I Have No Choice But to Stan: Manufacturing Desire Within the Affective Economy of K-Pop

Intro

Who has more power –– the fan, the idol, or the company? K-Pop idols work for their audience by performing on stage and off, but the audience also performs a service to the idol by maintaining a fanbase, boosting album sales and streaming numbers. Do the idol and fan labor for each other? And how does the company fit into that exchange by extracting value from both? The K-Pop industry operates through producing and satisfying desire, but who really has their hands on the reins? The nature of fandom is such that the joy of being a fan is always entangled with the possibility of exploitation. To quote Tiziana Terranova, 

The digital economy is an important area of experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labor. It is about specific forms of production (Web design, multimedia production, digital services, and so on), but is also about forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters, and so on. These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion; that is, they have not developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of capital. However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect. (Terranova [1]) 

Fans, idols, and the companies managing them all operate within a complex economy in which monetary value is created out of knowledge, culture, and affect. To begin to trace the blurry lines of desire, production, and exploitation within the K-Pop industry, we have to ask ourselves what exactly it is that K-Pop produces and who ultimately benefits.

Fan Labor

“If one trajectory locates fan work as generating surplus value that is ultimately extracted and exploited by industry, a second would focus on the proliferation of value generated by fans for fans. Fandom runs on fan labor, and this work produces enjoyment, collectivity, and various material and immaterial goods that give fandom shape as a practice, community, or culture. Calling attention to this action as labor stakes an important claim to that production precisely as a production of value.” (Stanfill and Condis, Fandom and/as labor [2])

From the perspective of the fan, the decision to invest labor and money into their fandom isn’t consciously predicated on the idea of ‘generating value’. It’s more so predicated on emotional catharsis. Fans feel grateful to idols for entertaining them and bringing them joy. There’s a level of love — but not just love, a yearning — and not just yearning, a devotion — that builds up and can only be released by, say, contributing to album sales. It becomes more than a transaction, to know that you are contributing a small but concrete amount to your fave, to have a physical artifact filled with reproductions of images of them. 

Or by writing fanfiction — to fully realize and polish your fantasy, to make explicit the little aspects of an idol’s (perceived) psyche that fans pick up on through intense study of their content/media appearances, to share those fantasies with fellow comrades who just get it the same way that you do.

Or by making fan edits — providing a more perfect and packaged consumption experience of the idol, to provide analysis through collation, a vehicle for potential evangelization, a service for the benefit of your fellow fans, your sisters-in-arms.

The thing about fan labor is that it’s fueled by a near-infinite amount of devotion. There’s an element of transcendence and spirituality to being a fan. The feelings of love are resilient and potentiating, like an undying engine. Unfortunately, that also makes it extremely hard to tell when fan labor is being exploited. Comparing material and immaterial value quickly gets confusing. Fan labor is done willingly and ‘for free.’ But the idol for whom they perform this labor gains concrete monetary value from, for example, being able to reach Anglophone audiences from a fan translator’s free subtitles of their YouTube content. It’s just that fannish satisfaction is hard to correlate with specific monetary value. 

There’s a sense of hyperbole to the way I describe fandom, but it’s warranted. K-Pop fandom is so intense because psychoanalyzing the interpersonal dynamics of a K-Pop group is like reading an infinitely interesting and complex text that unfolds in real-time. The group dynamics make K-Pop fandom much more interesting than Western celebrity culture, which is more often focused on a singular figure / parasocial relationship. It’s reminiscent of the American phenomena of the ‘hype house’ or ‘content house’, which was an attempt at utilizing that same potential of group dynamics to boost fandom engagement and combine audiences. Although the particular economic formalization of the hype house has since failed and withered away, its former success points to the value of collaboration between individual content creators. Audiences crave interactions between different characters in a particular parasocial sphere because relationships and interactions are what enable intimate glimpses into the perceived ‘world’ that their favorite characters/celebrities live in. A celebrity in a vacuum is boring. 

