"K-pop was never about the music" is the laziest argument against it

It's a damaging, reductionist take that assumes the West gets to decide whose music should be considered art. And the reasons people keep making it is worse.

Former LOONA, current ARTMS member Jinsoul. Courtesy of Modhaus.

Nobody says this about Motown. Nobody looks at the Holland-Dozier-Holland production line, its deliberate commercial formulas, the hit-factory infrastructure of 1960s Detroit, and concludes that because the music was industrially produced it cannot be taken seriously as music. Nobody says it about the Brill Building or about any of the other commercial production systems that eventually birthed some of the most emotionally resonant popular music of the past century. So why do people keep saying it about Korean pop?

I’ve been reviewing K-pop for outlets like NME and Teen Vogue for years now. I’ve critiqued music from acts like aespa, NCT and BABYMONSTER to CL, Lee Chan-hyuk and Key with the same critical lens I’d apply to any other genre of music, simply because that’s what the work asks for. One of the most consistent pushbacks I’ve encountered – from readers, fans, and sometimes even editors – has been a version of the same sentiment; that K-pop is not “real” music.

When you take a moment to sit with it, you’ll find that it’s less about the music itself and more about where it originates from. The Western media empire has a long and well-documented history of treating non-Western popular culture as either an exotic novelty or a disposable fad. It’s only allowed to be consumed with mild curiosity then dismissed with mild condescension, never something to be respected as a site of genuine artistic expression. K-pop comes to Western media already pre-categorised: a teenage phenomenon, a stan culture curiosity, a foreign product. The implicit question underneath most mainstream Western conversation about K-pop is not “what is this music doing and why do people resonate with it”, as it tends to be for genres like rock and punk. The argument that K-pop was never about the music is a disguise cultural condescension wears when it wants to pass for industrial insight. The fact that I’ve encountered this position in editorial conversations that would never think to apply this particular form of prejudice to Olivia Rodrigo songs or Oasis records is, to me, indicative of where the hierarchy really lives: in the assumption that these institutions get to pick and choose whose music counts as art.

The label of “K-pop” itself accounts for part of the problem. “K-pop” is doing double duty as both an industrial descriptor and sonic genre, and the label gets applied very inconsistently across fan and critical spaces. Day6’s live-band rock, aespa’s maximalist art pop and Stray Kids’ production-heavy sound are all filed under the same heading solely because they all originate from the same industry in the same country. This categorical imprecision is the direct result of what happens when institutions haven’t cared about K-pop enough to apply the appropriate vocabulary to acknowledge its diversity. This imprecision is not neutral at all: a label carelessly slapped on without meaningful distinction is a label applied without genuine listening, and a dismissals built on that label is hardly about the music at all.

What the argument actually claims

The argument that K-pop was never about the music tends to travel without the corresponding qualifications. In practice, it usually arrives just as a singular assertion that explains itself, but the compression of the argument is part of what makes it so difficult to push back against. That simple sentence continues to survive partly because it’s vague enough to mean different things to different people. When I really look into it and pull it apart, I see three separate claims, only one of which is true.

Scene from Popstar Academy, a Netflix documentary chronicling the training programme behind KATSEYE and Dream Academy. Courtesy of Netflix.

The first claim – the most defensible and the one worth taking seriously – is structural: that the K-pop industry was specifically designed to produce idols rather than music, and that the music exists primarily in service of that larger product. This is largely accurate as a statement of industrial intent. The trainee system, the concept-first development process, the way sonic identity is often designated rather than organically developed. All of these are indisputable features of how the K-pop industry operates, and acknowledging them is more of a description than a criticism. That said, a description of what a system was designed to produce is not a statement about what it actually produces, or about the value of what it produces. The Honda Civic was designed to be affordable and reliable rather than beautiful, and it can still be beautiful.

