K-Pop goes the world: What Canada can learn from South Korea’s red-hot cultural moment

Growing up in Toronto in the 1980s, I was often asked by my classmates, “Are you Chinese or Japanese?” “I’m Korean,” I would reply. “What’s that?” I think they know now. The wild success of Korean pop culture is the kimchi slap heard around the world. Audiences are binging South Korean shows on Netflix, second only in minutes watched to American shows. Social media is filled with Korean food, K-pop dance challenges and K-beauty tutorials. The ascendance of Korean pop culture has a business aspect (huge) and cultural influence (also huge).

If you’re surprised by this success, imagine me. I grew up preinternet. Besides the bootlegged VHS tapes my parents rented at the Korean grocer, I had zero access to Korean pop culture. Instead, I was clocking every Canadian success story, aware of our underdog status. In the 1990s, we gave the world Alanis, Celine, Shania and k.d.lang. Degrassi was airing in more than 40 countries.

Meanwhile, South Korea was experiencing an economic crisis and emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

One Jungkook later (27 years, the age of the BTS superstar), that’s all changed. K-Pop Demon Hunters, a surprise Netflix hit, is the obsession of the summer, sparking singalong screenings in cinemas and a soundtrack at the top of the charts. On YouTube, Blackpink and BTS maintain the biggest artist channels (#1 and #2, respectively). In a New York Times’ list of the 100 Best Movies of the 21st century, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite tops the list. Squid Game is Netflix’s most-watched show of all time.

In a fibre-optic cable world where everything is a click away, borders and gatekeepers hold less power while each fan holds more. After a childhood of never seeing anyone like me or my family in pop culture, I made up for lost time by becoming a boy-band fan in my 40s, falling for BTS, the reigning kings of K-pop. Later, I survived COVID lockdowns with K-drama marathons, watching shows like Crash Landing On You, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, and My Mister.

In 2023, hallyu, or the “Korean wave” of culture, was valued at $114-billion, and is forecasted to reach $143-billion on the global market by 2030.

These days, Canadian global successes pale in comparison. We could use some big Korean energy. Where is our bold national brand in a world exploding with more content by the day? Since a near-death experience triggered by Napster and file-sharing 20 years ago, the Canadian music industry is experiencing slow and steady regrowth, but our TV and film industries are currently in a tailspin as they try to weather the overall collapse of cinema box office revenue, cable TV and the advertising revenue that went with it.

Making matters worse, U.S. president Donald Trump has threatened tariffs on our $9.58-billion TV and film industry. This would be ruinous for the Canadian sector. About half the value of our industry is dependent on Hollywood productions coming here to film with our crews and locations.

Adding to this mix, Canada is in the midst of a “once in a generation” regulatory revamp to the Broadcasting Act with the newer Online Streaming Act of 2023, also known as Bill C-11, the first update to the Act since 1991. This is the law that defines what is Canadian content – better known as Cancon.

The implementation of the new Act presents opportunities, including improving how government money flows to our entertainment industries, but TV and film are hanging by a thread as the government bickers with streamers. Industry consultations are taking forever. If results aren’t more quick and nimble, there won’t be much left of these industries to save.

The nineties was our last truly analog era, and since then, South Korea has learned that while government funding needs to be a part of the equation, the focus is on building infrastructure and a strong private sector, including boosting new technology, rather than providing support on a project-by-project basis for content.

I’m also, frankly, jealous of how Koreans aren’t afraid to be Korean. We need a lesson in how to make Cancon not only more successful but more Canadian. Maybe the whole “elbows up” vibe can be more than a passing moment of raised ire. Are we ready to be seen for who we are in our own entertainment, songs, and stories, and sell it to the world? If South Korea can do it, and they started from the bottom, we can, too.

Think local, sell global

Canada and South Korea are comparable by several measures. South Korea has the seventh largest recorded music industry in the world. Canada has the eighth. Our GDP-per-capita is $55,800 and South Korea’s is $50,600. Canadians live next door to the U.S., and Koreans also know about big neighbors: Japan and China.

