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K-Pop

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BLACKPINK is the revolution! The girl group wrapped up its second weekend headlining Coachella by sending BLINKs a heartfelt message of thanks on social media on Tuesday (April 25).

“Still feels surreal that we did this! Thank you @coachella for having us!” the foursome wrote in a series of Instagram Stories showing off their high-octane stage in the California desert. “And to all BLINKs out there, we could’ve never done this without you guys. We are forever grateful. Thank you again for these unforgettable two weeks and hope to see you all again!”

During both Saturday night headlining slots, Jennie, Lisa, Jisoo and Rosé ran through their entire catalog — from early hits such as “Whistle” and “Forever Young” to recent fan favorite smashes including “Pink Venom,” “Shut Down” and “Pink Venom.” Each set also included solo moments for each member, including Jennie’s as-yet-unreleased track “You & Me,” a medley of Rosé’s “On the Ground” and “Gone,” the explicit, unreleased version of Lisa’s “Money” and Jisoo’s brand new solo debut “Flower.”

Jisoo also took to her Instagram feed to share a celebratory selfie with her bandmates, writing, “@blackpinkofficial in your area” with the requisite black and pink heart emojis. In a follow-up post, the ME singer showed off more behind-the-scenes footage from the weekend, captioning the slideshow, “enjoyed pinkchella season to the mostest.” (Lisa also posted her own carousel while Rosé and Jennie have yet to share photos from the second weekend.)

Next, BLACKPINK is set to embark on an encore of their sold-out Born Pink World Tour, starting with a show at Mexico City’s Foro Sol on Wednesday (April 26). The North American leg of the encore begins later this summer with stops in New Jersey, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Check out BLACKPINK’s Stories about Coachella here and scroll through Jisoo and Lisa’s Pinkchella memories below.

Taeyang‘s highly anticipated second EP has finally arrived. The BIGBANG singer released his newest project, [Down to Earth], on Tuesday (April 25), and it features two superstar collaborations with Lisa from BLACKPINK and Jimin of BTS.
“This album comes from various emotions and inspirations that I felt underneath my skin as I gazed at the sunset,” the K-pop star shared in a press release. “The sunset, which decorates a day’s end, welcomes the dark night and not a new morning. Just like the sunset, my world is colored with beautiful memories of the past, but what came back to me was the ceaseless night that followed. Thus, I began to realize that the image of myself over the past six years was not much different than the sunset.”

He continued, “In a way, I was deeply touched and felt relief by the silent sunset and how it greets the night, fulfilling its role in the most beautiful way possible. The repetitive and burdensome times that I could not overcome alone guided me ‘back to the drawing board’. Thus, this album allowed me to capture my heart that was ready to jump back up into a fresh new start.”

Jimin featured on the album’s first single, “VIBE,” which hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s World Digital Song Sales in January. New to fans is Taeyang’s collaboration with Lisa, the hip-hop and R&B heavy track “Shoong!” The song debuted alongside a sizzling performance video, in which the duo hit intricate choreography moves, and are supported by backup dancers.

“You keep my engine on purr, you could never get swerved/ How you move ’round the curves make me, ooh/ You got that thing that I want, know your love hit the spot/ And you never should stop, baby, shoong,” Lisa raps on her sultry verse for the track.

The album also includes tracks “Seed,” “Reason,” “Inspiration (featuring Beenzino)” and “Nightfall (feat. Bryan Chase).”

Watch the music video for “Shoong!” above, and stream [Down to Earth] below.

With breakout single “Cupid” fluttering up sales charts on both sides of the Atlantic, FIFTY FIFTY forms a partnership with Warner Records — a deal that should boost the hit and others.
The K-pop girl is very much on the rise, thanks to the streaming power of “Cupid,” with its original recording, a “Twin” mix and an instrumental cut amassing a combined 377 million-plus streams across all platforms.

It’s on TikTok where “Cupid” gets a lot of love. The song has generated over 8 million TikTok videos and views on the platform are climbing towards 12 billion, and the #CupidChallenge has been added to tens of millions of clips.

“Cupid” has made the crossover into mainstream, all-genres charts. The track debuted on the Hot 100 a few weeks back and it’s now up to No. 60. Meanwhile, in the U.K., the single cracked the top 40 on the latest chart, published April 14, at No. 34. Also, the tune has entered the top 10 on the Global Excl. U.S. chart, lifting 22-9 on the latest tally.

Comprising Aran, Keena, Saena and Sio, FIFTY FIFTY was formed last year by South Korean entertainment agency ATTRAKT.

Now, through the new alliance with Warner Records/Warner Music Group Korea, FIFTY FIFTY is “poised for worldwide superstardom,” gushes a joint statement issued today (April 20).