Parallels can also be drawn to Western boy-band fan culture (which basically died with the dissolution of One Direction), but the difference is that the K-Pop industry has a much more reciprocal relationship with the fans. The actions and activities of fandom are, to a certain extent, both expected and rewarded by the production apparatus behind an idol group through acts of fan service. A K-Pop idol’s public persona is carefully crafted by the idol and their company, but the company is also shaped by fan desires, and will shape the idol’s image in accordance with what they think the fans want. 

This arrangement is usually understood by fans. Many fans actively speculate on industry trends and promotional strategies, the details of idol contracts, and other bits of shoptalk. However, peeling back the curtain does not simply make idol personas feel “fake” or “manufactured”. In fact, the knowledge that an idol’s actions are typically semi-scripted just makes perceived moments of authenticity that much more valuable to the fanbase. As a fan, there’s a romanticism to the idea that you can see through the media training and glean the idol’s actual personality. This is so true, in fact, that manufacturing authenticity, relatability, and a carefully constructed sense of candidness has become a marketing strategy du jour in Korea. Here I might point to the ‘girl next door’ concept with which NewJeans debuted, the popularity of gen-Z icon Lee Young Ji, and the fact that the newest girl group from HYBE, ILL’IT’s debut album is literally titled  ‘SUPER REAL ME’. ILL’IT is one of many groups formed through idol competition/survival shows, a genre highly effective at generating an audience and cultivating parasocial attachments to idols before a group even debuts. It’s also interesting to note that this emphasis on authenticity has come to rise in Korea on the tail end of authenticity discourse regarding celebrity influencer culture in the West, as epitomized by, say, the hyper-relatable tone of Emma Chamberlain’s peak vlogging days, or even earlier by Jennifer Lawrence’s quirky, down-to-earth, ‘bruh girl’ persona. 

Fans produce labor for the sake of the idol, not the company behind the idol, but obviously the idol and the company are economically codependent. The company produces the idol to generate value. But to think about it another way, the company also produces the K-Pop fanbase itself as an asset that can be bought and sold. The fanbase and the idol work in tandem, as a system, to generate value for the company. The goal of the company is to turn the idol into the perfect interface between entertainment and commerce, and to translate captured audiences into spending power as smoothly as possible. The idol facilitates the commodification of K-Pop audiences, which can then be sold to advertisers simply by lending idols to brands for brand partnerships and ambassadorships. This recalls Dallas Smythe’s 1981 argument that “television audiences are produced and sold as commodities to advertisers.” (Brown [3]) This commodification is especially valuable to advertisers because Korea is quickly becoming the most important luxury market in Asia, and is a reliable barometer of how brands will fare elsewhere in the region. This also speaks to the soft cultural power that Korea has been able to amass through the K-Pop industry. 

However, the fervor of the fanbase often exceeds the expectations and control of the company, transforming the attitudes and demands of the audience into a powerful force that the idol and company have to reckon with, and at times are even subservient to. As Meicheng Sun writes in their case study of GOT7 Chinese fandom,

“K-Pop fan laborers do not resist consumerism; instead, as consumers or as co-producers, who subscribe to consumerism, fan labor arises when the official corporate narratives inadequately address the desires and expectations of consumers” (Sun [4])

For example, if the official merch is ugly, then we’ll make our own merch. If we want idols to interact with each other more, then we’ll construct our own scenarios and write fanfiction. If the music videos and stage performances leave us wanting more, then we’ll create our own fan edits. If the company is doing a bad job at promoting the idol, then we’ll promote them ourselves, boost streaming numbers, and artificially inflate album sales. If the company does not translate its content or provide subtitles, then we’ll translate it for international fans who don’t speak Korean.

