'Fanomenon' or fan exploitation? Korea's fandom awards plan draws backlash

"I gave up my real life to run a mass streaming campaign, and all I have to show for it is a pile of trash albums."

"I saw the total fundraising amount for a first-week album bulk buy trending on Twitter — now X — before my group's comeback even showed up. I don't know anymore whether I love the singer or whether I'm running a branch office for a pyramid scheme."

Self-deprecating memes like these have circulated for years on X, the SNS hub for K-pop fandoms. The people the K-pop industry calls "super fans" once cheered for their favorite artists out of what felt like pure, voluntary devotion. Today they have become a massive force that drives the entire industry — yet what was once a romantic solidarity, a symbol of youth, now looks like a burden too heavy to carry on affection alone.

That burden is expected to grow heavier. The Presidential Committee on Popular Culture Exchange, working alongside the four major domestic entertainment companies — Hybe, SM, YG and JYP — has unveiled a blueprint for a mega-project called "2027 Fanomenon," which would select and award the year's top 10 most influential fandoms.

The announcement of an unprecedented fandom awards ceremony unleashed a torrent of bitter self-mockery across SNS, online communities and offline fan circles alike. The prevailing sentiment: "I thought draining my bank account just to see my favorite's face one more time or help them win one more award was what being a fan meant — and now the government and the big agencies are stepping in to officially certify us as paying suckers."

The fans' lament is no exaggeration as a portrait of the K-pop industry's own contradictions. The industry has long used pure affection and romantic devotion as fuel for capitalism, urging fans to spend more — always more. Park Jin-young, chairman of the committee, said the initiative would "define fandom not as consumers but as an industry in its own right, and make it unmistakably clear to the world that South Korea is the global leader in the fandom industry" — a statement that rang hollow to many.

Fandom was not always an industry. Fans have existed throughout the history of popular music, but the organized, commercially driven fandom model seen today took shape only with the rise of idol groups.

In the K-pop ecosystem, fans are active "prosumers" who help build an artist's brand value. They go far beyond simply listening to music, inserting themselves deeply into the growth narrative of the stars they love — voluntarily pushing songs to the top of streaming charts, running global promotional campaigns and generating the metrics that define an artist's success.

Lee Gyu-tak, a professor and director of the Global K-Center at George Mason University Korea, said K-pop's global success "did not come from one-way corporate marketing, but from a fan phenomenon in which fans discovered the music themselves through social media and organically spread it." He added that "K-pop is fundamentally an industry built by fans, and the degree of emotional investment and participatory ownership fans hold is overwhelmingly greater than in any other genre."

The history of fandom stretches back to the 1980s. The "oppa brigades" that followed legendary singer Cho Yong-pil were the first organized fandom model. Then in 1992, Seo Taiji and the Boys debuted, bringing teenagers to the forefront of popular culture and turning fandom into a full-blown social phenomenon.

With the arrival of first-generation idol groups such as H.O.T. and Sechs Kies, fandoms became more active agents. Nationwide fan clubs, signature colors, light sticks and chants emerged, laying the structural foundation for the fandom culture that exists today.

The internet age transformed fandom once again. PC communication networks and fan cafes brought together people who loved the same singer from across the country, while YouTube and SNS pushed those boundaries beyond national borders.

From the second generation onward, fans did not stop at listening to music — they translated Korean lyrics, produced videos and spread content worldwide. They managed their favorite artists' album and streaming performance, sent protest trucks to agency headquarters and took social causes into the streets. Fandoms were simultaneously consumers and producers, emotional communities and cultural amplifiers, and actors capable of shaping public opinion.

Music critic Lim Hee-yun said "fandom is almost everything in K-pop," pointing to the statement BTS released when they boycotted the Grammy Awards — "We are grateful to our Army and everyone who has always been with us" — as an encapsulation of fandom's weight. That line, he said, was not a simple expression of thanks but a symbol of the place fandom occupies in K-pop's growth.

As fandom power grew, fans shifted from supporters leading voluntary cultural activity to workers generating industrial output. Because fandoms are at their core emotional communities and unpaid cultural producers, they have willingly allowed themselves to be mobilized — bonding together and competing in equal measure.

When third-generation acts BTS and Blackpink expanded K-pop's territory from East Asia into the United States and Europe, global K-pop fandoms evolved yet again after 2020 — not only toward commercial consumption but outward into platforms for social solidarity.