As for differences, language is the most obvious one. Unlike English, Korean is the official language of no other place on Earth. You would think this would be an obstacle for exporting culture, but according to Canadian TV executive Michael MacMillan, CEO of Blue Ant Media, it’s actually an advantage. “They know who they are. They’re Korean. They speak Korean.”

Making Korean content for a Korean audience that reflects their own lives was South Korea’s first step in a formula for global success. You need a surplus of domestic product in order to export. After building infrastructure for their cultural industries over decades, South Korea has grown a deep, competitive domestic pool of talent and saleable content.

Canadian talent also runs deep. Our film crews are second-to-none. But it’s challenging to get funding to make our own stories. It’s especially tough now because Canadian broadcasters are buying fewer programs, especially in the English-language market, having overspent on Canadian programming in an overcorrection after the pandemic. Two Hollywood strikes had an impact, with Canadian crews waiting for work that never arrived. The net of it is a Canadian TV and film industry that shrank by 18.5 percent from April 2023 to March 2024.

Pivoting in this era of rapid transformation is challenging, but South Korea is doing it. They have a history of iterating government policies that aren’t working – for example, changing their approach to caps on the import of foreign films (restrictive in the 1960s, scrapped by the 1980s) and quotas on how many could be screened (fluctuating over the decades but most recently halved in the 2000s).

Responsive policies have allowed their industries to flourish – and Netflix took notice. In 2023, the streamer dropped US$2.5-billion into a multiyear commitment to the Korean film and TV industry.

Netflix’s model is to invest locally to give local audiences what they want. If a show breaks out to become a worldwide hit – bonus.

Serving local audiences is a strategy that suits South Korea well, as they are highly invested in learning about their own history and culture. Shin Dong Kim, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, says that a Korean obsession with education has refined their taste.

“In Korean society, after colonialism and war, we were all devastated and the traditional class system was just demolished. Education was the last resort of social mobility,” says Prof. Kim.

He says Koreans’ passion for education has meant they increasingly demand more interesting and well-written dramas and movies.

The high quality of content has in turn led to sales in the global market. When I began to watch K-dramas, I didn’t understand all the cultural nuances, but the storylines were so addictive, I kept watching. As I did, I learned more and more about Koreans at work, on dates, and at home with their families. And now the world has, too.

In Canada, instead of reflecting our own culture back to us, about half of our TV and film industry caters to American productions.

American producers love our cheaper dollar, tax credit incentives, and world-class crews. For us, the arrangement has been out of necessity. Americans’ money has kept our production industry competitive and alive.

“Our local market, our audience size, is tiny,” says Blue Ant’s MacMillan.

But while our audience may be tiny compared with the U.S., compared with South Korea, whose population is 51 million, 40 million Canadians isn’t so small, especially not in a market that has been made global by streamers and YouTube.

Canada has already shown in small ways that it can be like Korea when it comes to selling its unique culture. One of this year’s buzziest Canadian TV shows is North of North. The sitcom, from Inuk showrunners Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, takes place in Iqaluit and was made through a partnership between CBC, APTN, and Netflix. Inuit make up 0.2 percent of the Canadian population, but geographically-based audiences matter less in a streamer world looking for great shows with universal themes (in this case, motherhood and community).

This spring, North of North became a global Top 10 hit for Netflix, part of their local-to-global hitmaker pipeline.

In the past, our mode was to sell shows by hiding that they’re Canadian. Schitt’s Creek had “no location, no setting, there is no country,” as star Eugene Levy told Stephen Colbert in 2018. This, about a show starring some of our biggest household names and produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Government funding for Canadian content is a cornerstone of our system and it boils down to a points systems. Film and TV productions, for example, earn points by employing Canadian citizens in key positions and paying at least 75 percent of costs to Canadian companies, among other criteria. Ticking enough boxes doesn’t necessarily get you the money, it just puts you in the running for a panel to decide.

