How Fifty Fifty beat the odds: Music industry insiders, experts address success at MU:CON

The success of girl group Fifty Fifty's "Cupid" (2023) was not by chance but by careful design for a K-pop market seeing world-beating growth.

Helena Kosinski, the global vice president of U.S. data company Luminate, speaks at the annual MU:CON fair. [KOCCA]

The continued growth of digital platforms can be both a curse or a blessing depending on how creators and producers go about their strategies, according to girl group Fifty Fifty’s “Cupid” artist and repertoire (A&R) chief Lee Jun-young and Luminate vice president Helena Kosinski.

In fact, the “miracle” K-pop girl group's “Cupid” (2023) was no happenchance but the result of meticulous planning, carefully tailored to the 5-second window given on TikTok, according to Lee.

“It’s usually the chorus of the song that’s used on short-form video platforms, but we intentionally focused on the pre-chorus section that we thought would appeal more to the users of TikTok,” Lee told the Korea JoongAng Daily in an interview held Tuesday during the annual MU:CON music and entertainment fair held in Seoul.

MU:CON is an annual pop music festival hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency aimed at expanding business opportunities for local musicians and entertainment professionals while serving as a networking platform for the music industry.

This year’s main conference events were held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in central Seoul, along with performances at various venues across Seoul.

Danny Lee, head director at Beat Interactive K-pop agency, in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on Sept. 24 [KOCCA]

“I’ll be frank — we didn’t know if it would work. We hoped it would, but we weren’t sure,” he continued.

“Nevertheless, we gave it that intentional tweak so that ‘Cupid’ could have that competitive edge over all the other songs. We focused on the melody and lyrics so that it could appeal to a younger audience, such as by starting the bit with ‘I’m feeling lonely,’ which is a universal sentiment among youngsters, as well as making sure the melody was good to the ear.”

Lee, one of the numerous experts to visit MU:CON, was the chief of the A&R team at The Givers, the production company that put together the song and concept for Fifty Fifty. A&R refers to a music division that oversees the whole process of an artist’s music production, from casting songwriters to putting together the visuals to go with the music.

He is currently working at Beat Interactive, a K-pop agency home to boy band A.C.E, crossover quartet Forestella and more.

Fifty Fifty perform the song ″Cupid″ (2023) at a press conference in Seoul as a group in April 2023. [NEWS1]

“For smaller companies that inevitably have less capital to work with, the only way to succeed may be to avoid competing with the mainstream and find that one thing that others haven’t done,” Lee said.

“For instance, Fifty Fifty was initially planned to debut with a powerful, girl crush concept like (G)I-DLE. But we knew that we couldn’t compete with [Cube Entertainment's] power so we changed it midway. A song-making process is entirely different for a smaller agency from a larger company, so it’s important for smaller players to study the market and try something new.”

Studying the market will come down to reading the data on the market, according to Luminate’s Kosinski.

Luminate is a U.S.-based global data company that gathers music and entertainment data from over 200 major platforms around the world, including Korea’s Melon as well as YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify. It is well-known for providing its data as metrics for Billboard’s charting methodology.

Helena Kosinski, the vice president global of U.S. data company Luminate, in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on Sept. 24 [KOCCA]

According to Kosinski, K-pop’s growth is neither sudden nor sporadic. In fact, the industry has been growing slowly and steadily thanks to the “K-pop superfans” who are more actively engaged than those of any other genres in the world.

“We have been seeing the growth of K-pop overall as a genre,” she said. “Yes, there are big artists that have shown big success, but we’ve been seeing overall growth in K-pop. Of the top 100 K-pop artists globally, we saw 42 percent of growth in streaming year on year in 2023 compared to 2022. The overall average of streaming growth [during the same period] was in the teens.”

The development of streaming platforms and short-from videos has significantly led this growth, according to Kosinski. She cited Luminate’s midyear report that revealed that K-pop and J-pop consumers are 59 percent more likely to not only consume content, but also create their own short-form videos on various platforms compared to listeners of other genres.

“We see a higher proportion of superfans when it comes to K-pop,” Kosinski said. “Those fans engage more with other fans around the world and the artists directly. K-pop and J-pop listeners are younger than the average of U.S. listeners and they are clearly more likely to be engaged to music online.”

The annual MU:CON music and entertainment fair held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in central Seoul on Sept. 24 [KOCCA]

“Our data is not just used to value musical catalogues but also to understand marketing effectiveness, to discover new music and find out lots of data-driven approaches to all the areas that a company may use in the industry,” she added, emphasizing that K-pop companies should readily utilize data to find out their potential market base.

The annual music industry get-together wrapped up its four-day run on Friday in Seoul with professionals from diverse fields of music, local creators and 53 teams of performers from the domestic music scene.

Guest performers included singers Nell, BewhY and Kino from Pentagon on the first day and girl group tripleS, Peppertones and Eve on the second day. International artists — Taiwanese girl group Genblue, Thai singer Ally and Thai band Rocketman — also took the stage.

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]