From Policy to Pop: Navigating South Korean Cultural Policies and Their Impact on Korean Popular Music

Abstract: This paper aims to demonstrate how the nature of the South Korean government’s involvement in popular music has changed from repressive power to productive power, in addition to explaining how this transition affects the industry and why the government’s intervention is crucial to grasping the current state of the global phenomenon of Korean popular music (K-pop). This paper explores how the government’s cultural organ, the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), influences global audiences’ understanding of K-pop and Korean culture by supporting various types of musicians in global markets, on the one hand, and how KOCCA has also overseen regulatory programs concerned with the cultural industries on the other hand. This paper argues that the government’s approach to the cultural industries is ambivalent, which highlights why its cultural policy cannot be understood based on the binary perspectives, such as “state versus market.”