The promise of tax credits from the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO) will form another piece of that budget spreadsheet, with yet another checklist.

Cancon rules aren’t just about funding; they dictate quotas for Canadian broadcasters. Songs score points when music, lyrics, and recording are entirely done by Canadian citizens – and then performed principally by a Canadian. Radio stations are required to play a minimum of 35 percent Cancon (50 percent for the CBC).

Now that the Online Streaming Act of 2023 has replaced the Broadcasting Act, the CRTC has been tasked with implementing it to reshape the rules for a digital era. So far, no one seems happy.

“This seemed to be the opportunity to say we are doing something new here,” says Patrick Rogers of Music Canada, which represents major music labels in Canada. Instead, Rogers says outcomes have been disappointing.

One of the first actions the CRTC took under the Act, in 2024, was to require global streamers to pay a 5 percent levy to operate in Canada, with revenues being used to support the Canadian broadcasting system, including local news on radio and television, French-language content, Indigenous content, and content by and for equity-deserving communities.

This levy didn’t land well. Spotify raised its subscription prices. Netflix stopped funding talent-generating incubators for Canadian creatives.

Rogers calls the update a “once in a lifetime opportunity,” but at this point, he isn’t optimistic. “It appears the CRTC is interested in finding ways to maintain the system of the past.”

Our system is ‘broken’

South Korea’s cultural industries are supported by the government, too, but they do it differently. The South Korean government, with a few exceptions, puts the money into infrastructure and sector support rather than funneling it into specific projects.

When I ask Yoori Kwon, a Seoul-based TV executive, how much government money goes into the dozens of TV shows her studio produces per year, she seems puzzled.

“None,” she says.

However, her studio, SLL Studios, a top South Korean production company, is based in Digital Media City, a neighborhood in Seoul with a high concentration of tech and media, a world of hard facilities, as planned by several levels of government.

Besides infrastructure, Kim says the South Korean government supports cultural industries by encouraging private investment. For example, the K-Content Strategic Fund – announced last year and worth $400-million – is a pool of investments by private companies, including studios and banks, backed by the government. In this way, the South Korean government leverages capital markets to fuel their ambitious global export plans, merging private and public dollars to do it. This content fund is about growing money as much as it is about funneling it back into their industries, building in financial sustainability.

Clive Kenny, a British economist who has studied K-culture industries, says that private sector business acumen has been integral to the growth of hallyu. “Korea had the chaebols, these family-run conglomerates, who were able to bring their expertise from producing appliances and cars into the entertainment sector.”

An early example is CJ Group, a South Korean food company, which became a founding investor in Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG in the 1990s. Besides holding a stake, they got distribution rights for Asian countries – but the whole point was to get into the biz. Today, CJ ENM, owned by CJ Group, is one of Korea’s biggest entertainment companies.

Imagine Canada expanding past the telecommunications oligopoly (Rogers, Bell, Telus) with Loblaw or McCain Foods getting into movies – or Canadian export industries like oil and gas or lumber.

“It’s very risky to produce high-end content,” Kenny says. Government incentives, like grants, are designed to mitigate some of the risk. Kenny says the South Korean government provides incentives but they’re not big relative to other markets like Europe, U.S., or Canada.

He says government incentives done well can create a virtuous circle, encouraging many players to invest in the local ecosystem, as South Korea has done. Incentives done poorly, however, can go sideways, creating inefficient obstacle courses, a drain of time and effort. “You’ve already missed the wave of what you’re trying to achieve if you add a year of prefinancing discussion,” Kenny says.

It’s also counterproductive, Kenny says, when you have a small group of judges applying their points of view to assess what’s worth funding. That’s when a process, meant to be an incentive, actually adds risk to the business, by making it more subjective.

Kenny may as well be describing the Canadian grant system.

Without jumping through hoops to scrape together budgets, no Canadian producer can pay a crew to arrive on-set, and no Canadian audience gets a show like Sort Of, Kim’s Convenience, Letterkenny, or Little Bird, last year’s biggest winner at the Canadian Screen Awards.

