‘Now it's indie’: The creative turn of the cultural policy in the Korean indie music scene

Abstract

As creative industry policy discourse has travelled quickly across the South Korean cultural industry, including the Korean Wave and beyond, the indie music artists in South Korea have found opportunities to perform and promote their music overseas. The recent cultural policy along with the direct support programs are unexpected, because of the conservative nature of the government and the nature of the South Korean indie music as independent from political and economic powers. With the example of the overseas advance of South Korean indie artists, with government support, this article presents an examination of the complex relationship between the government's creative cultural policy and the resulting effects of the policies on the South Korean indie music scene. It is argued that it is yet to be determined whether the cultural policy is having a negative or positive effect on the cultural industry. This article suggests that the cultural policy, whatever the goals of the policy-makers, is interacting with other elements—such as the political economy of the technologies of distribution and consumption, subculture, and the methods through which the cultural policy discourse is articulated among the policy community—beyond the objectives of the policy itself.

Keywords

Creative industry-based discourse cultural policy indie music subculture the Korean Wave

Introduction

While South Korean popular music (K-pop) has drawn popular attention from music fans around the world, indie music scene in South Korea (hereafter Korea) has developed and extended its influence for the last couple of decades. Since the beginning of Korean indie music scene in the mid-1990s at the Hongdae (Hongik University) area in Seoul, the popularity and influence of indie music scene as a cultural phenomenon are no longer limited to that area and indie music fans. Entering the 2010s, more than one thousand indie bands used to perform in 10 to 50 live music places at the Hongdae area every weekend. Korean indie music currently ‘plays a complementary role in its relationship with mainstream music’ (Yang, 2017: 4). Some bands happened to achieve commercial success in domestic music market.

For the last few years, the indie music artists have found opportunities to perform and promote their music overseas. In the early phrase of their oversea advance, some of the indie bands (like Crying Nut and No Brain, which are the first generation of Korean indie bands) had often positioned themselves against hegemonic culture recognizing K-pop as mainstream music. This was often the case despite the rise of K-pop ‘affords an undeniable publicity boost for Korean bands’ including indie bands who ‘might otherwise remain little heard internationally’ (Epstein, 2015: 4). More recently, these legendary indie bands gained more publicity in mainstream music scene. More and more Korean indie artists and their songs are now often recognized in continuum with K-pop rather than necessarily in opposition to it among not only domestic but also international audiences.

Korean indie musicians have, of course, performed abroad and even released their music overseas before 2010. However, the recent advance of Korean indie musicians in the overseas global music scene for the last few years is distinguished by the Korean government's efforts to support indie musicians in this endeavor. Until recently, the Korean government had limited its support of pop music entering international markets to pop and idol bands signed by Korea's largest private entertainment labels.

Traditionally, any intervention on the part of the government in Korea's popular music scene has been greeted as bad news by performers and fans. Most of all, government intervention means censorship of lyrics and/or the occasional police bust on drugs (mostly marihuana) used by some members of K-pop idol bands such as Big Bang and by legendary pop musicians such as Shin Jung Hyun, Cho Yong Pil, and Jeon In Kwon. In the Korean indie music scene, in particular, government intervention is very unwelcome. In this context, musicians who have signed with a big label have been frowned on and playing at a government-funded event has long been viewed as selling out.

However, over the past few years, indie performers have succeeded in both accepting government support and maintaining their fan base. One fascinating aspect of this recent development is that it is related to the idea of the ‘creative industry,’ or more particularly the ‘creative economy’ at the core of the Park Geun Hye government's cultural policy discourse. In this article, I examine the effects of this policy on Korea's indie music scene including in reference to the government's efforts to support indie performers’ success in the global music scene given that creative industry policy discourse has travelled quickly across the Korean cultural industry and beyond. Considering the historical relationship between the popular music scene and the government in the Korean context, I will also examine how through its creative industry cultural policy, the government is coming to terms with the indie music scene and reshaping the environment of cultural production.

