Are KATSEYE K-pop? What Happens When the System Goes Global
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| KATSEYE. Image: HYBE x Geffen Records / KATSEYE official website |
If you'd asked me a while ago whether KATSEYE were K-pop, I probably wouldn't have thought very hard about the question.
HYBE is involved. They went through an intensive training programme based on the K-pop trainee system. They dance. They have the choreography, the performance focus, the fandom culture. They're on Weverse. They've promoted on Korean music shows.
They certainly look like they belong in the same general universe as K-pop.
So... K-pop. Obviously.
Except I'm no longer convinced it's that simple.
This whole rabbit hole started because I kept seeing KATSEYE referred to as a K-pop group, and something about it bothered me. Not because the members aren't Korean — K-pop has had non-Korean idols for years. Not because they mostly sing in English — established K-pop groups release music in English, Japanese and other languages all the time.
It bothered me because KATSEYE weren't actually created in the same industry as the groups we usually call K-pop.
And once I started pulling on that particular thread, I ran into a much bigger question:
What exactly makes something K-pop in the first place?
Because if the answer is simply "they were trained using the K-pop system," we have another problem.
HYBE doesn't actually describe KATSEYE as a Korean idol group transplanted to America. On its own corporate website, it describes the HYBE x Geffen project as an attempt to create a "U.S.-based, global girl group modeled on the world-renowned K-pop training & development system."
That's a very specific way of putting it.
Not a K-pop group based in the US.
A US-based global girl group modeled on the K-pop system.
And those aren't necessarily the same thing.
So I did what any perfectly normal person does when one sentence on a corporate website raises a mildly interesting question.
I disappeared down a research rabbit hole about K-pop, Motown, Japanese idol systems, corporate structures, trainee programmes and the increasingly blurry borders of the global music industry.
Because apparently I don't know how to leave well enough alone.
And somewhere along the way, the question stopped being simply "Is KATSEYE K-pop?"
It became:
If you take the system that produces K-pop out of the Korean idol industry, transplant it into another entertainment industry and adapt it to work there... is what comes out the other end still K-pop?
First problem: K-pop isn't really a genre
The first problem with trying to decide whether KATSEYE are K-pop is that we tend to talk about K-pop as though it's a genre.
I'm not convinced it is.
Or, more accurately, I don't think "K-pop" tells us very much about what a piece of music actually sounds like.
Take BTS.
Depending on which song you pick, you could be listening to hip-hop, R&B, EDM, pop, trap, disco, funk, or some combination of several of them. And BTS are hardly unusual in that respect. One of the defining characteristics of K-pop has always been how freely it borrows from, combines and jumps between musical genres.
Calling all of that "K-pop" as though K-pop itself describes the sound is a little like walking into an enormous supermarket, pointing at everything on every shelf and deciding the genre is "groceries."
Technically, you've identified something they have in common.
You haven't told me much about what's actually in the packet.
Language doesn't solve the problem either.
K-pop groups release songs in Japanese for the Japanese market all the time. We don't suddenly decide the group has stopped being K-pop every time they record a Japanese version of a song. The same is increasingly true of English-language releases. BTS didn't temporarily cease to be a K-pop group when they released "Dynamite," "Butter" or "Permission to Dance."
Nationality doesn't work particularly well as a definition either.
The Korean idol industry has included non-Korean idols for decades. Thai, Japanese, Chinese, American, Australian and plenty of other nationalities are represented across K-pop groups. Whatever makes those groups K-pop, it clearly isn't everyone holding a South Korean passport.
And simply being Korean isn't enough in the other direction.
South Korea has rock bands, rappers, R&B singers, indie musicians, ballad singers and countless other artists who aren't part of the idol industry. Calling all popular music made by Koreans "K-pop" would flatten an entire country's music industry into one convenient Western label.
So if K-pop isn't defined by a particular sound, language or nationality, what does all of this music actually have in common?
For me, the answer that makes the most sense isn't found in the music itself.
It's found in the industry producing it.
When I use the term K-pop in this discussion, I'm talking specifically about the South Korean idol industry: the system through which idol artists are recruited, trained, developed, debuted, promoted and managed.
That makes K-pop much more useful to me as an industry classification than a musical genre.
A K-pop song can be hip-hop.
It can be R&B.
It can be EDM.