The second claim is aesthetic: that K-pop music is generically produced, formulaic and interchangeable, and that criticising any particular release for these qualities misses the point because those qualities are mere features of the system rather than failures of legitimate execution. Now the argument begins to collapse under its own weight. It’s often false as a description – the dissonance between a Red Velvet arrangement, an aespa production and a Hearts2Hearts track is not a matter of minor variation, but of entirely different artistic endeavours – and it’s certainly false as a critical position. Formulaic production is a real problem in any tradition, perhaps even a common symptom of consumerism, but pointing at the formula as justification for the formula doesn’t really say much.

aespa’s ‘Dirty Work’ and Red Velvet’s ‘Cosmic’ concepts. Courtesy of SM Entertainment.

The more defensible version of this claim operates at the level of individual releases rather than across groups – that within any given discography, the interchangeability argument has more traction. But this is true of nearly every commercially produced popular music tradition, including the ones tastemakers do legitimise. Not every Motown single was essential, nor did every Brill Building song endure. The formula has historically produced both extraordinary and forgettable results, and critical frameworks exist precisely to tell them apart. There should be no reason why it shouldn’t apply here.

The third claim is the most ambitious and also the most confused: that because K-pop is a commercial product, it cannot be evaluated using the same critical frameworks applied to other music. This conflates production context with aesthetic outcome in a way that doesn’t outlast even a cursory look back at the history of popular music – a history this essay will get to shortly. For now, the important thing is to separate it from the structural claim, because they’re often treated as the same argument despite doing entirely different work. A description of the industry is not the same as a verdict on what criticism is allowed to say about it – and conflating them lets the latter do significant argumentative work without having to justify itself.

What all three claims share, beneath their varying levels of defensibility, is a common function: they remove the music from the conversation before the conversation is able to even find its feet. The argument pre-empts the act of taking it seriously. What’s specifically pre-empted is the question this essay most wants to ask: what is the music actually doing, and what happens when it stops?

The idol package loses it heart without music

If you strip the music from a K-pop group, what you will be left with is more or less a mood board. The visuals, concept, mythology, personality archetypes, narrative arcs across eras – all of these exist in the registers of image and language. It can be seen and described. What it cannot do, without the music, is be felt. The music is what transforms a concept from something you observe into something you inhabit. The difference between those two things is also the difference between a product and an experience – which is, uncoincidentally, the difference between something that generates passive consumption and something that creates the kind of devotion the K-pop industry runs on.

LOONA for pre-debut single, ‘favOrite’. Courtesy of Blockberry Creative.

Consider what LOONA’s music was doing before LOONA even properly existed as a group. The pre-debut project – one member revealed per month across three years, each with her own solo single and accompanying short film – is sometimes discussed as a form of marketing architecture, or a serialised reveal strategy designed to build anticipation. Neither of those statements are wrong, but they don’t account for the genuine conceptual labour the music was doing. Chuu’s ‘Heart Attack’ and its specific quality of innocent infatuation, the way the production expresses the overwhelming flurry of emotion without letting it go even a step overboard. Choerry’s ‘Love Cherry Motion’ and its almost-disorienting lightness that makes her character in the group’s overarching lore feel emotionally inhabited rather than merely assigned. The music was the actual mechanism by which a listener came to understand who each member was and where she stood in the larger world that’s being constructed. The concept without the music are just flat pictures on a screen – the music is what anchored it and evolved it into a universe.

‘Hi-High’, the group’s debut as a complete twelve-member act, demonstrates this same point from the other direction. Everything that the pre-debut project had built – the emotional geography, the sense that these twelve particular girls are the beating heart of something much bigger than any individual concept – had to land neatly with LOONA’s debut song. ‘Hi-High’ was considered a huge success in doing so, because the production understood the legacy it was inheriting. The specific warmth of the arrangement and the structural choice to make the song feel more like an arrival than an introduction are not incidental decisions, even if they seem unassuming. They are evidence of the music doing the work of unification that no amount of visual identity or group lore could have pulled off single-handedly.

