K-Pop Catalogs Are Booming — How Korea’s Music Investment Market Is Changing the Game

As mainstream interest in the catalog investment market grows and investors look for opportunities outside of traditional Western pop and rock, the runaway success of Netflix’s Kpop Demon Hunters — which has four songs in the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 — has helped spur interest in K-pop catalogs.

The K-pop catalog market out of South Korea functions differently than that of the United States, however. So, Billboard asked Jinwoo Jo, CEO of South Korean investment firm Beyond Music — which has built one of the largest collections of Korean and Asian popular music, including megahits from BTS and BLACKPINK — to share his perspective on the current marketplace and some of the institutional wisdom that Beyond has learned over its four-year history.

Founded in 2021, Beyond has invested around $250 million to acquire more than 35,000 songs, making it far larger than other Asian catalog investment firms and putting its portfolio alongside U.S.-based HarbourView Equity Partners in terms of number of songs in its portfolio.

“We are like a specialized asset management company,” says Jinwoo, whose firm has reportedly raised more than $400 million from Korean private equity and institutional investors including Pax Capital and KB Securities. “We try to focus on what we are good at, which is K-pop.”

This year the Seoul-based firm acquired publishing rights from the independent K-pop songwriter and producer Bekuh Boom, including to BLACKPINK hits “Kill This Love” and “Ice Cream,” as well as a stake in BTS’ monster hit “Butter.”  Beyond also has an extensive library of older Asian classics from groups like Panic and Kim Sung Jae, and it recently expanded into the Latin market with the acquisition of Yandel. 

Here are three takeaways from Billboard’s conversation with Jinwoo.

Struggling Korean management companies are looking to sell catalogs.  

Jinwoo says Korea’s music management industry is going through a changing of the guard with much leadership and artist roster turnover, and several companies are looking for ways to shore up their finances. 

For management firms that are struggling financially, Beyond Music offers a way to liquidate part of their catalog and reinvest in their company.

“It’s pretty much like an industry-wide issue at this point,” he says. “It’s a winner-takes-all situation. If you don’t have a BTS or a BLACKPINK, what are you going to do? The long tail of those management companies has a pretty significant existential issue. We are a liquidity and solution provider to them.”

Although Korean management companies are structured like one-stop shops with songwriters on staff, Jinwoo says acquisitions happen nearly the same way they do with Western music companies. Beyond negotiates with the songwriters to acquire publishing rights and the company to acquire masters. He says the primary difference is that, because the catalog investment market is nascent in Korea, getting a Korean songwriter to sell their rights “requires much more [and] deeper trust, handholding and a greater sensitivity to cultural nuances.”

Name, image and likeness rights, which Pophouse used to create the ABBA Voyage virtual concert in London, and that Primary Wave used to make Nirvana merchandise like heart shaped boxes and special edition Converse shoes, do not exist in South Korea.

Beyond’s catalog is comprised mostly of publishing rights and master recordings, and while it has explored name, image and likeness deals with the catalogs it holds from outside of South Korea, Korean law is still evolving around the right to one’s image as it relates to music.

Beyond generates returns in other ways, including through synch placements in Korean dramas, films and advertisements. One recent success came from the Japanese beer company Asahi Super Dry, which used BLACKPINK’s “Kill This Love” in a global ad campaign — a deal Beyond timed to coincide with the girl group’s most recent world tour.  

The company also collaborates with social media influencers.

“First thing every morning, we look at our internal data system, and it will show that [for example] 78 songs moved very dramatically over the last 48 hours,” Jinwoo says. “We try to figure out why, and maybe it is because an Indonesian TikToker used our song in a dance challenge in Jakarta for the last two weeks. So, we will contact her and say we have 25 more songs and are willing to invest $10,000 in an event to make it bigger and encourage her to do to more frequent dance challenges.”

While the recency of K-pop megahits makes forecasting potential revenue generation less predictable, Beyond says it has been more surprised by a pop in streaming revenue from Korean classics.

Jinwoo says Beyond’s strategy focuses on owning and working both new K-pop hits and older Korean and Asian evergreen songs, and the revenue generating trajectory of the latter category has been surprising.

Many of the K-pop hits in Beyond’s catalog are less than seven years old and still enjoying current popularity that is boosting their streams. Managing the decline of those songs’ popularity through synchs is a top priority, Jinwoo says.

“We believe, from our experience, actually, you can slow down the decay curve and somewhat defy gravity,” he says. “Not all the time, but most of the time.”

What’s surprising, he adds, is that vintage songs in Beyond’s library have seen streaming jumps in recent months. Company analysts are still working out why, but Jinwoo says he thinks it’s due to many of these catalogs recently becoming available on streaming platforms. Korean management companies and artists have lagged Western markets in putting older songs on streaming platforms, he says.

“Many songs in our catalog older than 10 years old are starting to grow. It’s a big kind of a structured tailwind story for us.”