It can be pop.
It can be in Korean, Japanese or English.
The genre tells us what kind of music we're hearing.
K-pop tells us something about the system it came from.
And if that's true, then the question of whether KATSEYE are K-pop can't really be answered by listening to them.
We have to look at the machine that made them.
So what do I mean by "the industry"?
When I say K-pop is an industry classification, I don't mean that every K-pop company operates in exactly the same way.
They obviously don't.
I'm talking about the broader South Korean idol system: the interconnected structure through which companies recruit and train potential idols, form groups, develop concepts and performances, release music, promote artists and build fandoms around them.
The trainee system is part of it, but it's only one part.
There are also the entertainment companies and their in-house development structures. The choreography and performance training. Music shows. Fan platforms. Fandom-specific marketing. Comeback cycles. Photocards, lightsticks, fan signs, variety content and the frankly terrifying number of album versions my bank account would prefer we didn't discuss.
Not every K-pop artist uses every part of that machinery in exactly the same way. And the machinery itself has changed enormously over the years.
But it's an ecosystem.
And once I started thinking about K-pop that way, a few things that can otherwise seem contradictory became remarkably easy to explain.
Take a Thai idol who debuts through a Korean idol company.
They're still a K-pop idol.
If that idol releases a song in Thai while they're operating through that same Korean idol system, I don't see why the language should suddenly turn the release into Thai pop. K-pop groups have been making Japanese-language releases for the Japanese market for years, and we don't generally decide they've become J-pop groups every time they do it.
The system producing the artist and the release hasn't changed just because the language or target market has.
But we can flip that around too.
Imagine an established K-pop idol leaves the Korean idol industry, creates their own company elsewhere, signs with different partners and starts releasing music entirely through another country's music industry.
Does everything they make for the rest of their career remain K-pop simply because they once trained and debuted as a K-pop idol?
I don't think it does.
Their history hasn't disappeared. They can still accurately be described as a K-pop idol, particularly if they're still a member of a K-pop group. Their experience in that system will probably influence their work for the rest of their career.
But influence and biography aren't necessarily the same thing as the industrial classification of every new piece of music they make.
That distinction becomes important here because we're actually asking several different questions that are very easy to collapse into one:
Is this person a K-pop idol?
Is this group a K-pop group?
Is this particular release a K-pop release?
Those answers don't necessarily have to be identical.
And none of this means the Korean idol industry is some fixed machine preserved in amber.
K-pop companies experiment constantly. Idols push against conventions. Business models change. Technology changes. Promotion changes. The industry expands into new markets and absorbs new influences.
BTS are probably one of the clearest examples of why that distinction matters to me. They came through the Korean idol system, but they've also spent much of their career stretching what an idol group can do within it — musically, creatively and commercially.
Pushing against the boundaries of an industry doesn't mean you weren't produced by it.
Industries evolve because people inside them change them.
Which brings us back to KATSEYE.
Because their situation is different.
The interesting question isn't whether their training resembles K-pop.
We already know it does.
The people who created KATSEYE have been remarkably explicit about that.
The question is where that system was being used, who was using it, and what exactly they were trying to build with it.
So what actually created KATSEYE?
This is where things get interesting.
Because KATSEYE weren't created by a Korean entertainment company deciding to debut another idol group and then simply aiming that group at the American market.
They were created through a partnership between HYBE and Geffen Records.
And that distinction matters.
The project dates back to 2021, when HYBE and Universal Music Group announced a strategic partnership between HYBE and Geffen specifically to develop a new global girl group.
From the beginning, the idea was to combine expertise from two different entertainment industries.
HYBE brought the training and development system it had developed within the Korean idol industry.
Geffen brought its experience operating within the American music industry.
And rather than bringing a group of trainees through the Korean system in Seoul and exporting the finished product afterwards, they built the infrastructure for this project in the United States.
Global auditions were held, attracting more than 120,000 applicants. The selected trainees were brought into a training and development programme based in Los Angeles, where they trained in areas including dance, vocals and performance.
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| Trainees during the HYBE x Geffen development programme. Image: Netflix / Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE |
That training had already been happening for more than a year before most of us saw any of it.
This is another detail I think gets slightly lost when people talk about The Debut: Dream Academy, the public competition that eventually formed KATSEYE.
