South Korean entertainment powerhouses, SM Entertainment, HYBE, and Kakao Entertainment, are accelerating their global expansion strategies by targeting the North American market. A critical initiative in these efforts is the introduction of new audition programs and strategic partnerships with prominent North American record labels.
On August 28, HYBE announced the launch of a new global girl group audition program titled ‘The Debut: Dream Academy‘. In this program, 20 finalists, selected from a pool of 120,000 applicants from around the world, compete for auditions primarily through social networking service (SNS) platforms.
In the run-up to the launch of ‘Dream Academy’, HYBE had been preparing to infiltrate the international market in partnership with a North American local record label for about two years. The entertainment conglomerate, which previously established a local corporation, HYBE America, in April 2019, is boosting its North American presence through subsidiaries like SB Project, Schoolboy Records, and Big Machine Label Group.
Similarly, SM Entertainment and Kakao Entertainment have intensified their efforts to increase their global reach. Ever since Kakao Entertainment became SM Entertainment’s largest shareholder in March, the two entertainment companies have been enhancing their business collaboration. They launched a local integrated corporation in North America last August aiming to leverage both SM Entertainment’s global Intellectual Property(IP) and production capabilities, with Kakao Entertainment’s comprehensive music and album distribution network and multi-label system.
Jang Yoon-joong, the newly appointed CEO of Kakao Entertainment America, said, “Through the North American integrated corporation, we will accelerate the global expansion and growth of SM artists and Kakao Entertainment, promoting music, artist development, along with planning, production, and distribution of IP.”
The growth strategies employed by HYBE, Kakao Entertainment, and SM Entertainment reflect a significant shift in vision – one that aims to transcend the expansion of the K-pop market in Korea and strengthen its influential foothold in the United States, the epicenter of the pop music industry.
Industry insiders note that the K-pop market’s main consumer base is gradually shifting from Asia to North America. The present moment is, therefore, a crucial one for watching how these three powerhouses’ rapid advancement into the North American market will impact K-pop’s expanding global influence.
