K-pop Is Not a Fad, It’s Industrial Policy

South Korea built in three decades an export machine for culture generating several tens of billions of dollars. In 2023, its cultural exports represented several billion dollars — a remarkable performance, even though Korean shipyards alone exported $21.8 billion USD that year, with steel adding to that. This is not a market accident. It is the result of a state strategy built over thirty years, documented, budgeted, piloted by performance indicators.

The 2025 Global Hallyu Trend Analysis Report — published by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) and the Korea Culture and Information Service (KOCIS) — has just delivered the most complete assessment to date. It documents the scale of the phenomenon, its mechanisms, and what data on foreign tourists citing K-pop or K-dramas as a determining factor in their visits says about the power of soft power constructed like you would construct an industrial sector.

The Essentials

  • South Korean cultural exports represented several billion dollars in 2023, according to available data.
  • K-pop physical album sales actually declined 9% in 2025 on the domestic market, contrary to some optimistic analyses — even though artists such as SEVENTEEN or Stray Kids maintain considerable album sales volumes.
  • According to the Korea Tourism Organization, 32.1% of foreign tourists in South Korea cited K-content as their primary motivation for visiting in 2023, a proportion that rose to 41.8% in Q1 2024 — a structuring figure for tourism and economic diplomacy policies.
  • The model relies on precise institutional architecture: dedicated ministry, specialized agencies, multi-year budgets, exported indicators. Not on spontaneous talent alone.
  • The question the report raises implicitly: why haven’t countries with comparable cultural assets produced an equivalent?

A State Report on the Cultural Industry

KOCCA is not a private think tank. It is a public body placed under the authority of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST). The annual analysis of Hallyu trends is published by the MCST and the Korea Culture and Information Service (KOCIS) — the Korean term designating the “Korean wave” in its entirety: music, television series, cinema, video games, cosmetics, gastronomy. The 2025 report covers data from 2023-2024 and presents a mapping of markets, financial flows, and perceptions in about fifty countries.

What this says first and foremost is the nature of the project. A state that equips itself with national agencies to annually measure the impact of its cultural production abroad is not a state that lets culture “happen.” It is a state that treats culture as an export sector, with corresponding management instruments. The 2025 report is, in this logic, less an academic document than an industrial dashboard.

How You Manufacture a Wave

The history of Hallyu begins in the rubble. The 1997 Asian financial crisis collapsed the won and forced the Kim Dae-jung government to rebuild. One of the most singular decisions of this period is the following: faced with the destruction of entire sections of the traditional economy, South Korea chose to bet on its cultural industries. It created in 1999 the Basic Law on Cultural Industries Promotion. It allocated a specific budget. It trained executives. It built infrastructure.

This is not cultural policy in the European sense — protective, subsidizing, preserving heritage. It is export-oriented industrial policy. The distinction is fundamental. The objective is not to produce culture for Koreans. It is to produce culture for the world, using the tools you would employ to develop any export industry: market studies, sector structuring, training, certification, international promotion.

The result, thirty years later: BTS sold 50 million albums in five years. Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” won the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Picture. “Squid Game” became the most-watched series in Netflix history. These successes are not isolated strokes of luck. They are part of a structured sector that trains artists in talent agencies operating as intensive excellence academies, that controls its distribution chains, and that has learned to read foreign markets with a precision that few cultural industries can claim.

What the 2025 Figures Reveal

The 2025 report confirms an overall upward trajectory, but it also documents important nuances. On the side of immediate tensions: K-pop physical album sales actually declined 9% in 2025 on the domestic market. This signal contrasts with the solidity of figures for certain flagship artists — SEVENTEEN exceeding 5.5 million albums sold, Stray Kids approaching 3.4 million — and reminds us that the overall health of a segment cannot be read solely in the performances of its leading acts. The economic model of physical media, based on multiple editions, collector boxes, and “photocard” albums transforming the cultural object into an artifact of parasocial relationship, remains a real innovation — but its growth is no longer linear.

Data from the Korea Tourism Organization perhaps constitute the most political figures in the report: 32.1% of foreign tourists cited K-content as their primary motivation for visiting in 2023, a proportion that rose to 41.8% in Q1 2024. These figures quantify what economists call the “spillover” effect of culture: the overflow effect of a cultural image on an entire country’s economy. Tourism, cosmetics, gastronomy, electronics: all benefit from the aura built by K-pop and K-dramas. Samsung doesn’t sell better in Southeast Asia solely because its products are competitive. It sells better because South Korea has become a desirable country.

On the side of structural tensions: the report notes signals of saturation on certain mature markets — Western Europe and the American East Coast notably. The talent agency model, criticized for its training conditions that resemble restrictive contractual regimes, receives increasing attention. The question of the sustainability of the model for the artists themselves is not absent from the document, even if it is treated cautiously there.