The commercial case for the music’s centrality in fan experience is also the hardest to dismiss because it can be made entirely in commercial terms. The economic engine of K-pop fandoms – subscriptions, album purchasing patterns, concert attendance, merchandise cycles – can’t be sustained by visual identity or group mythology alone. It’s created first and foremost by the specific experience of a specific song at a specific moment in a listener’s life. Orbits didn’t build the kind of attachment that sustained LOONA through four years of company instability, mass member exodus and a disbandment through a visual identity or piece of lore alone. It was built through what it felt like to encounter this music at a particular point in time – the explicit production decisions, lyric choices and soundscapes that accumulated across thirty-odd pre-debut singles into a movement unlike anything else in the genre. It’s certainly not something you can replicate en masse or manufacture with generic production or substitute with stronger branding. The commercial ecosystem is downstream of the emotional ecosystem, and the emotional ecosystem is built through the music.

The third dimension of this argument gets the least attention, possibly because it’s the hardest to account for within the “music was never the focus” discourse: the music is what actually crosses the language barrier. There is no denying that visual production values, fandom infrastructure and social media strategy all contributed to K-pop’s international expansion, but none of them explain the thing that actually needs explaining: the reason why someone would want to listen to a Korean song two hundred times without understanding a single lick of the language. Subtitles assist in understanding lyrical content, but they can’t capture the experience the same way you can’t catch lightning in a bottle. In LOONA’s case, the international audience built around the group did so largely without significant label support, mainstream visibility or social media infrastructure. What anchored them was music.

One of LOONA’s title tracks, ‘Butterfly’, demonstrates what music can do when working at full capacity across every single barrier the “music was never the focus” argument claims to be primary. Discovered largely by accident, by listeners with almost no Korean and no context, released by a label already showing signs of the same instability that would eventually dissolve the group – none of the conditions that supposedly generate K-pop’s international appeal were functioning apart from the music itself.

The openness of ‘Butterfly’’s production and the way its melodic choices keep reaching outward without ever quite resolving evoked a sensation of wistful expansiveness that communicates directly at the level of experience and meaning. Listeners who didn’t know what the words said knew exactly what the song was meant to feel like. Don’t mistake this as an argument for how all K-pop music achieves this. ‘Butterfly’ is just a demonstration that the music is capable of doing what only music can do: embody something language can’t quite describe and materialise it. A song’s capability to do so is what serious critical attention exists to locate and evaluate.

Commercial production ≠ Artistic Invalidity

The experience of hearing a song like ‘Butterfly’ and feeling something shift within you deserves more than to be callously written off as a guilty pleasure. Nor is it a lesser aesthetic encounter than the experience of hearing a record by The Smiths or Joni Mitchell, or anything else the critical establishment grants credence to. The argument that music never mattered in K-pop makes a bold, untrue assumption: that the individual response to it should be explained away rather than examined, categorised as fleeting fan feeling rather than profound aesthetic experience. Music history actually suggests that it should matter regardless.

Holland-Dozier-Holland famously wrote and produced on an assembly line during their time under Berry Gordy’s Motown system – a hit factory built with an explicit commercial mandate, equipped with production formulas precise enough to be taught and a quality control process (literally called Quality Control) that evaluated songs not on artistic merit but on sellability. The Funk Brothers underpinned the entire Motown catalogue across dozens of sessions for dozens of artists without a single production credit. What got made instead was ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’, ‘Stop! In The Name of Love’, ‘How Sweet It Is’ – songs evaluated as critically phenomenal precisely as products of the system rather than in spite of it. The formula perfected rather than broken free from. This parallels what K-pop’s producers and composers are doing when working at their best: they make aesthetic decisions within a commercial system because they were right for the music, even if no mandate required it. Nobody argues that the HDH catalogue can’t be held in regard simply because it emerged from a system designed to generate revenue. The system produced greatness regardless.

