Gangnam Style came out a year ago today. I still remember exactly where I was the first time I heard (and saw) Gangnam Style. It was at my desk, in front of a computer. Not very exciting, I know. But it was probably a pretty common way to experience it--on the computer. A decade ago, that wouldn't have been true. Songs and videos spread the old fashioned way, on radio and TV. Today's different, and it means that something completely unlikely--like a portly K-Pop star--can hit in never before imagined ways.
I also remember where I was the first time I shared Gangnam Style--which is the video's other inherent action. I was in my car, talking about it. My passenger hadn't seen it, so I pulled over to the side of the road, and we watched it on my phone. From there it was a short skip to parodies, photoshops, and your uncool aunt doing the Gangnam dance in the Marriott ballroom during your newphew's Bar Mitzvah. In other words, in the span of a few months, it totally ate culture.
This isn't just anecdotal conjecture. YouTube released some interesting numbers on its anniversary. Gangnam was the first video to cross one billion-with-a-b views (take that, Bieber.) It's creeping up on 2 billion now, at 1.7.
It had a massive effect on the rise of K-Pop as well, YouTube data suggests that K-Pop videos have tripled their viewership rates, and in another shift, are being watched primarily outside of the Asia-Pacific region. 91 percent of K-Pop views last year took place outside of Korea. Psy's followup video, Gentleman, has nearly a half billion views itself. K-Pop vodeos racked up some 7 billion total views in the past year (up from 2.2 billion the previous year). K-Pop is a certifiable global trend.
It used to be that it took some sort of gatekeeper to make this happen. A band like Nirvana would get signed to a major label, pushed hard in heavy rotation on radio and MTV, and if it worked, all sorts of similar acts would follow suit through the same pipeline. And then the great marketing beast would move on to some other scene and devour it as well.
But K-Pop was different. K-Pop grew because we clicked like and share and posted it to Facebook and played it on our phones for our friends. K-Pop grew because we followed user generated playlists trying to find more things like Gangnam Style. K-Pop grew because we wanted it to.
Psy isn't the first YouTube star (and its worth noting he was massive in his home country before Americans discovered him) but he's emblematic of how completely things have changed. And while sure, there's some marketing weasel in Los Angeles right now trying to figure out how to emulate Psy's success, the future of music distribution is you. That future has been a long time coming. But one look at Gangnam's numbers, and it's massively evident that it is here.