Given the characteristics of Korea's current creative industry discourse-based cultural policy, specifically in reference to the creative economy, I argue that it is too early to determine whether the policy is having a positive or deleterious effect on the Korean popular and indie music scene.¹ I argue further that many cultural and technological elements interrupt the direct relation of the goals and the resulting effects of the cultural policy. On this point, this article focuses on three elements: the subculture of Korean indie music scene, the technological environment along with music markets, and the characteristics of creative industry discourse articulated by the Korean government.

With the focal example of Korean indie artists' advance overseas with government support over the past few years, this article presents an examination of the complex relationship between the government's creative cultural policy and the resulting effects of the policies on the Korean indie music scene. The recent cultural policy along with the direct support programs on the Korean indie musicians since 2010 is somewhat unexpected given the overall conservative nature of the government and the by-definition nature of the Korean indie music as independent from (even opposed to) political and economic power.

As this article will demonstrate in the following, the subculture of Korean indie music scene has evolved from independent, resistant, and subversive to professional, self-conscious, and savvy as Epstein (2015: 5) describes. The supporting policy of the Korean government on the Korean indie band could have been impossible if the indie band themselves would reject to apply for the support program or resist to receive the financial support from the government. There is a substantial change in terms of the subculture of indie bands in Korea, a change that is substantial enough to let the indie musicians stop resisting the existing mainstream powers like the government and start embracing the support from the government, which used to be considered remote and even hostile to popular musicians. The change is deeply related to the Korean indie bands' struggle to find a way to strike a balance between sell out and making a living in the creative cultural economy.

Another interrupting element that will be discussed in this article is the changing technological environment of production, consumption, and distribution of popular music including indie music. Especially, the much increased availability of digital media technologies in indie music scenes did change the ways that popular music is distributed, consumed, and produced. The recent oversea advance of the Korean indie bands cannot be fully understood without considering the changing environment of distribution, consumption, and production of popular music including indie music in Korea.

Lastly, the characteristics of creative industry discourse within the Korean government and its corresponding policies also need to be considered in order to understand the resulting effects of the cultural policy supporting popular music, particularly indie music. The meaning of creative industry or creative economy in the Korean government and policy-making communities was never explicit and coherent. Opacity, incoherence, and arbitrariness (or flexibility) in the meaning of the creative industry discourses are one of the important aspects that can be commonly seen in the creative industry discourses in many regions. This arbitrariness around the meaning of the creative industry (also the creative economy) affected the ways that the conservative government took supporting action on the oversea advance of the indie music following through the previous success of the K-pop in the global market.

Studies on the creative industry discourse and its impact on the Korean Wave

While some scholars studied about the key cultural factors (such as cultural hybridity) behind the success of Korean local cultural products in the global market, some scholars on the studies on the Korean Wave (Hallyu) emphasized that the Korean government has been playing an active role in the growth of cultural industries and the global success of Korean cultural products including the film, broadcasting, online gaming, and popular music industries (Jin, 2006; Kim, 2012, 2013). With the change in the government's approach on cultural industries as from an ideological tool preserving national identity to one of the fastest-growing parts of the national economy in the age of knowledge, innovation, and information in Korea, recent studies on creative industries as a policy discourse help make sense of the change in the relationship between the government and the indie music scene and the recent rise of the Korean indie bands' advance oversea.

There have been debates on the role of the creative industry-based discourse. Since the late 1990s when the creative industry discourse firstly emerged within the cultural policy in the UK, the discourse quickly went beyond the cultural policy domain as well as geographical boundary. In the following decade, many scholars discuss on the utility of the creative industry discourse and its implication for cultural practice. In this line of studies, the creative industry discourse is viewed as a neoliberal discourse (Garnham, 2005; Hesmondhalgh, 2008; Miller, 2009). For instance, for Garnham (2005) the discourse can be seen as a ‘Trojan horse’ which brings in the highly technocratic discourses of the information society, Schumpeterian theories of innovation, and knowledge economy into the realm of cultural practice.

