- In an interview, Ava Labs' Justin Kim says South Korea's industrial giants are keen on web3.
- NFTs can help K-pop artists protect their compensation from merchandise and content.
- Avalanche blockchain is quietly winning over partners in South Korea for web3 apps.
K-pop fans are famed for being obsessed with their favourite idols.
Their obsession with Korean pop music bands is driving an entertainment market expected to generate $20 billion in event-related revenue by 2031, according to a recent report by Allied Market Research.
Now there’s an all-out push to get K-pop’s legions onto web3, said Justin Kim, the head of Ava Labs’ Korean operation.
”Some of the K-pop girl groups and boy groups are launching with web3 features,” Kim told DL News in an interview this week.
He rattled off a list of projects ranging from collectibles and ticketing to DAOs that will allow fans to vote on things to do with their favourite K-pop groups.
Chaebol meet K-pop
Ava Labs is the outfit behind Avalanche, the layer 1 blockchain network with $681 million in deposits, according to DefiLlama. In addition to South Korea, Ava Labs is drumming up users across Asia and has offices in Japan, Vietnam, and India.
While South Korea has long been mad for crypto — one in every eight residents use cryptocurrency exchanges — Kim said it’s the nation’s old-line industrial conglomerates, or chaebol, that are the key to web3 expansion.
‘Retail adoption should happen with bigger companies because they already have locked-in users.’
— Justin Kim, Ava Labs
SK Group, South Korea’s third biggest chaebol with $119 billion in annual revenue, started working with Ava Labs last year to offer NFT ticketing for K-pop concerts. The group makes semiconductors technology, batteries, and many other products.
“I think retail adoption should happen with bigger companies because they already have locked-in users,” Kim said. “The problem with smaller web3 teams is that they need to look for users.”
Ava Labs has also invested an undisclosed sum in Titan Content, a studio that mashes up K-pop, NFTs, and other web3 apps.
Titan is led by Han Se-min, who quit last November as the longtime head of SM Entertainment; it’s South Korea’s largest K-pop studio and manages superpopular groups like EXO and NCT.
Kim is betting web3 has much to offer the K-pop scene. One issue, for instance, is how talent management firms often fail to fairly compensate K-pop bands.
Finances not transparent
“One of the major problems with the K-pop industry is that the finances are not transparent,” Kim said. “Companies take all the benefits and the boy groups or girl groups never get paid.”
Such exploitation is an age old problem in the music business blockchain technology can address, he continued.
Using NFTs and crypto for K-pop merchandise will allow groups to record exactly how much money is being made from fans.
“You can see how many people bought it. There’s no way a company can get around this,” said Kim.
Ava Labs is also eyeing plays in South Korea’s thriving intellectual property market for online gaming.
In March, the project announced it was bringing one of Nexon’s flagship games, MapleStory, into the crypto space.
Ava Labs plans to use NFTs as in-game obects to make it easier for players to trade them.
Callan Quinn is DL News’ Hong Kong-based Asia Correspondent. Get in touch at callan@dlnews.com.