HYBE is “a half-tech company.”
That’s how Bang Si-hyuk, founder and chairman of the K-pop giant, described his entertainment company in a recent Q&A session at Bloomberg Screentime event in Los Angeles.
Bang was commenting on the massive technological change that the music industry has seen in the nearly two decades since he founded Big Hit Entertainment, as HYBE was known then, back in 2005.
The chairman of the world’s biggest K-pop label and artist management company reminisced about his younger years sharing a cramped apartment in L.A. with Park Jin-young, who would go on to found rival K-pop label JYP Entertainment.
“When I was here with [Park], we were living in a room that was so small that if we lay down and reached out, we could put our hands on each other’s stomachs,” Bang said through an interpreter, in an interview with Bloomberg’s Sohee Kim and Lucas Shaw.
“And now, as you say, I have a mansion in one of the nicest neighborhoods in L.A., so life has definitely changed externally,” Bang continued. “But I think these external changes are not that important to me. The reason I purchased the house in Bel-Air is I felt it would help with my business and meeting people here. My life, fundamentally, has not changed.
“I still consider music to be the most important thing… Then, and now, I am still committed to finding the things that are wrong in the industry, and improving these things and innovating things, so that everybody in the music community and industry can have more opportunities.”
He added: “And of course, back then, we were somewhat more distant from the tech sphere than we are now. Right now we are basically a half-tech company. But again I don’t think the fundamentals have changed very much.”
Bang was, of course, referring to the incredible changes that have transformed the music business over the past quarter century, from the rise of digital music sharing and piracy, to the boom in music streaming services and – more recently – the AI revolution that promises to change both music creation and monetization.
HYBE is no stranger to these technological changes. The company has dived into AI music, releasing a track earlier this year that was sung in six different languages, thanks to tech from Supertone, an AI vocal-generating company HYBE acquired last year.
The company is also behind Weverse, a fan platform that is on the leading edge of using social media and digital marketplaces to monetize superfans.
But beyond embracing new tech, HYBE is looking to make major inroads into the US market, and in his recent Q&A session, Bang clearly laid out the rationale for this move.
Here are three key things we picked up from Bang Si-hyuk’s Q&A session…
1: HYBE’s global expansion is about creating a self-sustaining business
HYBE’s global girl project with Universal Music Group/Geffen kicked into overdrive in August with the announcement of 20 finalists who will compete for a spot in the as-yet-unnamed group through a reality show called Dream Academy.
For Bang, Dream Academy is an experiment – a “test,” in his words – to see how and how well the K-pop methodology exports to global markets. It’s also part of an effort to ensure that HYBE has a role in the music industry well beyond K-pop – something Bang sees as being crucial to the company’s long-term success.
“K-pop is characterized by the most massive level of consumption in the history of music and pop music,” Bang said through an interpreter. “That is a good thing for HYBE, but also a challenge because further expansion may be difficult.
“That is why the goal was to focus on the US market, the biggest music market in the world, and the rest of the global market to try to increase our market share and increase the number of fans both through internal expansion and external expansion.”
By “internal expansion,” Bang meant using HYBE’s resources and experience to create a girl group “made of members who are not Korean or east Asian,” to appeal to a broader international audience.
“And externally, through this new group we would be able to engage and find new fans who may not engage in the massive consumption that characterized K-pop before, but who are willing to accept K-pop, or the music of this group, as pop and still enjoy the music and become a fan. Dream Academy is the testing of this method or methodology,” Bang said.
“I am still committed to finding the things that are wrong in the industry, and improving these things and innovating things, so that everybody in the music community and industry can have more opportunities.”
Bang Si-hyuk, HYBE
Arguably the single most important acquisition HYBE has made in the US was Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings (now HYBE America), which HYBE bought in its entirety for just over $1 billion in 2021.
That deal put Braun’s management clients such as Justin Bieber (but no longer including names such as Ariana Grande) as well as the Big Machine label under the same umbrella as artists such as BTS, Seventeen and Enhyphen.
Under HYBE ownership, Braun has been working to build a major new US-headquartered music rights house, notably acquiring Atlanta rap powerhouse Quality Control (aka QC Media Holdings) earlier this year.
Bang made it clear that he sees US expansion as imperative, not least because market growth in East Asia is not what it used to be.