While the information and communication technologies such as the internet, smartphone, social media, and so on are quickly disseminated in advanced countries as well as the developing countries, the ways that the digital technologies affect the creative industries vary. Sometimes, the effects of the discourse are tentative, uncertain, and uneven depending on the geographical regions such as the global South and North (Cunningham, 2009: 376). According to Stuart Cunningham (2009), in developed countries, the creative industry discourse plays a role of softening the technocratic orientation of the information society, whereas in the global South, the discourse is very often utilized to seek and find some kinds of support in terms of the basic infrastructure. Here, the prestigious status of the information society discourse is something that should be still realized rather than simply taken for granted. Indeed, local variations in terms of the application of the creative industry discourse and policy need to be carefully examined unless the creative industry discourse is simply viewed as ‘a singular “master discourse” such as the information society’ (Flew and Cunningham, 2010: 118). In this respect, the cultural policy on the creative industries should be considered consisting of multiple specific heterogeneous policies and interrupting elements, which vary in terms of how they have induced different effects.

Discussions on the creative industry discourse as such are very helpful in understanding not only the technocratic characteristic of the creative industry discourse within the conservative Korean government for the past several years but also the various implementation processes of the discourse in varied domains, particularly the popular music in Korea. As will be explained later, the Korean government's discourse on the creative industry has a strong tendency to connect the creative industry discourse to the information society discourse as information and communication technology is often thought of as one of the competitive parts of the nation's economy in the global market and thus its importance is rarely questioned and always taken for granted (Cheong, 2013b). Moreover, the importance of information and communication technology along with the mostly technocratic discourse of the information society has different and sometimes contradictory ways that the effects of information and communication technologies are unfolded and realized: for the indie artists in Korea, the information and communication technologies are leveraged in their PR marketing and promotion activities via social media like Facebook and YouTube. It is equally important to note that the information and communication technologies reshape the ways that the popular music is distributed and consumed via the streaming online music services mostly owned by the large telecommunication and media companies in Korea.

Along with studies on the creative industry as a neoliberal discourse of political economy, this article also benefits from studies on the changing nature of creative labor, especially the precarious work experiences of creative labor in the neoliberal and ‘gig economy’ (De Stefano, 2016; Morgan and Nelligan, 2018). In explaining the changing nature of labor in creative industries with detailed examples, Morgan and Nelligan (2018) argues that,

more workers are now living like musicians – working precariously from gig to gig. The word ‘job’ is losing its Fordist connotation of regular-waged work….In many Western societies, the deregulation of labour markets has promoted the gig economy, as has the emergence of websites like Airtasker, Uber X and Kickstarter, which allow prospective employers to advertise jobs of work for one-off payments, often on a competitive tendering basis. (p. 6)

Studies on the changing experience of creative labor help to understand the subcultural change of the Korean indie musicians, who have to strike a balance between making a living and sell out when they engaged in the government support program. With their support programs, the government provided mostly one-off and competition-based funding rather than the regular supports, for indie musicians, which go on the concert tour in some music festivals abroad. The government also provided infrastructural and managerial supports on the costly rents of performance hall, music recording facilities. To receive the funding, the indie artists should apply and go through some selection process. With these support programs, the popular music industry and market that the indie artists in Korea should face seem to turn out be a gig economy where all artists promote themselves and seek for pop-up opportunities provided by the governmental branches related to culture and popular music to compete with other musicians. Here, with the help of the existing hegemonic online music service platforms in Korea, the government seemingly acts as a gig-economy platform that enables the flexible work arrangement of the indie musicians and influences their activities as entrepreneurs.

Korean indie artists on the move

Since the mid-2000s, it has become clear that the Korean indie music has remarkably increased its presence in the global indie music scene with artists performing live and promoting their music in overseas music markets (Yang, 2017: 6). Crying Nut and No Brain, veteran bands from the early Korean indie music scene were included in the lineup at the Fuji Rock Festival in 2000 and 2001, respectively. In 2003, Gum-X signed a contract with Toy's Factory, a local record label in Japan, to promote and sell record labels and performances (Yang, 2017: 2).