In other words, the idol and the company cannot create enough media and content to keep up with the desires and demands of the fandom, and thus the fandom must create its own content, as well as provide the community infrastructure and organization necessary to sustain and grow the fanbase. Fan activity and community building happen on a wide variety of different platforms and forums, including Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok, Tumblr, Discord, and AO3, to name a few. The community-building aspect of fandoms doesn’t directly lead to more profit for the company, so companies try to capture this by creating their own platforms like Weverse, which has exclusive content and livestreams, and lets fans directly interact with idols. However, platforms like Weverse are ultimately meant to capture surplus value through paywalled content and are not primarily community platforms. ‘Exclusive’ Weverse content inevitably makes its way to other platforms, through screenshots, fan-translated rips of livestreams, and other forms of piracy. The task of archiving idol content and making it accessible to non-paying fans is a noble one. Even though there exists a moral imperative amongst fans to financially support their idols, they will still make exclusive content available via piracy, because it’s even more righteous to ensure that fans without means have equal access to the content. A fandom is a self-sustaining and self-generating entity. The fact that a fandom’s activity indirectly generates more value for the company is merely a side-effect. 

But the productive initiative that fans take on is not immune to instrumentalization. On the contrary, it leaves the fanbase more vulnerable to manipulation and breadcrumbing. For example, in the context of queerbaiting, companies know the extremes to which fans obsess over small moments of intimacy between members, so it becomes part of the marketing strategy to bait audiences with tender moments that just so happen to be caught by the camera. However, these juicy interactions are never made explicitly queer in any way. I’m not saying that these tender moments are entirely fake, or that idols just pretend to like each other on camera, but it is a type of performance regardless of its proximity to reality that is absolutely capitalized upon by the company. Any development of the fan economy is eventually a net-positive for companies, and for companies to continue to rely on fan labor to generate value, it actually becomes imperative to maintain the gap between official media and fan desire.

The Content Creator Model of the Idol

Idols are a financial investment for their company. This may seem like a dehumanizing statement, but at the end of the day, the idol’s job is to generate the highest return on investment for the company as possible. The model of the ‘idol’ is currently in an era of optimization. This is reflected in the trend of greater focus on singles, and the release of shorter EP’s (as opposed to full length albums) in order to trigger more frequent promotional cycles.

While this trend is global (as indicated by the torrent of think-pieces on the ‘death of the album’ in the era of streaming), in K-Pop it’s more apparent because K-Pop is a much more visual medium than the Western music genres. To the K-Pop industry, there is less reason to invest resources in writing and recording b-sides / deeper album tracks that won’t generate as much streaming revenue and won’t get their own music video, photo shoot, art direction, choreography, TikTok dance challenges, etc. It makes much more sense to produce, for example, 3-5 songs, space out the release of each one as a single, and then to release the collection as an album with a fully realized, beautifully art-directed, physical artifact (with multiple collectible versions, of course). By shortening the promotional cycle, the idol group can constantly stay relevant, and the company can generate revenue more frequently because they can charge the same amount of money for a physical album with 4 tracks versus 12.

With this shift towards shorter comebacks, it’s almost as if the purpose of each song being promoted is to be a ‘seed’ for a whole host of other, ‘secondary’ content. Each promotion cycle is an opportunity for idols to go on variety/YouTube shows, create viral TikTok dance challenges, release photoshoots, and have magazine appearances. In fact, many K-Pop groups now produce their own weekly YouTube shows, which means that they can keep fans constantly engaged, whether or not they are currently in a single/album promotion cycle. Not to mention, having your own variety show means getting additional ad revenue and product placement opportunities (called PPL in Korea). Here, I feel beholden to mention BTS’s show, ‘Run BTS’, which started in 2015 on V-Live/Weverse, and has updated pretty consistently until the end of 2022, when Jin enlisted for his mandatory military service. All episodes have since been made available on YouTube. While BTS wasn’t the first group to have their own self-produced variety show, they were one of the first to demonstrate that online/social-media based content was much more effective at keeping fanbases engaged than network TV appearances. They stopped appearing on TV variety shows entirely around 2018.

Before the proliferation of online content, K-Pop groups would go on TV variety shows so that the audience could get to know them more personally. It was a means to an end: to sell more records. But now the idol’s model of production takes more cues from the success of vloggers, content creators, and influencers. Online content is an end in itself that is just as important, if not more important, than the music. In the Seventeen fandom, for example, while “Carats” is the general name for the fandom, “Cubics” (as in cubic zirconia) is a well established term for people who are fans of their YouTube variety show ‘Going Seventeen’, but aren’t necessarily fans of their music.

