Korean and Japanese pop music have been gaining a lot more visibility in recent years. A main factor for this success is the worldwide exposure they are gaining via popular internet outlets like Youtube, facebook and specialized Asian music blogs.

At the beginning of this week, 2NE1 (a popular K-pop girls group) announced their brand new website targeting specifically their international fanbase. Although there are plenty of popular Japanese pop and rock groups who have potential to get picked up overseas; it does seem their Korean counterparts are the first to become ‘international entrepreneurs’. 2NE1 have announced their concert tour to cover Europe and America, Big Bang (K-pop boysband) have announced their Los Angeles and New Jersey concerts and SHINee (K-RnB) have announced a 2012 world tour after their successful 2011 debut world tour.
Plenty other K-girl and boybands are negotiating with their management to jump on the bandwagon but have currently no confirmed plans.

The main question many fans asked was: ‘Why did it take them so long to finally start touring outside of Asia?”. Performing outside of Asia requires a vast investment to be made, we are not talking about flights and hotel expenses here. One of the main reasons are contracts and local artist management, you have to make sure the artist’s rights are protected and have a solid business plan on how to market their albums and/or concert dvd to a new audience that’s still fairly unfamiliar territory for many Asian artist management companies. Finding overseas subsidiaries and reliable business partners takes time and efforts. Another issue is the fact that music and blurays (for those of you who already shopped in Asia) is generally speaking more expensive. Thus, copyright infringement and piracy are factors their management has to put into consideration in their financial planning.

Future is looking bright for Asian pop music. Last month’s MBC Korean Cultural Festival in London sold out in less than 3h (2500 tickets were available). Let’s hope for the fans they are getting plenty of new opportunities to see their favorite Asian idols perform in their own country.