Even before the global mega-hit of PSY's ‘Gangnam Style’ in 2012, some Korean indie bands had participated in global music festivals, including South by South West (SWSX) in the US and the Glastonbury music festival in UK (SBSCNBC, 2014; Seo, 2013). Korean indie music bands in various genres, including modern rock, instrumental, emo-core, and hip-hop, have met with a positive reception abroad and expanded in those markets accordingly. For instance, from 2010 to 2012, the Seokyo Music Labels Association (SMLA), an association of about forty independent music labels based in the Hongdae area, held the Seoul-Tokyo Sound Bridge music festival four times and strived to promote exchanges between Korean and Japanese indie musicians. In 2012, the SMLA hosted three showcase concerts known as New Wave in Seokyo to discover talented new indie bands.

It is even clearer that the Korean government's support of the country's indie music is greater now than at any other time. More concretely, since the mid-1990s, the Korean government has recognized the economic value and importance of the culture industry and founded the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (formerly the Ministry of Culture). However, from approximately 2012 onwards, governmental branches including the Korea Creative Content Agency (hereafter KOCCA) have provided support—especially financial support—to indie musicians. For instance, Seoul Mucon (MU: CON), an international music fair held in Seoul annually since 2012, is the most noteworthy of the indie music projects supported by the government, principally through the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency. Mucon functions as a popular music market in which musicians and music business actors representing a range of genres participate. Programs include conferences with major actors (planners, producers, engineers, etc.) in the world music business, showcases for musicians, and business meetings for networking with music business partners. Through these festivals in Korea and abroad, Korean indie musicians have even secured recording contracts and held opportunities to collaborate with international producers (Park, 2014). For instance, ‘Asian Chairshot’, one of the most famous Korean indie music bands has collaborated with a producer and Smashing Pumpkins’ guitarist. Another indie band, ‘Glen Check’ has worked with former producer of the legendary Irish band U2 to advance to US music market.

K-Rookies is another government-sponsored program that was introduced for the first time in 2013 by the KOCCA. The program provides support for a number of purposes ranging from participation in domestic festivals, space for practice, broadcasting opportunities, business mentoring, and so on. If K-Rookies is a direct support program for indie bands, Seoul Mucon is an indirect support program that provides various opportunities such as signing contracts and workshops as a kind of international pop music fair (Goh, 2014).

A close inspection on these kinds of direct and indirect fund support programs by the KOCCA from 2013 to 2017 tells that they were more likely to be the direct support program, which is different from an indirect support program that aims to improve the entire music scene and ecosystem that the indie musicians can earn a living by playing and selling their music rather than being dependent on one-off cash support on individual music concerts or album production.² This means that through the direct programs as such, indie musicians have to compete for the government funds to produce and promote their albums, music videos, and live converts. It also affects what it means to be indie musicians in Korea: the life of the artists is never stable and chronically vulnerable. Their music appears neither independent nor completely separated from the mainstream music like the K-pop as the indie artists seek the opportunities to play and sell their music abroad along with the K-pop musicians fully supported by the large private entertainment companies.

Evolution of the Korean indie music scene: Striking a balance between making a living and selling out

The media have reported extensively on the ‘overseas advance’ and ‘overseas performances’ of indie bands in recent years (Kwon, 2013; Park, 2014; SBSCNBC, 2014; Seo, 2013). Over the past few years, some Korean bands, including indie bands, have drawn attention from international star producers and prominent labels such as Steve Lillywhite, a former record producer working with the Rolling Stones, U2, Dave Matthews Band, and so on. The news is delivered as follows: K-Rock bands, especially indie bands in Korea, are ‘on the fast track to advance into the world’ (Seo, 2013); ‘K-Rocks have enough identity and quality’; and Seoul is attracting attention as the ‘Next Tokyo’ from the overseas music business (Park, 2014).

