before releasing it anywhere else. It is not the first time the band has run this kind of experiment.

When the EP "Animal" was released, the band held a listening event at a multipurpose cultural venue in Paju ahead of the official release, and their brand concert "Bulgoogyeong" extended into a live concert film screening and a 10th-anniversary pop-up store. With each album, Thornapple has not simply released music — it has designed the way fans encounter it.

The latest release, "My Century Extended Play Film," follows the same logic. Seo Hyeon-gyu, a director at Thornapple's agency MPMG Music, said music is ultimately an art form that each listener interprets in their own way. "Rather than offering a single interpretation, we wanted to open up the possibility of experiencing a wider range of emotions and atmospheres," Seo said. "We hoped that within that space, each listener could build their own story."

Notably, the film was not designed as a commentary on the music. Seo said the visual medium "allows people to experience the atmosphere and emotions that are difficult to convey through music alone in a more sensory way," explaining the thinking behind the unconventional experiment.

Combining albums with books, exhibitions and films is not simply a promotional strategy. It is a survival response born from a distorted ecosystem — one dominated by streaming platforms and major agencies, where industry policy and commercial success revolve almost entirely around K-pop. It is the answer creators have arrived at in an era when music alone can no longer sustain a livelihood.

An official at an agency representing mostly independent musicians said that moving away from a structure dependent solely on streaming and combining ticket sales, publishing and spatial experiences can give creators a more stable revenue base. "Even without a massive fandom like a K-pop group, you can extend the life of an album significantly," the official said. A small core fandom, in other words, can be enough to recoup production costs and keep an artist self-sustaining.

Above all, this approach can help address what is perhaps the greatest threat facing musicians in the streaming era: the shrinking window of engagement. A piece of music consumed only through streaming lasts roughly three minutes. But when a fan reads a book, visits an exhibition or watches a film tied to that music, they spend far longer with both the songs and the creative world behind them — an experience of an entirely different order from one that ends with a play button and a skip.

An official at a mid-sized agency said that unlike the ultra-short consumption cycle in which songs go viral and vanish from the charts within one or two weeks, reading a book, visiting an exhibition or watching a film inherently demands a slower pace. "Extending the time of immersion stretches the lifespan of content to a scale of months, keeping music fans engaged with an artist and their album for far longer," the official said.

There is also a secondary effect: it elevates popular musicians from being simply singers to the status of authors and original artists who move freely across literature, visual art and film.

"It is an experiment that crosses genres, and at the same time a fierce survival strategy by creators determined to keep the album as a format alive even in the streaming age," the official said.