A worthy counterargument against this is that Motown earned its critical rehabilitation not through the system itself, but through the artists who eventually pushed against it. Marvin Gaye didn’t make and release What’s Going On he was asked to – he made it in spite of what Gordy wanted, and the critical establishment’s recognition of Motown’s value is partly a recognition of individual authorial voices who dared to assert themselves against commercial machinery. The parallel to K-pop is obvious: breakout acts like BTS and Stray Kids are writing their own lyrics, addressing their mental health and other taboo issues publicly and actively pushing against the idol system’s expectations. The individual artist transcends the system, while the system remains dismissed. But this reading gets the causality backwards. Gaye’s assertion only meant something because the system had already built a musical language sophisticated enough to push against. What’s Going On was an album in dialogue with the Motown sound by expanding and complicating it, yet the album can’t be understood without it. The rebellion still requires the baseline, and if the baseline has no intrinsic value, any departure from it wouldn’t hold weight. The same logic applies to K-pop. The musical language BTS and other acts like them assert themselves through had to be built by someone before them within the very system the argument dismisses.

Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On on vinyl, 1971. Courtesy of Discogs.

The Brill Building system removes the complication entirely. Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka were writers producing to order, often on deadline, for artists they didn’t know, in a building full of other writers doing the same thing simultaneously. There are no transcendence narratives here, nor is there any individual authorial autonomy to rehabilitate the catalogue retroactively. The results remain as some of the most formally precise and emotionally durable pop songs of the twentieth century, and they are evaluated as such. K-pop operates within the same tension between industrial production and artistic outcome, and it deserves to be measured on the same terms: what does this music do, how well does it do it, and what is lost when it fails to?

Contrary to popular belief, commerciality is not what sets K-pop apart. It’s the reluctance from arbiters of taste to even consider it. Motown waited for years for the critical establishment to catch up with what listeners already knew. The Brill Building was condescended to for a decade before anyone admitted the songs were great too. I believe K-pop is now somewhere in that same limbo, still fighting for the basic right to be treated with respect. The argument that “music was never the focus” is one of the primary mechanisms keeping it stationary. Refusing to give K-pop the credit it deserves and calling it a concession to fandom is just another way of saying it ought to continue.

Consequences of accepting this argument

Accepting the argument that K-pop was never about music has a cost, even if it doesn’t feel like one at the moment. The person dispensing the argument dispenses it as a corrective that signals their understanding of how the system supposedly works rather than naively mistaking it for something it isn’t. But correctives that foreclose fair analysis are critical abdication, not rigour. We will only lose what makes K-pop special as an art form to time if the argument continues to stand.

The first thing we lose is the listener. The people who found a piece of themselves in songs like Hyunjin’s ‘Around You’ or Kim Lip’s ‘Eclipse’ built a relationship with LOONA’s body of work because it defined and/or shaped how they understood the concepts of beauty, impermanence and the power of music. They deserve a critical framework that acknowledges that experience in earnest, instead of dismissing it as a symptom of parasocial attachment to the idol package. The music meant something precise and irreplaceable in a way that only specific artistic objects mean things. This song at this moment produces this feeling that nothing else has ever produced. Saying the music was always secondary is just another way of telling those listeners that what they experienced wasn’t a genuine aesthetic encounter, or that the feeling was real while the object wasn’t, or that all they were moved by was just packaging. The dismissal falls disproportionately on listeners who are already being told by broader culture that their tastes didn’t count or that the thing they loved wasn’t serious, or that their emotional investment was facetious rather than legitimate.

It also takes away the listener’s right to grieve when the music is lost. The legacy LOONA built across those three years and the sense that this discography was achieving something specific that no one else was doing was exactly the kind of artistic grain that the “music was never the focus” argument claims is unable to exist within the commercial K-pop system. Then it was gone: the company collapsed, the members dispersed, and the music now exists as an archive rather than an ongoing project. If we accept the argument’s terms, there would be nothing to mourn here beyond commercial disappointment or the discontinuation of a product line. LOONA’s sprawling pre-debut project, the internal logic that formed its throughline, the emotional world they built from scratch and inhabited would all fail to register as something valuable and thus wouldn’t register as a loss. The argument has done damage before the disbandment even happens by pre-emptively denying the music’s existence as something worth grieving.