During the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States in 2020, fans flooded a police tip app designed to identify protesters with idol fan-cam videos, effectively disabling it — an episode still talked about among overseas fandoms today. When disasters strike at home or abroad, fandoms have raised tens of millions to hundreds of millions of won in donations and planted forests in their artists' names to address the climate crisis, demonstrating collective efficacy as a force for public good.

That powerful cohesion has produced remarkable social achievements, but it has also exposed a darker side: extreme factionalism and industrial side effects. At the 2008 Dream Concert during the second-generation K-pop era, fans of rival groups collectively switched off their light sticks and staged a silent protest during a particular girl group's set — a defining moment that laid bare fandom's insular tribalism. From the third generation onward, it became commonplace for fans to send LED protest trucks and funeral wreaths to agency buildings in response to opaque management decisions.

Music critic Kim Do-heon said the impulse to cheer for someone "has been a pure passion since the days of pianist Franz Liszt — there is nothing wrong with that feeling itself." The problem, he said, is that "K-pop became a fandom-dependent business model after agencies realized that rallying and encouraging fans could produce visible results."

Fandom's organizational power was the engine that drove K-pop's growth. But competition among fandoms intensified year by year, and first-week sales records, total album sales, streaming chart positions, music show rankings and music video view counts all became directly tied to fandom pride.

Music critic Jeong Min-jae said the K-pop industry, led by its agencies, has "actively exploited fandom's competitive instincts." To chase first-week records, agencies built structures that lure fans into buying multiple copies of the same album by bundling in dozens of random photo cards, fan sign event entry tickets and video call lottery coupons. The result: physical albums stripped of their contents and discarded, generating thousands of tons of plastic waste each year. Major agencies alone produce more than 1,400 tons of plastic packaging waste annually.

Concert ticket prices tell the same story. Overseas markets offer expensive shows, but they also offer a wide range of seating options from budget to premium. Domestic K-pop concerts, by contrast, layer expense upon expense — high ticket prices followed by pre-show rehearsal viewing passes, light sticks and merchandise purchases, each pulling fans deeper into spending.

Jeong said fans of major pop stars like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Drake "are not so different from K-pop fans — they spend money, love music and go to concerts." The difference, he said, is that "K-pop has engineered a tightly woven structure, from albums to concerts, that makes spending feel unavoidable."

Fan exhaustion has reached a breaking point as a result. A fan of a third-generation boy group who gave only her surname, Kang, said agencies "release five album versions every comeback and tell you to collect 50 types of photo cards." She added: "They set it up so you have no choice but to spend, and then when the group wins an award they call it 'the fandom's great victory.' Every time I look at my receipts I feel a wave of self-loathing." Another fan, surnamed Chae, said she keeps finding herself trapped in "photo card hell — buying hundreds of albums just to throw them away." Even so, she said, "I keep spending more to boost my favorite's morale, but all I get back is a fleeting moment of joy."

It is against this backdrop that the fandom awards ceremony — the first project under Fanomenon, a portmanteau of "fan" and "phenomenon" — has been met with sighs across fan communities. A fan of a fourth-generation idol group in her 20s, identified only by her surname Kim, said her first thought was: "Do we have to spend even more money to push our ranking into the top 10?" There are those who see genuine meaning in having the pride of helping build a favorite artist's success officially recognized. The concern is what happens when the criteria come down to how much fans have consumed.

Jeong said the very idea of giving an award based on "who spent the most money" through such a ceremony "is self-contradictory at its core."

"The foundation of my concern about a crisis is that K-pop runs on extremely intense fandom consumption. That also becomes a ceiling on how far it can expand. There need to be fans who engage casually and lightly, but if most artists operate on a super-fan and light-fan structure, K-pop is extremely concentrated. It needs to move toward a structure where a much larger light fandom can attach itself."

Those were the words Bang Si-hyuk, chairman of Hybe, spoke on the television program "You Quiz on the Block" in 2023, as Park Jin-young, seated beside him, nodded in agreement. Three years on, the Fanomenon project that Park now leads appears to be moving in the opposite direction — one that further entrenches the very limitations Bang described.

Kim said Fanomenon "seems to be an awards concept grounded in the post-pandemic theory that a 'super-fan era' is coming — a remarkably naive idea." In practice, he said, "the super-fan theory was abandoned long ago amid the global economic downturn, and fans themselves are struggling to hold on." The "super-fan theory" was a marketing framework originally put forward by major global labels including Universal and Warner.