“We are grateful to Warner Records for the opportunity to discuss innovative ways to bring FIFTY FIFTY to the forefront of the music industry,” comments Sung-il Ahn, CEO of The Givers and co-CEO of ATTRAKT. “We are thrilled to find that our thoughts and visions align with an artist-centered approach, and we are eager to explore potential avenues for success together.”

Adds Tom Corson, co-chairman and COO, and Aaron Bay-Schuck, co-chairman and CEO, Warner Records: “We are thrilled to partner with FIFTY FIFTY to amplify their global smash single ‘Cupid’ and we know there is much more to come.” The Warner Records’ team, they continue, “is excited to create additional opportunities for this powerhouse K-pop girl group.”

The group debuted its first single, “Higher,” on its introductory four-track EP, The Fifty, released Nov. 18, 2022. There’s more music on the way, insist the rising foursome.

“We are so honored to be working with Warner Records, and we are excited to see what the future holds for us,” reads a statement from the band. “We are looking forward to bringing more great music and content to our fans around the world. Thank you for your continued support and love.”

SEVENTEEN introduced fans to a new era with the release of their mini-album FML on Monday (April 24). The project marks the most pre-ordered album in K-pop history with more than 4.64 million pre-orders, according to a release.

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Six tracks appear on FML: “F*ck My Life,” “Super,” “Fire,” “I Don’t Understand But I Luv U,” “Dust” and “April Shower.” Each song gives a new aspect of the 13-member band that their fanbase, affectionately called CARAT, can enjoy.

With the mini-album officially released, we at Billboard want to know which track you’ve been loving the most. Let us know by voting in our poll below.

SEVENTEEN unveiled their brand new mini-album FML on Monday (April 24), and to celebrate, the 13-member group sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe to talk about the inspiration behind some of the project’s songs.

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“‘Super’ is the track makes you cheer up when you want to do fighting and it is a charming song with the grand sound,” Seungkwan shared, with S. Coups adding, “During listening to the all the tracks in this album, we hope to feel that SEVENTEEN and [fanbase] CARATs are one team.”

As for what they have planned for the rest of the year, Seungkwan kept it coy. “It would be hard to say exactly what is the plan for the rest of this year but we will present great performances to CARATs,” he shared.

Listen to the full interview here.

Six tracks appear on FML: “F*ck My Life,” “Super,” “Fire,” “I Don’t Understand But I Luv U,” “Dust” and “April Shower.” FML arrives via PLEDIS Entertainment almost nine months after SEVENTEEN’s most recent full-length project, SECTOR 17, which earned the act a career high on the Billboard 200 by peaking at No. 4. 

FML is the most pre-ordered album in K-pop history with 4.64+ million pre-orders, a press release for the new album says.

May is gearing up to be a busy month for ENHYPEN‘s Engenes, as the K-pop stars announced both the title and release date for its forthcoming mini album on Monday (April 24).

The group — which consists of Heeseung, Jay, Jake, Sunghoon, Sunoo, Jungwon and Ni-ki — shared via Weverse at midnight that their fourth mini album, DARK BLOOD, is scheduled to arrive on May 22. Accompanying the announcement was a moody and enigmatic logo trailer, which features classical string instrumentation as well as black and white imagery of text, drops of liquid and more before unveiling the album’s title.

Fans were also treated to a calendar of events pertaining to the album’s release. Concept trailers, films, photos and mood boards will arrive between May 1 and May 10. DARK BLOOD‘s tracklist and its respective title poster will arrive on May 17, with an album preview to follow on May 18. The video teasers for the yet-to-be titled lead single precede the album’s release on May 19 and May 21, with the album and full music video releasing one day later. ENHYPEN will also perform a special showcase for DARK BLOOD on May 22.

ENHYPEN’s previous mini album, Manifesto: Day 1, marked the group’s first No. 1 effort on the Billboard charts. The set crowned Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart dated Aug. 27 in its third week on the chart, following its No. 3 debut.

Watch the album trailer for DARK BLOOD in the video above, and see the schedule of events for the album below.

On April 3, Billboard broke the news that Jimin’s track “Like Crazy” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a first for a solo Korean artist — while his album, FACE, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Released by Big Hit Music, one of the labels under Korean entertainment company HYBE, “Like Crazy” currently marks the best performance by a member of K-pop supergroup BTS, whose hiatus announcement last year presented a significant challenge to HYBE’s ability to forge another chart success in the United States. “Like Crazy” reached only No. 11 in South Korea, although FACE topped album charts in South Korea and Japan.