Dream Academy wasn't the entire KATSEYE training process.
It was the public-facing competition that came towards the end of a much longer development programme.
And HYBE and Geffen haven't exactly been vague about where the inspiration for that programme came from.
HYBE's own corporate website describes the goal of the partnership as creating a "U.S.-based, global girl group modeled on the world-renowned K-pop training & development system."
Bang Si-hyuk described the goal as creating an international group "based on K-pop methodology."
Geffen chairman John Janick talked about creating a global group using "the best of K-pop methodology" together with the Geffen team.
Mitra Darab, who led the HYBE x Geffen project, described it as making a girl group "under the K-pop methodology" and explained that they established a training and development centre in Los Angeles to do it.
There's a pattern here.
U.S.-based global girl group.
Based on K-pop methodology.
Modeled on the K-pop training and development system.
Global group using the best of K-pop methodology.
They're repeatedly describing two related things, but they aren't describing them as though they're identical.
There's what they were building.
And there's the system they were using to help build it.
Even KATSEYE's Sophia made essentially the same distinction when she described them as "a global girl group that was formed through K-pop training program."
That doesn't prove KATSEYE aren't K-pop.
I want to be very clear about that.
Corporate wording isn't a magical sorting hat, and I'm not going to build an entire argument around whether somebody at HYBE used the word "global" instead of "K-pop" in a press release.
But when the companies that designed the project, the executives running it and one of the members themselves repeatedly make the same distinction, I think it's worth paying attention to.
Especially because the corporate structure tells the same story.
KATSEYE's music isn't simply being released through one of HYBE's Korean idol labels.
They're operated through HYBE x Geffen — a joint venture combining a company rooted in the Korean idol industry with a major American record label.
Their training infrastructure was built in Los Angeles.
Their development model came from K-pop.
Their operational context was deliberately international and American.
In other words, KATSEYE aren't an accidental grey area.
The grey area was the project.
HYBE and Geffen deliberately took a system developed within the Korean idol industry and asked what would happen if they used it to build a global group within a different environment.
And at this point, I thought I had a fairly straightforward argument.
KATSEYE use a system derived from K-pop, but that doesn't necessarily make them K-pop.
Then I mentioned in my original KATSEYE discussion that the K-pop industry didn't invent its own system from scratch either, using Motown as an example.
Someone else then pointed out that J-pop was also an important inspiration for the K-pop system, which made the whole question considerably more interesting:
The K-pop industry didn't invent its own system from scratch either.
And then someone mentioned Motown and J-pop...
I'd already been thinking about Motown.
Not because I think Lee Soo-man sat down one day, copied the Motown handbook and invented K-pop. The history is considerably messier than that.
But the comparison is useful because Motown famously didn't just record people who happened to be talented singers.
Performers received choreography and performance training. Their presentation and public image were carefully considered. Artists were prepared for interviews and public appearances. Songwriting and production were organised through the company. Motown wasn't simply selling records. It was deliberately developing stars.
Sound familiar?
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| The Supremes in 1965. Promotional image: Motown Records / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. |
There are obvious differences between Motown's system and the modern Korean idol industry, and I don't want to pretend they're interchangeable. But the broader idea that a company can systematically develop performers rather than simply sign finished artists existed long before K-pop.
And Motown wasn't the only influence.
Someone responding to my original discussion pointed out that I was missing another rather important piece of the puzzle: Japan.
The Korean idol industry developed alongside — and borrowed from — an already established Japanese idol industry. Research into the development of K-pop has documented Japanese influence on Korean talent development, including the idea of recruiting young performers and developing them systematically before debut.
Lee Soo-man and SM Entertainment are particularly important here. The system SM helped establish in the 1990s took ideas that already existed elsewhere and adapted them for the Korean entertainment industry.
And that's the part I find interesting.
Because none of this makes K-pop fake, derivative or somehow less Korean.
That's how culture works.
Industries borrow from each other. Musicians borrow from each other. Companies see something working somewhere else and think, What could we do with that?
Then they change it.
They combine it with other influences.
They adapt it to their own market, culture, laws, audiences, technology and business structures.
And eventually the thing that comes out the other side can become recognisable as something in its own right.
That's essentially what happened with the Korean idol system.
It didn't emerge fully formed from a uniquely Korean vacuum. It developed through a mixture of Korean innovation and ideas borrowed and adapted from elsewhere.
