Eamonn Forde Meets… – each month, the veteran music business journalist speaks to a senior industry figure about the topics that really matter – and gets the opinions of the people who make the decisions that count.
October 2024: Mary Megan Peer, CEO of Peermusic. K-pop ’n’ roll: the US and the UK provided the lingua franca of popular music for the entire twentieth century. They controlled the global music industry as they exported most of the songs and the stars. The market dominance they came to expect is slowly dropping away. South Korea offers a foreshadowing of how the pop world is going to become inherently more international.
Peer discusses why long-term investment in markets like South Korea were essential for anyone hoping to link themselves to K-pop, but you cannot show up now and expect to waltz into the party. Western music’s dominance in popular music and the popular music business are soon to become crumbling institutions of the past.
The music industry map is being redrawn like never before, with China and South Korea increasing steadily in power and with multiple Latin American and African nations becoming consumption hotbeds and export powerhouses in a way that was unimaginable two decades ago. Except… if you were alert to the early tremors, you would have begun building in these markets to prepare for the slow dampening of the Anglo-American centre of gravity that defined popular music in the twentieth century.
“These are not new markets for Peermusic,” says Mary Megan Peer, the company’s CEO. “We’ve been in all of them for a while, but they are showing incredible growth.” She fires out numbers to qualify this: the company’s global net publisher’s share (NPS) has more than doubled in the past decade; its Latin region NPS has more than tripled; its Asian region NTS has more than quintupled; combined, Asia and Latin America now make up 25% of Peermusic’s NPS.
She says that 10 years ago, the company was “getting very little digital income” in China, but opening a mainland China office in 2016 is helping to make up “a significant part” of their total earnings. A change in the law in 2022 saw the government in China break apart an old monopoly that forced labels and publishers to do exclusive deals with one DSP, Tencent Music Entertainment, who would then sub-license their music to other DSPs.
“That has led to real growth and income, but, of course, also a growth in the amount of time that we spend on contracts, because we essentially do five times as many contracts as we used to do,” she says. “Having a team on the ground is important and it has led to a huge increase in revenue.”
Peermusic’s foothold in South Korea came from its acquisition of local independent publisher Music Cube in 2016, boosting its copyrights in the country, mostly K-pop, by 40,000 titles.
She also explains how important physical is in the market, driven bchiy the completist nature of K-pop fans, by saying 10% of the company’s global income is from non-digital mechanicals, but in South Korea it is 37%. “That just shows the importance of the physical market,” she says. “The fandom culture is really important there.”
She adds that Peermusic has been sending writers (primarily Swedish, but increasingly from the US) to work with South Korean writers, anticipating the country soon joining the rare likes of the UK, the US and Sweden as exporting more music than they import. The global axis tilts again.
South Korean hits are of the moment
Unlike Western catalogues, however, she cautions that South Korean hits are inherently of the moment and are often inextricably linked to the recording artists who made them. “There is not the same concept of evergreens [in South Korea],” she says.
“If the group breaks up, it isn’t going to have that level [of cultural endurance] that some of these other songs have,” she says, referring to the blockbuster multiples that have recently been paid for huge Western catalogues like those of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen.
This inherently redefines the window of exploitation around certain tracks coming out of South Korea. “It’s still early days in the market, but I do think the performers are such a crucial piece of most of the songs,” argues Peer. “It is important that they continue to perform those songs for them to maintain their value.”
“Now, you’re listening to a song and you’re not sure if it’s K-pop or not”
Writers hoping to get on board with K-pop can still get an in, but companies themselves may have missed that boat several years ago, especially with the dominance of a handful of local multifunctional behemoths (notably SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, HYBE and Kakao Entertainment). But those writers may have something of a rude awakening in terms of what they contribute and how rights are carved up.
“For folks who want to write internationally – the writers, composers, producers – they really have to be willing to put in some time to study the local market and [understand] what is being asked for, because it’s often different from what they’re seeing in their own territory,” says Peer. “It’s a little harder in the K-pop and J-pop markets [to operate], because most of our writers from abroad do not speak Korean or Japanese. And in those markets, you really have to be prepared to give away a local lyricist share and just expect that as part of the process. How big that share is varies by market.”
She adds, “Most of the time when Western writers are writing for those markets, they put in ‘throwaway’ lyrics in English, and then those are usually changed, even though they may keep a couple of key reference words in English.”
Asian pop is rearranging the architecture of songwriting
Apart from new ways to share writer royalties, Asian pop is rearranging the very architecture of songwriting. In his 2015 book The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory, John Seabrook explored how mushrooming writing teams, complex subdivisions of labour (one writer for the chorus, one for the verse, one for the middle eight, one for the topline etc.), a new attention economy and the harsh demands of streaming algorithms were remoulding song construction in real time. K-pop has become a hyper extension of that. Writers and publishers need to process and adapt to this.
“Particularly with K-pop and J-pop, there’s a structure to those songs that is more strictly adhered to than a lot of Western songs,” suggests Peer. “We’re seeing that become part of the rubric of songs that I am sure will happen to everyone at some point. Now you’re listening to a song and you’re not sure if it’s K-pop or not, right? Five years ago, that would have been almost impossible. Some of the song structures are kicking back into the Western genre.”
The aesthetics and the economics of pop songs have been dramatically changed in the past two decades, as has the epicentre of the business. Music and the music business will be increasingly international and hybrid, with South Korea offering our clearest portal yet into the future.