The Korean media usually cheerfully delivers news about Korean indie bands’ entering the global indie music scene alongside news about success in K-pop, mostly performed by idol bands. It is reported that the idol K-pop has done its work: the global success of K-pop such as PSY's ‘Gangnam Style’ paved the way for ‘world music fans … [to become] interested in other Korean music genres besides idol pop’ (Park, 2014). After the dust kicked up by ‘Gangnam Style’ cleared, various players in the K-pop scene—including entertainment agencies, online music service companies, K-pop idol musicians, and the Korean government—tried to build on the global success of K-pop in general and of ‘Gangnam Style’ in particular. It appears that none of them were quite successful to follow and revive the legacy of the former successors. It is in this context that the Korean media paid attention to the oversea advance of Korean indie music and the indie music became branded as K-Rock or K-indie.

Following its cheerful reports on the success of K-pop overseas, the media often turns to formulaic commentaries on the declining popularity of K-pop, how to continue the success, or where the next PSY is going to come from. Many commentators have criticized K-pop for being a monotonous genre littered with idol bands that all sound the same. They have also claimed that K-pop relies on an overseas fan base that is too narrow, i.e., comprising mostly teenagers, although they are the main buyer of K-pop music, and should diversify in terms of sound and style in order to attract more diverse. What was once thought of as a strong selling point is now viewed as a weak link.

In some media accounts, K-rock or K-indie, referred to as a part of the Korean Wave, is promoted as the next great hope for Korean music overseas. According to this point of view, the recent overseas expansion of ‘K-rock’ has created a pathway for Korean popular music to advance further in the international scene. It is reported that the recent increased presence of Korean indie bands in international music scene could constitute a breakthrough for Korean indie bands who may have lost their motivation in the domestic market to enter the foreign market (Seo, 2013). There is something familiar about this kind of report in terms of its narrative. In Korea, the Korean Wave, particularly the idol K-pop, became popular among global fans outside Korea. Many commentators and the media claimed that one of the reasons that K-pop was so successful outside Korea is their strong motivation to go abroad. Because of the small and even harsh domestic music market environment, where even mainstream K-pop earns significantly more from international than domestic sales and most of musicians cannot make a living with their career as a musician, K-pop musicians have developed export-oriented strategies and grown their dream to go abroad and perform and sell their music albums with the help of large management corporations such as YG entertainment and SM corporations. These companies recruiting and training the teenage apprentice K-pop idol bands happened to be at the forefront of musical export business.

Although the recent success of the Korean indie artists in international music scene as widely publicized through the media coverage in Korea, what has been less known is the change of the subculture and harsh reality that Korean indie artists as such live with. The Korean indie music scene has undergone a fundamental change whereby an independent, resistant, and subversive attitude characterized by opposition to mainstream music and hegemonic culture has given way to a more practical attitude, aptly described by Stephen Epstein (2015) as ‘more professional, self-conscious, and savvy’ (p. 5). For example, at the 2017 Korean Popular Music Awards ceremony, a female indie musician, Lee Lang, a winner of the Best Folk Song award, commented that she intended to sell her trophy:

My income in January was 960,000 won (US$ 850). Not just from my music sales, but the total. Thankfully, I made 420,000 won (US$ 370) in February. It is difficult to make a living as an artist. It would have been great if there was some prize money to this award, but it is not the case. So I think I'll have to sell this trophy. (Park, 3 May 2017)

This acceptance speech effectively revealed the longstanding and troubling reality that most indie musicians face. There were some complaints about her remarks, which were viewed as sarcastic and rude in some quarters. However, the ‘playful yet telling’ acceptance, ‘publicity stunt or not’ (Park, 3 January 2017), went viral on social media in Korea. It was reportedly described as savvy and successful rather than as subversive or resistant in that it not only showed self-confidence and self-consciousness on the part of the artist as a professional musician but also by drawing popular attention may even have boosted her record sales (Ghoo, 3 January 2017; Kwon, 3 February 2017; Park, 3 May 2017).

K-pop is considered one of the most lucrative Korean exports, and Korean indie music bands have been active in promoting themselves internationally. Aided by various kinds of support from the Korean government, dozens of Korean indie bands have started to attract attention from the domestic press and major foreign label producers at music festivals and international showcases globally, mostly in North America and Europe.