These shifts are well-suited to the desires of fans. Above all, fans want to deeply know their idols. It’s become increasingly obvious that the primary ‘text’ that fans are consuming is the idol’s persona itself. The music is merely one part of the persona.  Fans are adept at closely reading the slightest gesture or look from their idols. When one enters stan-hood, a transformation occurs where the most banal content from idols becomes deeply important and rich with subtext. Understanding that subtext is crucial to writing good fanfiction and to creating other fan-made content like fan-edits. 

One of the reasons I became so invested in K-Pop was by watching (impressively long) compilations of funny moments from certain idols, or moments where their personality shines through, or tender and intimate moments between members of a K-Pop group. The more I got sucked in, the more I wanted to know who these idols were in their hearts. These moments all came from more casual online content like social media posts, clips from variety shows, behind-the scenes content, and (especially) livestreams. Official releases and performances are important, like watching your favorite child in a talent show, but they’re not the bulk of a fan’s interaction with an idol. The dance practice video has become just as important as the stage performance video. The performance of the idol-as-human has become just as important as the performance of the idol-as-idol. Affective labor is now the primary work of the idol.

Idol Subjecthood and Affective Labor

The goal of the affective labor of idols is to motivate fan labor that can then be captured and extracted by industry. An idol’s affective labor produces desire within a fanbase, which is then translated into the sale of physical goods, like the actual albums, official merch, and concert tickets. In fact, one could say that these physical points-of-purchase are merely channels for financial support — like a donation box at a shrine. The actual content of the media is not judged on aesthetic merit or terms that are separated from the idol’s wider persona. Even when an album’s design is perceived as ugly by fans, they’ll still buy it and just complain about it online. And while I dont think the album will ever be phased out as a profit channel (to some extent, K-Pop will always be rooted in the music), in recent years, there is more and more emphasis on subscription-based models that give fans access not to new music or performance videos, but to livestreams, social media posts, and other forms of affective labor that create the illusion of direct access to the thoughts and feelings of the idols (e.g. Weverse, or NewJeans’s own app, ‘Phoning’). The K-Pop industry also has a much more formalized system for direct contact between fan and idol, through elaborate fan meetings, fansigns, and fan calls. 

I recently watched Seventeen’s new reality show ‘Nana Tour with Seventeen,’ in which Seventeen gets ’kidnapped’ by producer Na Yeong-seok (who has become a celebrity in his own right) to go on vacation in Italy for a week. It’s framed as a genuine moment of rest and relaxation for them, but at the same time, cameras are trained on them 24/7. 

As a fan of Seventeen, watching Nana Tour was great. It was great to see the members have fun, have new experiences, hang out with each other, and have deeper, more emotional conversations that we as fans aren’t normally privy too. But, while I’m sure they had a good time, I couldn’t help but be aware of a certain air of ‘professionalism’. Even while relaxing and sightseeing, they were still performing, and still had to be ‘on’ all the time. There are small moments peppered throughout the show that reveal how hyper-aware they are of the cameras and of the pressure to produce ‘good content’ by performing authenticity. They still had to entertain, just not in a flashy mode of the stage. An oft-repeated line by Seventeen is, ‘we’re singers, why do we want to be funny so bad?’ (in fact, it was revealed that they got comedy lessons as part of their training, which makes me wonder how prevalent such training is throughout the industry).

Any moment in front of a camera is an opportunity for a clip to go viral, to get incorporated into fan edits, or to otherwise circulate. Even when an idol is an audience member at a concert or an awards show, there will always be a camera pointed at them to farm reaction shots. The marketing of an idol is dependent on their constant surveillance. 

To once again use Seventeen as an example, starting around 2012, three years before they debuted, Pledis (their management company) would livestream their training room in a very ‘Big Brother’ kind of way. This is fondly referred to as the infamous, chaotic, ‘Melona room’ or ‘Melona prison’, so-called because the walls of the training room were painted a harsh, ugly, green-screen color. There were 4 different cameras put up around the room, and viewers could switch to whichever camera they wanted. Like the contemporary idol survival show, the idea was to drum up excitement and to pre-form parasocial relationships before debut. And while the financial benefits of this setup are unclear (Pledis was a struggling company back in the day), clips from the Melona room still circulate to this day, cherry-picked to highlight certain relationships or certain aspects of the members’ personalities. They’re still an important part of the Seventeen mythology and visual economy. 