Kim added that "fans are already being pressured to vote, stream on repeat and buy multiple albums as music awards shows multiply throughout the year," and said he was troubled by "the ambition of the state to convert the spontaneous affection fans direct toward singers into a sanctioned competition."

The plan has become a flashpoint precisely because the government and the major agencies are jointly advancing a project that critics say deepens the structural contradictions K-pop has long been accused of — fandom dependency and overconsumption. The committee's stated intention to select the top fandoms through objective, transparent quantitative indicators is fundamentally limited, since it reduces the complex value of fandom to numbers.

Some fandom activity can be measured — album sales, streaming figures and the like. But much of what fans do resists quantification: translating Korean lyrics for overseas fans, explaining an artist's content, running online communities, organizing donations or campaigns around social causes. At the heart of all of it is something that cannot be turned into data — the feeling fans have for their artists.

Lee said Bang "declared that K-pop needed to drop the 'K' in the name of broadening its appeal to a mass audience, yet turning around and using fandom cohesion to rank fans against each other is a step backward." He added that "K-pop fans have invested their own lives and emotions in the success of the music, and if the industry evaluates that emotional participation purely through quantitative metrics, it will generate pushback and unintended consequences."

The committee has disclosed some elements of its evaluation formula, citing "reliable data" and "big data from Spotify, video platforms and similar sources." If fandom influence is assessed primarily through consumption and engagement indicators — sales, streaming, votes and view counts — the result, despite the stated aim of recognizing fandoms as agents in their own right, could simply be ranking fandoms once again by their spending power.

Jeong said that while "someone might feel pride as a member of a fandom selected as the most passionate in the K-pop world and given an award, whether that is truly an honor is another question." Encouraging fans to overconsume and then "putting them on a pedestal and handing them a trophy while saying K-pop fans are different — that sounds like deception," he said.

Kim agreed, saying that while K-pop is "packaged with labels like 'hallyu wave' or 'pure artistic creation,' the industry must never look away from the core industrial factors lurking beneath — emotional labor and structural exploitation." He said this is "a moment when artists should be helped to find a healthier sense of self and the relationship with fandoms should be developed in a healthier, more mature direction," and that Fanomenon, by maximizing and institutionalizing an exploitative structure, "is the wrong choice."

Fandom has been the most powerful engine that lifted K-pop onto the world stage. But boosting engine output alone does not make an industry sustainable. For K-pop's future to be secure, the ecosystem must also draw in audiences beyond the fandom, make room for new musicians, allow smaller genres to survive and ensure fans do not burn out.

Experts agree that for Fanomenon to establish itself as a sustainable cultural platform alongside K-pop fandoms, a fundamental course correction is needed. A pyramid built on fans' unpaid labor and coerced spending can collapse at any moment. What is needed, they say, is not a quantitative ranking system that drives fandoms into a war of attrition, but a qualitative and pluralistic evaluation framework that encompasses public contributions and global cultural solidarity.

Jeong said K-pop must be led by "a future-oriented project with a horizon of 10 years or more — not one that disappears when the administration changes." Kim added that for a government-led event to earn genuine authority, "it must establish a sustainable fairness that the broader music community can endorse."

Beyond the fandom awards, the plan that has drawn the most concern from the popular music world is a proposal to bring 200,000 foreign tourists to the Ilsan and Changdong areas over 11 days — a plan critics say ignores the severe shortage of professional arena venues in Seoul and the greater Seoul area, chronic traffic congestion and price gouging at accommodation.

Lim said the priority should not be "fattening the coffers of the major agencies under the banner of national interest and patriotism," but rather "policies that relieve Seoul's overcrowding by linking with regional cultural infrastructure." He called for moving beyond "a 20th-century mindset fixated on short-term results — like chasing Olympic gold medals — and instead building up the physical fitness of the grassroots music ecosystem."

Lee cautioned against the festival's insularity and proposed an exit strategy through expansion beyond K-pop idol culture to Korean popular music as a whole. A festival "limited only to K-pop idols will inevitably leave people asking why it exists at all," he said, urging organizers to "build sufficient infrastructure and seek sustainability through solidarity and cooperation with other awards ceremonies, rather than lining fans up by exploiting fandom cohesion."