But here's the thing.
We don't therefore call K-pop J-pop.
We don't call it Motown either.
Nobody looks at an SM group and says, Well, parts of the system that developed this group have historical roots in Japanese idol culture, so technically this is J-pop.
That would be ridiculous.
Because borrowing a method from another industry doesn't automatically make you part of that industry.
What matters is what happened to that method after it was borrowed.
It was brought into the South Korean entertainment industry.
It was adapted.
It evolved.
It became part of a larger Korean idol ecosystem with its own companies, practices, infrastructure and culture.
In other words, the Korean idol industry took ideas from elsewhere and made something of its own with them.
Which made me realise I'd been looking at the KATSEYE question in only one direction.
We spend a lot of time talking about how much K-pop has borrowed from other music industries.
But K-pop is now more than three decades into developing its own incredibly successful system.
So what happens when everyone else starts borrowing from K-pop?
What if K-pop is now doing the same thing?
This is where the KATSEYE question flipped around for me.
Because maybe what HYBE and Geffen are doing isn't actually that different from what entertainment industries have always done.
They saw a system that worked.
They took parts of it.
They transplanted it into a different entertainment industry.
And they adapted it.
The only difference is that this time, K-pop is the system being borrowed from.
That's significant.
For decades, conversations about K-pop's globalisation have often focused on the things K-pop has borrowed from elsewhere: American hip-hop and R&B, European electronic music, Japanese idol culture, Western songwriting and production, and so on.
But the Korean idol industry isn't just consuming and adapting other people's ideas anymore.
It has developed ideas that other entertainment industries now want to use.
The trainee and development system is one of them.
And KATSEYE are a particularly interesting example because this wasn't an American company quietly looking at K-pop and copying the bits it liked.
HYBE was actively involved in exporting its own system.
But it wasn't exporting that system into a vacuum.
It was partnering with Geffen Records and placing it inside an American entertainment industry that already has its own companies, labour structures, business practices, promotional systems, cultural expectations and audiences.
That matters because you can't transplant an industrial system into a completely different environment and expect absolutely nothing to change.
Some adaptation is inevitable.
And once the system is operating outside the Korean idol industry, those adaptations are happening in response to the environment it has been transplanted into.
That's exactly why the Motown and J-pop comparisons became so useful to me.
The Korean idol industry could borrow ideas from existing systems without becoming those systems.
So why would the reverse suddenly work differently?
If using methods influenced by Japanese idol development didn't make K-pop J-pop, then using methods developed by K-pop doesn't automatically make an American global group K-pop.
The influence is real.
The lineage is real.
The connection is real.
But ancestry isn't identity.
And I think there's a temptation to hear that argument as somehow taking something away from K-pop.
I see it as almost the exact opposite.
Because look at what we're actually saying.
A music industry that was once routinely dismissed outside Asia as manufactured, strange, niche or disposable has become so commercially and culturally successful that one of the biggest record companies in the United States looked at its artist-development model and said, essentially:
We want to learn how to do that.
That's enormous.
K-pop has become influential enough that its impact can no longer be measured only by album sales, streams, tours or how many Korean artists enter Western charts.
Its industrial practices themselves are becoming an export.
And exports don't have to remain identical to their place of origin in order for that influence to matter.
In fact, the adaptation may be the point.
KATSEYE may therefore be evidence of something much bigger than another K-pop group becoming successful internationally.
They may be evidence that parts of the Korean idol system are becoming building blocks for new kinds of pop acts outside Korea.
The process starts to look something like this:
Borrowing → transplantation → adaptation → localisation → something new.
Which is why I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that KATSEYE must be K-pop simply because the system used to develop them came from K-pop.
If we apply that rule consistently, influence becomes identity.
And eventually we end up classifying everything by its ancestors rather than by the industry it actually operates in.
So at this point in my research, I was feeling pretty confident.
KATSEYE were created using a system derived from K-pop, but outside the Korean idol industry.
The system had been transplanted into an American context and combined with Geffen's infrastructure.
Case closed.
Right?
Unfortunately, no.
Because KATSEYE had one more problem waiting for me.
HYBE didn't just hand Geffen an instruction manual and go home.
But KATSEYE make this annoyingly complicated
There is, unfortunately, a rather large HYBE-shaped problem with everything I just said.