Investors took note of Jimin’s U.S. accomplishments. The following day, HYBE’s share price on Korea Exchange rose as much as 11.4% to 212,500 won ($161) before ending the day at 205,000 won ($155), up 7.5% from the previous day (as of April 17, it had risen 40%). That was the highest closing price since June 10 of last year — three trading days before BTS confirmed it would take a hiatus, worrying investors and sending HYBE’s share price down 28% in a single day. For a company with grand ambitions to build off of the success of BTS, “Like Crazy” was an important validation.

The music industry should take note, too. HYBE did with Jimin what all South Korean music companies are attempting with increasing urgency: ride the wave of K-pop’s global success by expanding outside of Korea and build up operations in the United States, the world’s largest music market. “All the shareholders want to see the ability for them to diversify [their] portfolios,” says Sung Cho, CEO of Chartmetric and newly appointed board member of the pioneering K-pop agency SM Entertainment.

Exporting is what South Korea does best. “After the Korean War, the only way to survive was to export things,” says Cho. Over the last three decades, the success of companies such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai has turned the country of 52 million into a top 10 exporter, according to the World Bank. But in recent years, South Korea has become known not just for its exports of high-tech products and manufactured goods, but as a global entertainment dynamo as well. South Korea’s music business built its economic success into a trade surplus of about $3.1 billion for intellectual property of music and images in 2021, up from $800 million in 2020, according to the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. The South Korean film Parasite won a 2020 Academy Award for best picture. A year later, Squid Game became the most watched series in Netflix history, a worldwide phenomenon that racked up 1.7 billion viewing hours in its first month.

South Korean music companies have become international powerhouses by drawing on hip-hop, R&B and pop music and selling the K-pop blend of these genres back to fervent fans in the United States, Japan and Europe. But to compete globally with larger companies, the South Korea approach to the music business, and not necessarily the music itself, could be the deciding factor. “We’re seeing not only the export of K-pop bands — the boy bands, the girl bands — we’re starting to see the export of the K-pop business model,” says Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based artist and label services agency. SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man coined the term “cultural technology” in the ’90s for his system of producing K-pop and promoting it worldwide. Other K-pop companies have adopted a similarly disciplined, systematic approach to finding, developing and promoting musicians.

The widespread music-business anxiety about the death of artist development doesn’t apply to South Korea. Western labels fight bidding wars over viral artists with instantaneous popularity or favor proven artists and catalogs, leaving the task of building an audience to artists themselves or independent labels. In contrast, K-pop companies spend years recruiting and rehearsing talent, as well as giving artists instruction in a specific approach to the music business. “Combing through social media platforms like TikTok may give us a chance to sign artists who are technically proficient as music producers or performers, but we demand more from our artists,” says HYBE CEO Jiwon Park in an email to Billboard. That means trainees work with HYBE’s training and development department to “internalize the values of autonomy and responsibility” so they can navigate the expectations put on them.

To learn the U.S. market, South Korean companies have partnered with U.S. labels to distribute, market and promote their music. HYBE has a joint venture with Universal Music Group’s Geffen Records to create a U.S.-based girl pop group. JYP Entertainment has teamed with UMG’s Republic Records to form the global girl group America2Korea, or A2K. Additionally, Kakao Entertainment’s Starship Entertainment subsidiary has partnered with Sony Music Group’s Columbia Records to co-manage marketing and promotion of the six-member female group IVE in North America.

These U.S.-Korean partnerships have also given domestic labels a chance to learn the K-pop method of A&R. To Glenn Mendlinger, president of Imperial Music, a new division of Republic Records, the JYP partnership has provided insight into “what it is to build a fandom and foster it through immersive packaging and increasing the collectability of the products.” Mendlinger is impressed with JYP’s attention to detail and ability to build storylines for their artists. “That’s why they’re so successful,” he says in an email to Billboard. “The level of care is unparalleled and unrivaled in terms of its intimacy and diligence.”

But more and more, South Korean companies have boots on the ground and control of their destinies in the United States. HYBE is the furthest along in building out its stateside operations. In 2021, it acquired Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings for $1.05 billion and named Braun the CEO of HYBE America, a genre-spanning collection of artist management and record labels that includes SB Projects, Nashville-based Big Machine Label Group and Atlanta hip-hop company Quality Control, which was acquired in February for $300 million. Those deals are “just the beginning,” HYBE chairman Bang Si-hyuk said in a speech in March. He believes building in the United States will give HYBE the “strong network and infrastructure” it needs to “minimize the cost of trial and error” and attain stronger bargaining power and distribution rates relative to local companies.