K-Pop idols are subjected to these kinds of intense surveillance in order to maintain and nurture their fans’ parasocial bonds to them, which are truly the nervous system of the K-Pop industry. The more that fans believe they intimately ‘know’ their idols, the more they can be counted on to be a consistent stream of revenue for the idol/company. But the flip-side of this is that idols are under intense scrutiny from their fanbase. Deeply ‘knowing’ idols leads to the mindset that idols ‘owe’ fans certain behaviors, especially when something happens that disjoints the intimately crafted perception fans have of their idols. Idols are constantly getting into ‘scandals’ that seem innocuous from afar, especially from a Western perspective, for things like smoking cigarettes, vaping, dating, being a middle school bully, or other things that contradict an idol’s pristine, benign, and neutered image. There’s an elevated and untouchable quality to the image of the idol, especially in the psyche of a certain type of fan, and seeing the idol partake in earthly activities like smoking or dating causes an inexcusable rift. Adherence to this level of fantasy is only held by a vocal minority of the fanbase, but it’s in the company’s best interest to maintain that fantasy to avoid any alienation of the fanbase whatsoever, and to make the idol as marketable as possible to the widest demographic of fans. 

One recent example of this is Seunghan from RIIZE, a new boy group under SM Entertainment. Seunghan was the subject of a ‘scandal’ in November of 2023, after photos and videos were released of him smoking cigarettes and kissing an ex-girlfriend pre-debut. The details around who leaked these photos and why are kind of muddy, but the fandom speculated the leaker to be someone who had a personal grudge against him and wanted to either blackmail him or sabotage his new career (Seunghan only officially debuted with RIIZE in September 2023, a mere two months before the ‘scandal’). SM’s response was to pursue legal action against the leaker, but they also immediately suspended Seunghan from the group for an indefinite amount of time. At the time of writing, there are rumors of him coming back, but nothing has been officially confirmed. Since Seunghan’s hiatus, there have been multiple other ‘scandals’ or defamatory attempts against the other members RIIZE, which leads some fans to speculate that this is a deliberate takedown of RIIZE, perhaps by a jealous trainee who never got to debut. While I can’t speak to the validity of that speculation, it illustrates just how precarious an idol’s career can be. Idols train for years, often in grueling conditions like long hours and restrictive diets, and are subject to exploitative contracts, extremely long working hours and debt to their company, but it can all come crashing down so fast from so little. K-Pop companies are so risk-averse that they will cower to the demands of the loudest fans. A lot of fans agree that Seunghan’s forced hiatus was a huge overreaction by SM, but SM is so scared of losing fanbase support that they will over-correct even the slightest perceived transgression. Above all else, they need to protect the market value of their remaining assets. 

Seunghan is feeling severely apologetic and is reflecting on himself for causing disappointment and commotion to not only the team and members but also to fans due to issues regarding his personal life that are being leaked and circulated recently via social media and online communities.

Seunghan feels mental pressure and responsibility regarding this, so after deep contemplation, he relayed his intention to halt activities for the team.

We also judged that it is too difficult for him to continue activities through this situation, and respecting his opinion of no longer wanting to cause harm to the team and members, we decided on the indefinite suspension of his activities.

Therefore, RIIZE will promote with six members excluding Seunghan starting today (November 22).

It is an abrupt situation, but we ask for the generous understanding of fans as it is a matter that was decided through careful discussion with the artist himself, and we are feeling great responsibility for being inattentive about artist management although it was before his debut. We once again deeply apologize to fans.

However, the videos and photos that are being leaked and circulated were taken in his personal time during his trainee days before his debut, and they were reproduced several times to cause misunderstandings through deliberate secondary editing such as taking screenshots of a video of which the source can be specified.