“The structure of the way we do things in Canada is really broken,” says Jennifer Podemski, co-creator and showrunner of Little Bird, a drama about the 1960s scoop that was a partnership between APTN and Crave. Working with low budgets, and wearing many hats, requires a very entrepreneurial frame of mind, Podemski says. Her production company has a small core team and, until five years ago, she ran it without a physical office space.

“The business model didn’t work for me, and I can see now it’s not working for anybody.”

Double down on Canada’s strengths

Another driver of South Korea’s success is their intense work culture. Koreans work some of the longest hours in the developed world and take less holiday than the OECD average. You can clearly see it in K-pop, which has endured plenty of scrutiny from fans and detractors for its hard-driving trainee system.

“There’s a thing we could call the success theory of K-pop,” says Son Sungdeuk, Executive Creator at Hybe America. “There’s the idol, and contact with fans and communication, fans always being the priority. Also, artists produce music that is not just for the ears but also for the eyes. It’s performance-heavy, which is different. And then the training process. That’s the unofficial formula.”

K-pop groups are assembled by record labels through a long process of training and tryouts. Son began working with BTS as a choreographer during their audition phase, long before they amassed 80 million subscribers on YouTube. They were still a ragtag group of students, assembled by a scrappy, no-profile company called Big Hit, now one of several labels under Hybe.

The bandmates lived in a dorm, training daily for years, posting dance practice videos and livestreams (which they still diligently do) before debuting in 2013. Their hard-driving effort took them all the way to the Grammys stage in 2022. After the show, the team headed home to Seoul while Son stayed in California, where he is working to build Hybe’s U.S. endeavor.

Son’s contributions to the K-pop trainee system are on display in Netflix’s Pop Star Academy, a documentary series on the making of a K-pop group over a year of training and tryouts. The result is Katseye, a global girl group with members from the Philippines, U.S., Switzerland, and South Korea.

Does Son think it’s possible to take the K-pop trainee system out of Korea and apply it elsewhere?

“No,” Son says. “There’s too much of a cultural difference. Figuring this out was my biggest homework. There was no reference for what could be done.”

The K-pop trainee system is an expression of how Koreans work – at school, in the military, in the workplace, and in entertainment.

This method is not a blueprint for what the Canadian system needs. The lesson, instead, is to double down on your culture’s strengths.

We might not excel at highly-trained pop groups, but we regularly produce acclaimed solo artists. Our most famous exports are musicians with a strong point of view (think Drake, The Weeknd, Mustafa, Feist, Nelly Furtado, and, going back in time, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Gordon Lightfoot). K-pop has at its heart a pursuit of perfection, whereas Canadian musicians who travel well have a distinct voice. Perhaps storytelling is what’s in our cultural DNA.

As a whole, Canadian music is already faring well in a digital world.

Without quotas for streamers yet in place, Canadians choose Canadian music 10 percent of the time, which is substantial given they are competing with every song of all time and around the world.

Outside our borders, the world is also choosing Canadian, with our artists ranking third (behind the U.S. and U.K.) in worldwide streams of the top 1,000 singles.

“Canadian music is made by Canadians and it’s designed to be shared with the world,” Rogers says. “Some of the top songs in India are made by Canadians. We’re net benefiters of this global phenomenon in so many ways.”

Sharing a perspective is exactly what content creators do – and according to YouTube, Canadian creators on that platform see 90 percent of their watch time come from outside Canada. Some of this content, like that of MiaPlays (a channel entirely in Farsi with videos like “What I Eat In A Week”), aren’t in English or French. It’s an eye-popping ratio that shows Canadians are already exporting our pop culture to the world.

During the pandemic, in an attempt to understand the creator economy, the Canadian government ran a survey that found that content creators have low and volatile incomes, prone to fluctuation and reliant on supplementation from live performances and physical sales. It would future-proof our cultural economy if we could provide more stability for creators through accessible infrastructure (studios, gear