K-Pop in the Eye of International Fans
An Analysis about K-Pop Survey Data
The K-pop industry has experienced significant growth both nationally and internationally during the last several years although it has been building for two decades. It is no doubt that this industry plays a crucial role in increasing the economic growth of South Korea.
The industry’s significant growth also leads to the significant growth of a number of fans all around the world. Although it’s not easy for a foreigner to learn the Korean language, this is not a boundary for international fans to learn the Korean language and culture.
In order to know the K-pop industry in the eye of the international audience, especially the western, I conducted an analysis of K-pop popularity and audience based from the survey that was done by Saanjana Rraman in February 2019.
You can also find the Tableau Public visualization dashboard I’ve created to support this article. FYI, this is my first ever data analytics project, so please feel free to put any comments and feedback for me. Without any further ado, please enjoy this article. Happy reading!
Data Cleaning
As in the usual data-analysis pipeline, the first thing we have to do before conducting any analysis is to clean the data. Here, I’m using Python as the programming language. What I did to clean the data are basically as follows:
- Convert every column name into a more readable version
- Clean text-formatted answers by categorizing them into several categories
- Transform multiple answers into binary variables by using the One-Hot Encoding approach
If you are curious to know more about how the data cleaning is done, please refer to this Google Colab Notebook.
Demographic Analysis
First thing first, we’ll see the demography of the survey’s respondents.
There are 240 respondents in this survey with 140 of them come from the US. Following the US, there are 31 respondents from Europe and 28 from Canada.
As for gender, female respondents dominate the survey results with a total of 94.58%. Meanwhile, all transgender respondents with a total of 4 people come from the US.
On the other hand, most of the respondents’ age ranged from 15 to 20 years old with a total of 69.16% across all genders.
As for the occupation, most of them are students followed by nurses or caregivers. As for students, it is dominated by age ranging from 15 to 20 years old.
Popularity by Year
Before we deep diver into our analysis, let’s first see how long the respondents have already been familiar with K-pop. Based on the chart below, we can see that a big portion of respondents is getting to know K-pop from 3 to 4 years ago, around the year of 2016.
This insight is also supported by a number of western youtube channels that made K-pop reaction videos in those years. For instance, a video made by React channel showed that BTS’ music videos broke the record for the most viewed in 24 hours by a K-pop group, most sales in a week for a K-pop album, and the highest-ranking album on the Billboard Top 200.
Popularity by Country
So, what’s the most favorite K-pop group based on this survey?
It turns out that BTS is the most favorite K-pop group from all countries with the USA as the country that has the highest number of respondents.
Unlike what’s trending on the internet that shows Blackpink who always races with BTS to beat the record as the fastest video to reach millions of views, it turns out that MONSTA X and EXO are the second most favorite K-pop group and then followed by Blackpink.
We can also see that K-pop gives a big influence in the US and Asia whilst it is still growing in Europe, Canada, UK, and Australia.
Is K-pop an expensive hobby?
In the K-Pop industry, merch is as important as the music itself. Various kinds of merch can be found in the form of light sticks to an album.
The survey result shows that the majority of respondents’ profession, which is students, specifically females, mainly spend below $50 for buying their favorite group merchandise and concert’s ticket.
Contrarily for males, the money that they spend is around $50 to $100. The money is mostly obtained from parents or working part-time jobs. Specifically for males, the one who spends below $50 gains the money from working part-time and savings rather than from parents.
K-pop music videos
K-pop has always been associated with complex videos and memorable visuals. Because of the uniqueness of the videos, the audience has the freedom to create their own speculation towards the artist’s work.
In line with the above fact, it can be seen that almost all of the respondents watch K-pop music videos and the majority spend 1 hour a day watching the videos.
Is K-pop time-consuming?
Around 48% of respondents don’t think that K-pop is time-consuming and a few claimed that they are the ones who don’t have good time management. Following them, there are 35% of the respondents believe K-pop is time-consuming.
On the other hand, there’s no significant difference between those who listen to K-pop for 2–4 hours (44.16%) and those who listen to K-pop for 5 hours or more (41.67%).
Final Words
Finally, here’s come the end of this writing. Hope it can give you helpful insights or interesting facts about K-pop.
Please hit me up on LinkedIn if you have any questions or just want to have a further chat with me!
You can find all of the codes I used in this project here.