In addition, the individuals who are leaking and circulating these videos and photos are even using malicious means of creating groundless false information and messenger conversations that do not exist, continuing acts of severe defamation toward the artist by spreading fabricated and distorted information that is different from the truth.

We began monitoring immediately after recognizing the above situation, and we specified who was behind the unauthorized leaks and circulation after collecting a significant amount of evidence. We plan on filing a legal complaint this afternoon at the local police station.

In addition, we are considering additional legal action against the specified individual not only for defaming the artist through unauthorized leaks and circulation but also for various illegal acts such as cybercrimes and threats.

For the sake of the artist and team as well as the fans who love the team, the agency will not only file legal complaints but also respond strongly without any settlement or leniency to all forms of secondary harm such as generating as well as circulating and reproducing additional posts about thoughtless rumors regarding the artist.

We will continue to do our best for the protection of our agency’s artists.

Thank you.

– SM Entertainment

This incident suggests that the affective labor of maintaining a pristine and marketable image must start even before the idol becomes an idol. Not only must idols not do things that are illegal or morally wrong, but they must also refrain from doing things that are even subjectively questionable or simply unappealing to the most vocal part of the fanbase. It also reveals how much companies both exploit and are beholden to their audience. And in the middle of it all is the image of the idol, pushed and pulled by both company and fan, subject to scrutiny and ‘owing’ and ‘knowing’. But perhaps an idol can never be truly known because they are mediated by a feedback loop of fan expectations and layers and layers of PR. It’s no wonder that many idols are self-proclaimed ‘homebodies’, who say they prefer to spend their free time at home away from the intensity of the public eye. But maybe the presentation of being a homebody is also a claim to relatability and authenticity, another building block in the constant performance of the idol.

Outro

The figure of the idol is a persona and a tool created and maintained by the company to mediate fan desire in order to maximize capital. But regardless of these machinations, it would be wrong to imply a sort of false consciousness, or to suggest that fans are simply a coerced and captured audience via an idol’s affective performance. Because K-Pop fans are highly invested in the success of their favorite idols, they often pay attention to the movements of the industry itself, not just the idol. The highly mobilized and motivated nature of K-Pop fandoms is both its strength and its weakness. It’s why fan labor produces so much surplus value that is taken advantage of by the industry, but it’s also why K-Pop fans are able to make their demands and desires known to the industry, thus actively shaping it. 

The idol, too, generates surplus value through the production of affect — any time the idol is in public produces an opportunity for the consumption of their image. Fan and Idol engage in a system of entangled transactions in which desire and affect are the main currencies. It’s a complex media environment in which I always feel somewhat unclear where my own agency in the intensity of my feelings lie. Did I choose to stan? Or was I drawn in? But perhaps the fact of the intensity is more important than where it comes from, and it’s more of a question about what we do with it. 

These fannish feelings are powerful and have material consequences. As fandom energy becomes a force that more people are reckoning with within the mainstream (for example, I truly believe that ‘fandom’ has become the most salient framework to view national electoral politics), and as more and more forces try to exploit the infinite engine of fandom, we must never forget that although this desire might have been manufactured, it still belongs to us. Even as I think more critically about K-Pop, I never forget the jouissance of watching my bias performing on stage, or acting cute, or just being themselves.

Works Cited

[1] Tiziana Terranova; Free Labor: PRODUCING CULTURE FOR THE DIGITAL ECONOMY. Social Text 1 June 2000; 18 (2 (63)): 33–58. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-2_63-33 [https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/18/2%20(63)/33/33433/Free-LaborPRODUCING-CULTURE-FOR-THE-DIGITAL?redirectedFrom=fulltext]

[2] Stanfill, Mel, and Megan Condis. 2014. “Fandom and/as Labor” [editorial]. In “Fandom and/as Labor,” edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0593[https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/593/421]

[3] Brown, Stephanie Anne. 2014. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, edited by Trebor Scholz [book review]. In “Fandom and/as Labor,” edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0551. [https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/551/412]

[4] Sun, M. (2020). K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans. Global Media and China, 5(4), 389-406. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436420954588 [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2059436420954588]