A viral fan tweet in response to The Grammys announcing a new Asian category.

Another thing we lose is the music’s critical record every time an exceptional act gets exempted rather than used as support for the category’s revaluation. The very reason BTS blew up as much as they did was because their music resonated with the emotional cores of hundreds and thousands. But the conclusion the broader cultural establishment and their own fans end up drawing from their immense success is not to reconsider the genre BTS emerged from, but to exempt them from it. They’ve transcended K-pop, the argument goes. BTS either were not like the others from the very beginning, or have themselves evolved (arguments about when this transcendence happened are inconsistent and subjective) into something beyond the “superficiality” of manufactured K-pop, and something that escaped the “inauthentic” origins the label implies.

What happens to acts who don’t exactly fit the usual idol template, and yet aren’t able to escape it? For example, Day6 has always been considered part of the K-pop industry since they operate within the same major label system as acts like TWICE and Stray Kids. But their philosophy as a band doesn’t entirely qualify them as a standard K-pop idol group either: they are focused on live instrumentation over choreography, which makes them a band in the most straightforward, traditional sense. Many of their fans will tell you with insistence that they aren’t really K-pop. Xdinary Heroes also occupies a similar position: a six-piece band whose catalogue moves across rock, metal and pop-punk, signed to JYP, playing instruments and even performing at Lollapalooza in 2025 – but still filed as K-pop in every database and algorithm that routes them toward an audience already primed to dismiss what they’re hearing.

There are also soloists like Yves, who built a solo discography in the wake of LOONA’s wreckage that has largely worked with house, rock and electro-R&B. She’s even collaborated with internationally recognised authorities of alternative pop, like PinkPantheress and Lolo Zouaï. Yet, she is often still classed as a K-pop idol releasing K-pop music. In each case, critical institutions as well as the broader public’s stance on an act that challenges the manufactured image is to exempt them from the category while leaving the category – however flawed they believe it to be – intact. The exceptionalism of acts like BTS, Day6, Xdinary Heroes and Yves sounds like praise, but only doubles down on the dismissal of K-pop as a whole. Because if the acts that manage to succeed on their artistic terms are always the ones who have escaped K-pop, then K-pop remains by definition the thing you escape from. Every exception confirms this rule. The category is structured to be unfalsifiable, and an unfalsifiable category is just prejudice co-opting the language of genre taxonomy.

Xdinary Heroes performing live. Courtesy of The Seoul Story.

Something else we lose is the ability to hold the K-pop industry accountable. If the music has no intrinsic value – if it functions purely as a component of the larger idol package and nothing more – then it cannot get worse in any meaningful sense. Its commercial and streaming performance can either prevail or tank. But it cannot deteriorate in quality, because deterioration implies something worth preserving, which the argument has already decided is not the case. The progressive homogenisation of sound across K-pop music this past year – the fact that distinct group identities that once operated under their own sonic philosophies are starting to converge toward a mean that serves economic interest more than it serves the music – is visible and documentable and worth documenting. You just cannot document it in a meaningful way if you’ve already conceded that the individual sounds had no value in the first place. The argument shuts down the criticism before it can even exist, let alone land.

Nobody will say this about Motown in fifty years. Nobody will suggest that what Holland-Dozier-Holland built was a side effect of the hit factory rather than its most important product. The music will have outlasted the argument against conferring it legitimacy, because that’s what it always does. The question for K-pop is not whether that will happen, but whether the critical record assembled in the meantime will be proportionate to what the music actually is. The music has always mattered, and the critical lexicon to name it has always existed. Using it consistently, without the exemption this tradition has been granted for too long now, is where the conversation should go next.