The year is 2013. Danny Lee, a project manager at a computer software company, walks into Kilroy's Sports in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. It's an oversize bar popular with college kids, filled with flat-screen TVs, Long Island Iced Tea specials, and bad decisions. As he walks in, Park Jae-sang, best known as K-pop rapper Psy, comes on the speakers. "Gangnam Style," his viral hit, reverberates across the room. Heads turn to focus on the sole Korean American present. "Everyone is looking at me like, 'It's Psy's little brother!' So I do the dance. Everybody did it," Lee recalls of parroting the video's horse-prance choreography. "They were having fun, but 100 percent of the people were laughing at Psy. In Korea, he's a legend," Lee says. In America, he's "a one-trick pony."
Fast-forward to 2018. Lee, by then the founder of Asian Agent, a music management and label consulting firm, and head of talent and partnerships for premier K-pop agency YG Entertainment, leaves the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas, where the biggest band on the planet, K-pop group BTS, has just performed. Its fans, known as ARMY, have been screaming outside for hours. An Uber driver shows Lee a picture of his daughters on his phone: " 'She's 12 and she's 9, and they're at home right now learning Korean so they can understand what BTS is saying in its songs.' Dude, think about that!" Lee says. How could you not? K-pop's evolution essentially represents one of the most remarkable five-year plans of all time. By last year, Korean had become the second-fastest-growing language on the planet, according to Duolingo—thanks in large part to K-pop being the fastest-growing music market on the planet. In America, K-pop was once a niche interest. Now it is a dominant, multibillion-dollar global industry. And the music world will never be the same.
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