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A few weeks ago, at breakfast time, Operation Triunfo contestants were talking about K-Pop , and the main conclusion the kids came to was that it was a "Chinese" thing that worked "like robots." In other words, future Spanish pop products were applied in derogatory treatment of the biggest and most profitable products of world pop stars today.

Beyond the lack of self-criticism and anecdote - as well as the superficial knowledge that the triumphs transmitted, which even confused South Korea with its northern neighbors -, what that discussion told us was that, after many years living in the margins, the Korean pop had completely and unreservedly reached the general public. First he conquered all of Asia, then swept the United States , and it is already a phenomenon of fans also in Spain.

The main band of the scene, BTS, today publishes its new album, Map of the soul: 7 , and begins a huge world tour that includes its first two performances in Spain: July 17 and 18 in Barcelona, in the Olympic Stadium - which allows a capacity of up to 50,000 people -. Something like this has not happened since the heyday of the last successful boy band , One Direction, to which this team of seven handsome and disciplined boys trained in Seoul has taken the title of great sensation for teenagers in the global marketplace.

Indeed, BTS is a product skillfully designed in a laboratory, designed to meet a very broad layer of music and entertainment demand: there is not much, in essence, that distinguishes them from Backstreet Boys , for example. But what changes in an absolute way is the scale: since its formation in 2013, and especially since its commercial emergence from 2015, the Korean septet has reached a dimension that exceeds that of any other similar figure both individually - With numbers in hand, just enjoy comparable success Taylor Swift - as a collective. Among the groups by and for fans, they are only approached by their female equivalent in South Korea, Blackpink . Of course, we do not speak exclusively of the Korean market, but of the global one.

BTS, for example, are the celebrity most talked about on all of Twitter - while Blackpink is the female pop group with the most followers on Instagram worldwide - according to figures from a few months ago. When the dates of the European tour of BTS were confirmed yesterday, they immediately reached all the top positions of the trending-topic classification, and also with an added factor, which is the recent drought with which they had tortured their fans. It was known that BTS would return to activity in 2020 after a few months of stoppage - a decision that was justified in part by the fatigue of Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V and Jungkook, the artistic names of the seven components of the boy band , but that surely hid a marketing strategy skillfully orchestrated to trigger the sales of records and tickets-, which now culminates with the launch of Map of the soul: 7 .

The previous album, Map of the soul: persona (2019), was number one sales in the United States, Japan and Britain. After the great opening gap in world pop that PSY left with its (parodic) song Gangnam Style , the K-Pop has not ceased to conquer land in every imaginable country. It is, surely, the most representative event that has happened in the pop of consumption in the global era: for the first time, the publishing and collecting domain is not in the Anglo-Saxon world, but in some office buildings in Seoul. Big Hit Entertainment, the company that launched BTS, is the third most important in South Korea in the pop business - its global turnover amounts to more than 200 million dollars a year - and is above American factories such as Def Jam or Sony Music Latin. The largest record label in the world is the great Korean mastodon, SM Entertainment : a single company in Seoul bills more than Interscope, Warner and RCA, separately, worldwide.

The secret of BTS is in two skillfully modeled features. On the one hand, his image - perhaps the appearance of the seven boys does not respond to the canon of Western beauty, but in Asia they are the equivalent, conveniently combed and assorted of Botox , to Michelangelo's David -, and on the other the music in yes, a thoughtful balance of all the popular pop genres embedded gracefully in explosive songs, which have a bit of rap, a bit of EDM, another bit of ballad , accurate melodies and lustrous productions.

There is an added element: the global marketing plan of Big Hit Entertainment considered it important that the group collaborate with several R&B stars and dance music in the United States, such as Nicki Minaj or The Chainsmokers. Those featurings opened the doors of the American public and conditioned their rise in sales from 2017. The rest was a mixture of exotic novelty, euphoric material, perfectly executed choreographies and explosive videos . Like any boy band , BTS has its safe expiration date at the time when youth wilt and a more seductive competition emerges. But now, in the middle of 2020, the world of pop is yours.

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  • South Korea
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