Virtual bands, emerging stars to fuel global K-pop craze

Virtual bands have emerged as new stars to accelerate the K-pop craze across the world. An artificial girl quartet attracted more than 25 million viewers on YouTube with a single music video, while another cyber female group enjoyed more than 1 million streams in only 11 hours.

The popularity caused not only South Korean music labels but also game developers to rush to introduce virtual idols for new growth, expanding the cyber artist market.

Mave: has lured more than 25 million viewers on YouTube with the music video of its hit "Pandora" within seven months of its release. Previously it was only possible for top K-pop artists such as Blackpink to see this level of viewer numbers in such a short period.

“The virtual idol market has been growing so quickly that 80% of viewers of Mave:’s song were from other countries,” said an entertainment industry source in Seoul.

The group of four virtual girls was launched in January by Kakao Entertainment Corp. and Metaverse Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Netmarble F&C Inc., which is a unit of a mobile game developer Netmarble Corp.

They used Unreal Engine, a real-time 3D creation tool mostly used for game production, to develop the appearance of the artists while applying artificial intelligence-based voice synthesis technology for their voices.

ISEGYE IDOL, PLAVE

Mave: is not the only virtual band with a large fandom.

Isegye Idol, a six-member artificial girl group, exceeded 1 million combined streams with its third single "Kidding" within 11 hours on a local music streaming service.

In March, a cyber five-boy band Plave created by Vlast, a virtual intellectual property (IP) startup, made its debut. YG Plus Inc., a subsidiary of YG Entertainment Inc., handles the distribution of the group’s content.

SM Entertainment Co., the K-pop pioneer, plans to introduce virtual female artist Naevis in the first half of next year.

Artificial music bands are expected to be successful as their appearances and voices are similar to those of real people, industry sources said. Virtual humans have been increasing their influence in other sectors such as advertising, commerce and education.

The first virtual human in South Korea was Adam, a cyber singer created by computer graphics in 1998. Adam enjoyed some popularity, selling more than 200,000 albums, but could not maintain his fame due to inferior technology at the time.

KAKAO AIMS TO USE IP FOR WEBTOON, WEB NOVELS, GAMES

Kakao Entertainment is actively expanding the virtual idol business. The unit of South Korea’s mobile platform giant Kakao Corp. in May unveiled Feverse, a band of virtual avatars of five real female singers whose identities have been concealed.

The company held a survival contest show Girl’s Re:verse to choose the secret members from 30 artists from January to March.

Kakao Entertainment aims to supply the content of the virtual idol to webtoons, web novels, games and other services.

“We plan to diversify content distribution channels by utilizing the existing platforms such as Kakao Page and Kakao Webtoon,” a company official. “Entertainment agencies with plans for virtual idols would also like to expand the content market.”

Kakao Entertainment introduced digital comics featuring Feverse and Mave: in February, as well as Isegye Idol in June.

Write to Ju-Hyun Lee at deep@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.