Jambinai, a Korean indie band that elicits a range of reactions, is a case in point. In terms of musical sound and style, Jambinai could be called a post-rock and funk metal band that uses traditional Korean instruments such as a reed flute called a piri, a bowed instrument called a haegum, and a kind of zither called a geomungo. Their music sounds like Gukak, i.e., traditional Korean music, especially to domestic fans. However, the band could just as easily be viewed as a group of traditional Korean musicians influenced by noise, experimental rock, metal, and hardcore, especially by Western rock fans. In fact, the three original members met in college where they studied Korean folk, classical, and ritual music before forming the band after graduation.

Like many other indie artists in Korea, they happen to promote themselves by posting music videos on YouTube, which were once found by the founder of the music agency, Earthbeat in Netherland mainly representing traditional and cross-over musicians and bands from different regions including Africa, Asia, and South America. Since then, the band was selected for the official showcase of Seoul Mukon, the Asia Pacific Music Market (APaMM), and WOMEX (World Music Expo) in the UK and South by Southwest (SXSW) in the US. In 2014 only, Jambinai performed in 14 countries including at premium festivals, among which were SWSX in Austin, TX, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, and the Glastonbury Festival and the World Music Expo in the UK (Park, 2014). Most recently, they have performed in the closing ceremony of the 2018 Pyong Chang Winter Olympic Game.

Korea's creative industry-based cultural policy and its discontent

It has become clear that many of the Park Geun Hye government's cultural policies, especially those targeting Hallyu-related industries, have operated in a context characterized by corruption. The government's creative industry policy related to Hallyu industries can be seen in Stuart Cunningham's words as a ‘Rorschach blot’ adopted and practiced in the Korean context with its characteristic emphases. However, the Rorschach blot of the creative industry policy has turned out to be a stain, as several officials in the cultural policy-related governmental branches, including the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, KOCCA, and other related committees supporting the Hallyu industry in Korea have been accused of participating in a wide range of corrupt practices during Park's term in office, which was shortened by the impeachment of the South Korean president, Park Geun Hye in early 2017.

Despite corruption at the top level of government, indie music, movies, and games are drawing an unprecedentedly high level of attention from a government pursuing an agenda of seeking out new, niche markets for Hallyu cultural commodities. Of these indie genres, indie music has received the most attention over the past few years. Increasing interest in and support for such indie music can be found from 2013 to 2014, the early years of Park Geun Hye's term in office. Presenting the overall direction of the new cultural policy in 2013, the Park Geun Hye government introduced the term ‘creative economy.’ However, the concept of the creative economy has turned out to be rather an implicit and incoherent idea imposed from above. This opacity arises at least in part from the arbitrary use of the term in numerous policy discourses (Kim, 2015; Kwon and Kim, 2014). The numerous policies and reports produced by the governmental agencies and the policy-makers in Korea suggest that it is rather rhetorical, if not empty, gesture for the policy-makers and governmental agencies in Korea to create the cultural policies under the rubric of the ‘creative economy’ hoping that the gesture as such will prove that they genuinely create and champion the creative policies.

In Korea, the creative economy was primarily imagined as a high-profit industry related to the usage of information and communication technology—from the software industry, movies, and games to tourism and leisure. More specifically, since the mid-1990s, when digital technology including the Internet has spread throughout Korea, cultural industries have been recognized by the Kim Dae Jung government (1998–2003) as a key national industry and, therefore, critical to national competitiveness. In the Roh Moo Hyun government (2003–2008), the creative industry concept was introduced for the first time in reference to the cultural policies of European countries such as the UK (Cheong, 2013a). During the Lee Myung Bak government (2008–2013), a new term—‘cultural content industry’—was used in place of previous terms such as ‘culture industry’ and ‘creative industry.’ Most recently, the Park Geun Hye government (2013–2017) replaced the term, ‘cultural content industry’ with the ‘content industry’ as the core of the creative economy. Despite this conceptual variation, what has been continued for more than two decades was the intention of connecting the culture industry policy to an idea of the creative industry with the same emphasis on the importance of information and communication technology (Cheong, 2013b; Choi, 2013).