SM Entertainment, the company behind such groups as NCT 127 and aespa, and Kakao Entertainment have created a U.S. joint venture and plan to acquire a U.S.-based company to expand into hip-hop or R&B, according to SM’s road map made available to investors. Kakao now owns a 40% stake in SM Entertainment, having quelled HYBE’s attempt to buy a commanding stake and control its board of directors following a break with SM founder Lee.

South Korean music companies’ do-it-yourself nature extends to tech platforms, too. While most labels depend on the likes of Meta, Twitter and Fortnite to reach fans, HYBE owns its own social network, Weverse, and JYP and SM have a joint venture with tech company Naver called Beyond LIVE that streams live online concerts. SM also owns a social networking app, Bubble, and its artists will begin building fan communities at HYBE’s Weverse in September. It makes sense in one of the world’s most wired and wireless countries, says Cho of DFSB Kollective. In Korea, “youth culture, pop culture and digital culture are one and the same in many ways.”

For HYBE, Weverse not only diversifies its business but allows it to control how its artists communicate with their fans. With the addition of artists from North America and Japan, Weverse “will serve as a gateway to the fandom market in Asia, North America and the world,” says Park. With enhancements and new services, “Weverse will seek boundless expansion beyond K-pop.”

This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.

SEVENTEEN‘s new mini-album FML is here. The K-pop boy band released the new set on April 24.

Six tracks appear on FML: “F*ck My Life,” “Super,” “Fire,” “I Don’t Understand But I Luv U,” “Dust” and “April Shower.” The project arrives via PLEDIS Entertainment.

FML arrives almost nine months after SEVENTEEN’s most recent full-length project, SECTOR 17, which earned the act a career high on the Billboard 200 by peaking at No. 4. 

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The group previously posted teasers and shared a trailer for FML titled “F*ck My Life: Life in a Minute” on April 13. All 13 members were featured in the clip, which had a narrator asking, “How do you define the world that surrounds you? In the middle of this f—ing world. You’re not allowed to feel happy. But you deserve to be happy. So fight. Fight for your life.”

SEVENTEEN recently stopped by to play a game with Billboard News, revealing the most unexpected places they’ve run into one of their fans, known as CARATs. Joshua recounted meeting a fan in Disneyland, which he was enjoying with his parents, and at an Apple Store; Hoshi said, “I met a CARAT on the Ferris wheel in Seattle,” and Mingyu stated that he “actually run[s] into them quite often.”

Stream SEVENTEEN’s FML below.

Agust D aka Suga‘s D-Day has topped this week’s new music poll.

Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (April 21) on Billboard, choosing the BTS member’s latest project as their favorite new music release of the past week.

D-Day brought in more than 49% of the vote, beating out new music from Grupo Frontera and Bad Bunny, The Weeknd and Future and more.

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The 10-track album released via Big Hit Music is Suga’s first solo full-length, which was led by the single “People Pt.2” featuring IU.

Upon dropping the lead single earlier this month, Sugar told Billboard he was “actually a little bit worried” about the return to his solo moniker. “‘People Pt.2’ was made thinking about how people will receive Agust D’s music, which is why we also featured [his former collaborator] IU. It’s kind of a trial to release this music under the name Agust D,” he said.

Trailing behind D-Day on the poll is Grupo Frontera and Bad Bunny’s “un x100to,” with 21% of the vote, and The Weeknd and Future’s “Double Fantasy,” with 17%.

See the final results of this week’s poll below.

Suga of BTS unveiled his debut solo album D-DAY on Friday (April 21), and no one was more excited for the studio set’s arrival than Halsey.

The If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power singer used their social media to shout out the BTS rapper’s full-length debut, sharing single “Haegeum” in an Instagram Story and writing, “Lessss goooooo @agustd ALBUM IS OUT!!!”

The song is a popular choice from Suga’s first full album under his Agust D moniker — in fact, it hit the top spot on the Hot Trending Songs chart earlier this month by dethroning Tyler, the Creator’s two-week reign with Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale deluxe lead-off “Dogtooth.” In the very same tally dated April 22, Suga commanded the No. 3 slot with “AMYGDALA,” as well as three more spots lower down the chart after the reveal of the album’s 10-song track list.

Meanwhile, Halsey has been both a longtime pal and ardent fan of Suga and the rest of his BTS bandmates. Back in 2019, she became one of the first American pop stars to collaborate with the K-pop boy band, being featured on their Map of the Soul: Persona single “Boy With Luv.”

At the time, the team-up earned the septet their highest entry on the Billboard Hot 100 up to that point by rocketing to No. 8. Of course, since then, they’ve racked up five No. 1 hits with “Dynamite,” “Life Goes On,” “Butter,” “Permission to Dance” and Coldplay collab “My Universe.”

Check out Halsey’s sweet support of Suga here before the Story expires.