Idols and Repertoire: The Moral-Aesthetics of Precise Production in the K-Pop Industry

Over the past decade, K-pop has flourished as a transnational cultural form: between 2014 and 2023, industry revenue tripled, and groups like BTS and BLACKPINK achieved global prominence, cultivating vast international fan communities. At the same time, South Korea has emerged as a key site for global creative labor, attracting foreign songwriters, choreographers, and producers, while countries including China, Japan, and the Philippines increasingly adopt the K-pop model for their own music industries. Yet the explosive growth of K-pop has not allayed widespread anxieties rooted in intergenerational inequality, a hypercompetitive labor market, and one of the world’s lowest birth rates. Set against this boom in cultural exports, K-pop occupies a paradoxical position within this prevailing pessimism. On one hand, K-pop serves as an aspirational symbol of hope for more equitable futures, but on the other hand, it is increasingly associated with the darker facets of modern Korean society, including lookism, hyper-competition, consumerism, and the exploitation of young artists.

This dissertation explores South Korea’s economic, technological, and affective investments in building a global K-pop (Korean popular music) industry amid widespread public pessimism about the nation’s socioeconomic future. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul from 2023 to 2025, I trace the industrial production and circulation of K-pop across three interconnected domains: (1) emerging private academies (hagwon) that train Korean fans for professional roles in the industry; (2) a transnational network of creative professionals contracted to work in Seoul; and (3) everyday urban spaces such as gyms, cafés, and shops where K-pop media are embedded in the rhythms of daily life. Building on insights from linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and anthropology of media, I examine how affect and attention are coordinated and scaled across both digital and in-person environments to invest the idol’s persona with a ritualistic power that shapes the formation of new publics.

This dissertation challenges accounts that reduce K-pop to Fordist production, media fetishism, and fandom. Instead, I argue that K-pop’s production methods are animated by a work ethic rooted in an unstable nationalism. At the core of K-pop is what I term the precision ethic: a Confucian-inflected normative orientation that compels idols, A&Rs, and fans to create and value media that is “clean,” “sharp,” and “fat-free.” Within this framework, the K-pop idol emerges as an aspirational worker-citizen who continually refines their technical capabilities amid persistent socioeconomic precarity. Beginning with the tightly choreographed movements that idols are expected to effortlessly perform across mediatized performances, I trace how this discipline reverberates throughout K-pop’s production system. As K-pop’s production principles gain traction across Asia and beyond, I demonstrate how the industry supplies a fantasy of agency by providing a channel to sublimate neoliberal anxieties into an aesthetics of self-actualization.