The continuing emphasis of the Korean government's cultural and creative industry policies on information and communication technology has certain consequences. One of the most notable changes has something to do with the emergence of a platform-centered music industry heavily dependent on the use of information and communication technology. Compared to the physical pop music market through which music is sold in CD and vinyl formats market in US and Japan, in Korea the market disappeared almost entirely at much greater speed. Korea saw a rapid digitalization of its physical music market.

Here, the digital transformation of the pop music industry means not only that the main music market has transformed into an online market, but also that the pop music industry has become a platform-based online concern: the pop music industry as a whole is now dominated by network operators or broadcasters who own content distribution networks that attract massive numbers of subscribers. Their influence on the popular music industry in Korea cannot be exaggerated. For example, Melon, one of the most popular online music service platforms in Korea, merged with Kakao social media in 2016, is reported to account for more than 50% of total online music service sales in 2017 (Park, 2017). In addition, Genie, another online music service platform owned by the KT telecommunication company in Korea, is currently ranked as the second and reported to account for around 18%. The rest of online music service platforms such as Bugs Music and Naver Music, which are owned by the Cable TV network company and the biggest internet portal, respectively, account for around 10% of online music service sales in the same year. These major online music platforms are all owned by cultural intermediaries whose parent companies are large corporations such as mobile communication companies and cable TV network companies.

What is important here is how the reorganization of the cultural industry in the context of content distribution networks and platforms has influenced the supposedly equal and reciprocal relationship between large corporations, which act principally as cultural intermediaries, on the one hand and small and medium enterprises or individual creative groups, which act principally as cultural producers, on the other. It appears that the recent structural reorganization of the cultural industry in Kore has centered on large capital and the cultural industry is becoming increasingly dependent on capital power. Instead of pursuing profits by discovering and delivering innovative services, entrepreneurs in the online music industry—i.e., large corporations—are highly likely to prefer an easier business solution to vertically integrate the entire processes from production to consumption, thereby creating added value by playing their role as a gatekeeper to screen the products and control the distribution networks. Given these conditions, the relationship between large capital and small capital in Korea's cultural industry is far from being either reciprocal or horizontal.

Further, the platform-ization of popular music industry makes the creative labor of individual and independent cultural producers highly flexible and fragmented. This transformation allows artists to involve in more entrepreneurial activities as the government funds afford them the ability to strategically optimize their time in order to collect the necessary resources to initiate a project. More and more artists who mainly constitute the labor force in the creative industry are involved in a labor process characterized by irregular project-based work and one-off funding by the government rather than the long-term employment or contract. This has become the principal mode of work for the creative and innovative labor forces including indie artists in Korea. According to one news report, musicians receive only a small share from online music sales: The market price of a single mp3 file is “700 won (US$ 0.62), of which the artists get an average of 300 won after fees,” or when the song is streamed, the musician ‘gets 4.2 won something like a third of a cent’ (Park, 1 March 2017). “According to a 2015 survey by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in Korea, ‘the average annual income of an artist was 12.6 million won (US$ 11,150)’ ”(quoted in Park, 1 March 2017). In this work environment, it is hardly surprising that Lee Lang's comments at the 2017 Korean Popular Music Awards ceremony were somewhat well received in the indie music scene.