“It is true that K-pop has seen dramatic growth in the United States, but in other markets, we are not seeing that as much,” he said. “For example, in southeast Asia, the numbers… are falling. [In] the Japanese market, K-pop is growing but the music industry as a whole has not grown in the past 10 years. So we felt that for the continued growth of K-pop the answer lies in the United States…
“Of course, I’m not here just to pursue the growth of K-pop. Fundamentally, the United States is the biggest and most important music market in the world. And one of the primary duties of a company or business is to grow and continue to grow. So we are here [to] pursue a bigger market and look for bigger and more opportunities in our quest to, again, create more opportunities for the music community and the music industry as a whole.”
Bang added: “Regardless of the success rate or failure rate of this test [Dream Academy], you will continue to [see us] engage in similar tests with a variety of budgets and skills over the next two or three years.”
2: Bang’s retirement is a part of the company’s overall strategy
US and global expansion is just one part of Bang’s plans to build a self-sustaining company. Another prong in that strategy is a goal for HYBE to not be dependent on any one individual – be it an artist or an executive – for its success.
“What I expect is that – even if a certain IP is not successful, or a project is not successful – that the company is continuous and sustainable,” Bang said.
“A lot of entertainment companies tend to rely on a single IP a lot. So what I expect and what I would like to see is that [HYBE] does not rely on just one manager or creator and the company continues to sustain itself.”
Somewhere in there might have been the mildest possible criticism of HYBE’s reliance on BTS, the world’s largest K-pop group, currently on hiatus through 2025 due to members’ mandatory military service.
“K-pop is characterized by the most massive level of consumption in the history of music and pop music. That is a good thing for HYBE, but also a challenge because further expansion may be difficult.”
Bang Si-hyuk, HYBE
But if there’s any concern there about HYBE’s reliance on BTS, it was largely drowned out by gratitude for the uber-popular boy group – particularly in the wake of all seven BTS members recently extending their contracts with HYBE beyond 2025, when current agreements were set to expire.
“The fact we need BTS, I think, is needless to say. As a manager, as a management company, and as a music label, for a company like HYBE, for artists with such stature, and great artists, as BTS to have chosen us again as their manager and as their label is valuable for our company and something that makes us very, very happy,” Bang said.
However, Bang’s concern about HYBE putting too many of its eggs in one basket goes beyond BTS – to himself.
“I would like to – if I can – retire in 10 years, not because I have no passion for this work, but actually it’s because… if 10 years later I am still running this company, and it still relies on me, then have I, or we as a company, reached that goal of not relying on a single person, a single entrepreneur in achieving sustainability?”
Bang added a clarification: “I am not announcing my retirement here… but this is the ideal. The company should be running and sustaining itself without [relying on] any single person.”
3: There are ‘fundamental differences’ between the US and Korean music industries
Asked if his time working with Scooter Braun and HYBE America had highlighted any differences between the music business stateside and in Korea, Bang said he saw some “fundamental differences” between the two.
It goes to “the structure of the industry itself,” Bang said.
“In the United States, the artist is really at the center and the most important thing. The artist is the main decision-maker and the most important decision-maker. The artist will make their decisions, and then any profits or revenues that are generated from these decisions [will be redistributed] in the form of royalt[ies] to the label, or management or variety of service providers,” Bang continued.
“A lot of entertainment companies tend to rely on a single IP a lot. So what I expect and what I would like to see is that [HYBE] does not rely on just one manager or creator and the company continues to sustain itself.”
Bang Si-hyuk, HYBE
“But the industry is fundamentally different in Korea. Through contracts with the label and management companies, rights are guaranteed to the artist. But a marked difference is [that] the artist is a partner to the company in making business decisions. There is an understanding that the artist and the company [are] working together to develop the market.”
In the Korean music business, “when the decisions are made, they’re based not solely on the will of the artist, but as a business decision… It’s not always business [considerations] that drive decisions here in the United States.”
All of which brings up an enticing question: Will US-based artists take to the K-pop methodology, if it means compromising their vision for a jointly-made “business decision”? Clearly, this is one of the “tests” that Bang has set up as part of his company’s grand global expansion.
It will be interesting, to say the least, to see this test play out.