The Model That Was Not Copied

This is where the report becomes most intellectually stimulating. South Korea does not have a monopoly on culture. France has one of the world’s richest cinematographic productions, popular music that dominated Francophone markets for decades, gastronomy listed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. Nigeria produces afrobeats, which has conquered global charts for ten years, and has a cinematographic industry — Nollywood — that is second in the world by volume. Brazil has samba, carnival, MPB, João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, then funk carioca and forró.

None of these countries built the equivalent of the Korean system. The question is why.

A beginning of an answer is institutional. France treats its culture as a heritage to protect rather than as a sector to develop. Its cultural exception system, born to resist American hegemony, has produced a defensive posture. Quotas and subsidies have made it possible to maintain national production — but not to structure an export strategy. The Centre national du cinéma has real resources, but its instruments are designed for domestic production, not for conquering foreign markets.

Nigeria, conversely, lacks institutions. Nollywood exploded spontaneously, driven by private entrepreneurs distributing DVDs at low cost in underserved African markets. Growth was real, but without coordinated public strategy, without intellectual property protection policy, without support for exports beyond the continent. Afrobeats owes more to British labels and American platforms than to Nigerian policy.

The Korean case is different precisely because it articulates public intervention and private dynamism. The state created market conditions — training financing, intellectual property protection, international promotion — without substituting itself for companies. Talent agencies such as HYBE, SM Entertainment, or YG Entertainment are private actors that grew in an ecosystem structured by public power. This is what the article published here on the Korean model stuck between the United States and China documented on the industrial side: Korea excels at building private champions within public frameworks.

What the Report Doesn’t Say Clearly

The 2025 report is an official document. Its blind spots are predictable. It does not seriously discuss the human cost of the “idol” system — those artists recruited in adolescence, subjected to years of intensive training under conditions that several journalistic investigations have documented as close to contractual coercion. Dropout rates are high. Psychological pressure is real. Top-tier artists have spoken publicly about burnout and severe anxiety.

This point does not invalidate the economic model — it reveals its hidden cost. An industrial policy that produces export champions by externalizing its costs onto the bodies and psychologies of young adults is not entirely transferable as is. It is a real limitation that the report touches on without naming it.

It also does not discuss the question of sustainability in the face of generative AI. The K-pop model relies on an aesthetic of reproducible perfection — precisely calibrated choreography, standardized sound production, codified visuals. These are precisely the domains that generative AI is beginning to be able to reproduce at nearly zero marginal cost. The question of whether the model holds in a world where barriers to mass cultural production collapse is open, and the report does not answer it.

Why Read This Report

The 2025 Global Hallyu Trend Analysis Report is a working document more than an essay. Its value is not literary. It is in the data — and in what those data make visible when read with the right questions.

The real reading of this report is that of a decision-maker wondering why certain countries transform their culture into power and others do not. As the article When Imaginaries Travel Without a Passport showed, global cultural circulation is not a spontaneous phenomenon: it responds to institutional architectures, to investments, to political choices. South Korea is the most documented demonstration of this in the early twenty-first century.

For specialists in cultural policy, creative economy, soft power, or economic development, it is indispensable. For a reader curious about the mechanisms of Korean success beyond fan narratives, it offers the numerical backbone that cultural journalists generally omit.

The question it raises without formulating it is this: if culture is an industry, who makes its industrial policy? And if no one does — is that a choice, or an unexamined assumption?

Bibliographic Information

Title: 2025 Global Hallyu Trend Analysis Report Organization: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) and Korea Culture and Information Service (KOCIS), Republic of Korea Date of publication: 2025 Type: Annual public report Access: Free, available via the MCST official website

Sources

  1. Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), Global Hallyu Trend Analysis Report 2025 — via Outlook India Respawn
  2. KOCCA — Official website (supervising ministry) — https://www.kocca.kr/en/main.do
  3. MCST — 2025 Global Hallyu Trend Analysis Report — https://www.starnewskorea.com/en/pop-culture/2026/02/25/2026022508135794268
  4. Statista / KOFICE — Hallyu Exports 2023 — https://www.statista.com/statistics/1366179/south-korea-hallyu-exports-value/
  5. Statista / Statistics Korea — Shipbuilding Exports 2023 — https://www.statista.com/statistics/1079057/south-korea-shipbuilding-industry-export-value/
  6. Korea Times / KTO — Tourists Motivated by K-content — https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/travel-food/20260226/how-k-pop-fans-are-reshaping-korean-tourism
  7. Wikipedia — Parasite (film) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(2019_film)
  8. Variety / Netflix — Squid Game record — https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/squid-game-all-time-most-popular-show-netflix-1235113196/
  9. Goldman Sachs — Asian Crisis 1997 — https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/1997-asia-financial-crisis
  10. WIPO Lex — Framework Act on Promotion of Cultural Industries 1999 — https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/legislation/details/16960
  11. Wikipedia — Korea Creative Content Agency — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_Creative_Content_Agency