The transformation of the pop music industry into the digital platform has generated another problem. As the dominant actors in the pop music market, corporations provide various digital cultural contents and Internet services, thereby enabling self-regulation as an intermediary between consumers (users) and cultural content. In other words, a digital media company is often represented as not only a simple communicator of contents and services but also as a legitimate cultural leader, even as a public personality providing services without discrimination to the masses. In this sense, the recent global success of K-pop means that popular music contributes to the improvement of the national brand value by standing at the forefront of national prestige and helping those enterprises as a private actor in the market strengthen the public character as a patriot who supposedly promotes and raises the national brand value. Companies in the cultural industry play an intermediary role by providing most of the country's popular music products. In the process of reinforcing their market power and their status as a public figure, cultural intermediaries simultaneously bolster their monopolistic position in the popular music content market and in the domain of cultural policy. In the meantime, the indie musicians in Korea found themselves in the environment in which indie musicians can no longer find a sound way to make a living only by playing and selling their music in this market dominated and controlled by a few digital online music service platforms. While they promote themselves with their savvy knowledge about social media and compete for the one-off governmental funding, they look a lot like entrepreneur rather than independent artists.

Conclusion

Korean indie music partners with the government. This notion may immediately seem problematic. However, whether the cultural policy is having a negative or positive effect on the cultural industry remains to be full determined. The cultural policy, whatever the goals of the policy-makers, is constantly interacting with other elements—such as availability and political economy of the technologies of distribution and consumption, subculture, and the ways that the cultural policy discourse is articulated among the policy community—beyond the objectives of the policy itself, thereby producing unintended consequences. The effect of any given cultural policy arises from its interaction with those elements. In this article, I have suggested that this is precisely the case for the recent governmental support of the indie music in Korea.

It is true that the government's support of indie music, especially the international advance of Korean indie music, is unusual given the stance of previous Korean government's on this point. The recent unprecedented state support for the recent overseas advance of Korean indie music is actualized under the rubric of ‘creative economy.’ With the characteristic governmental support programs, many indie musicians and labels in Korea looked to bigger global markets with as they compete with other musicians to be a recipient of the governmental funding and use information and communication technologies, especially social media as a main marketing platform for promoting their albums, music videos, and upcoming live performances.

One might argue that it is not uncommon for music to be the beneficiary of state support. It is well known that the Korean government is playing a role in stimulating the supply of mainstream popular music such as K-pop and that most governmental support for the music sector has traditionally focused on flagship organizations and institutions such as classical music orchestras. Furthermore, it is no longer a secret that from the start, the Korean indie music scene has been very much global—in the sense that it responded to the indie music scene in North America: the unexpected rise of grunge rock with Nirvana, followed by the punk revival in North America in the mid-1990s (Epstein, 2015; Lee, 2010). In terms of lyrics, especially English lyrics, which are often seen as a proof of hybridization in the case of K-pop (Jin and Ryoo, 2012), the English language runs in the blood of Korea's indie artists. That is, many indie musicians are fluent enough to directly interact with fans, the press, and other musicians and producers in Europe and the US.

However, the governmental support provided by the creative industry-based cultural policy somehow seems to be really working even though the original intentions of the policy are never clear. It seems to deeply reshape the existing relationship between culture and markets as indie artists begin to look like ‘small, flexible enterprises linked to global networks of exchange and export,’ which is ‘a primary form of creative cultural production’ (Cunningham, 2009: 378). Despite this, the creative industry-based cultural policy in Korea can be limited in that it still emphasizes too much the importance of information and communication technologies along with online music markets while ignoring the physical ones. It often emphasizes the importance of global markets rather than local ones too.

In fact, the Korean indie music is very local, as is the case with indie music scenes in many part of the world. In terms of its intensity and length of interaction between indie musicians and audiences, indie music is unique in that it is heavily local and place-based in both the origin and distribution of music. This might sound a bit exaggerated given that today's music is sold and distributed through the Internet and advanced digital music platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. However, even though it is sold and distributed through virtual spaces and digital platforms, indie music is still very much local-specific, especially in its production and creation of songs and bands. For the cultural policy in Korea, it will be a challenge to go beyond the idea of selling indie music as a national cultural commodity in foreign music markets. In looking at the ways in which indie music has become popular, one has to realize that indie music is produced and sold in not only online markets but also physical ones, where local musicians and audiences actually meet and interact. It is likely that local and physical meeting places like music festivals, concerts, and showcases, whether global or local, are much needed in other popular music genres likewise.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A6A3A03043497).

Notes

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