Because this would all be much easier if Geffen had simply looked at the Korean idol system, copied it and created KATSEYE on its own.
They didn't.
HYBE is right there.
Not as an outside consultant. Not as an inspiration. Not as a company whose methods Geffen studied from afar.
As a partner.
HYBE and Geffen created the project together. HYBE personnel helped design and run the training programme. KATSEYE are operated through HYBE x Geffen. They're on Weverse. They've promoted on Korean music shows. They interact with HYBE's wider artist ecosystem.
They are, in other words, considerably more connected to the K-pop industry than my nice, neat transplantation argument would ideally like them to be.
Annoying.
And this creates what I think is the strongest argument for calling KATSEYE K-pop.
What if we're not actually watching another entertainment industry borrow the K-pop system?
What if we're watching the K-pop industry itself expand beyond South Korea?
That's a different proposition.
Industries don't necessarily stay inside national borders forever.
Companies become multinational. Supply chains cross countries. Production moves. Businesses establish overseas subsidiaries and joint ventures. An industry that originated in one country can eventually operate across many of them.
HYBE certainly isn't behaving like a company that thinks the Korean idol model needs to remain in Korea.
It has established operations in the United States, Japan and Latin America. And KATSEYE are only one example of HYBE experimenting with ways to develop artists for different markets.
Bang Si-hyuk has even talked about projects like KATSEYE in terms of expanding the broader "K-pop universe."
So maybe my definition has a problem.
If I say K-pop is the output of the South Korean idol industry, what happens when companies from that industry deliberately start building parts of the industry somewhere else?
Does the industry stop being the Korean idol industry the moment part of its operation crosses a border?
That seems too simple.
And KATSEYE's participation in Korean idol infrastructure complicates things further.
They've appeared on Korean music shows.
They use Weverse.
They're covered extensively by Korean entertainment media.
They've participated in HYBE projects alongside groups that nobody would hesitate to call K-pop.
You can make a perfectly reasonable argument that KATSEYE aren't merely influenced by the K-pop ecosystem.
They're participating in it.
And if that's where you draw the boundary, then calling KATSEYE K-pop makes considerably more sense.
This is also where I think it's important not to cheat.
It would be very easy for me to define K-pop in exactly the way necessary to exclude KATSEYE and then declare victory.
But that's not particularly useful.
If my definition only works when I ignore every inconvenient thing KATSEYE do, then I don't have a very good definition.
And these are inconvenient facts.
KATSEYE exist inside an unusual overlap between two industries.
They were developed in Los Angeles through a joint American-Korean project using Korean idol methodology.
They release through HYBE x Geffen.
They operate primarily as a global pop act.
And they also move through parts of the Korean idol ecosystem.
That's not a clean boundary.
Maybe there isn't one anymore.
Maybe KATSEYE are evidence that K-pop has reached the point where "South Korean idol industry" is simply too geographically restrictive a definition.
Maybe K-pop is becoming a transnational production system — one that originated in South Korea but can now produce K-pop artists anywhere.
I think that's the strongest version of the argument against my position.
And I still don't quite buy it.
Why that still doesn't quite convince me
The problem I keep coming back to is this:
If KATSEYE are K-pop because HYBE is involved, where does K-pop end?
Not geographically.
Conceptually.
Because HYBE isn't only trying this in the United States.
The company has been building operations in Japan and Latin America too, developing artists for those markets using knowledge and systems that originated in the Korean idol industry.
Imagine that process continues.
A Korean entertainment company establishes a division in another country.
It recruits local trainees.
They train locally.
The company hires local staff and partners with local businesses.
The artists release music through local industry infrastructure, promote primarily within that market and make music aimed at that audience.
And because they're operating within a different entertainment industry, the original Korean system inevitably adapts to local business practices, laws, labour expectations, media structures and culture.
At what point does that stop being the Korean idol industry operating abroad and become a new local system descended from it?
If the answer is never, then K-pop becomes an inherited label.
Anything produced by a company descended from the Korean idol industry remains K-pop indefinitely, no matter where it operates, how much the system changes or how deeply it becomes embedded in another country's entertainment industry.
I don't think that's particularly useful.
And we've already accepted the reverse.
The Korean idol industry borrowed and adapted ideas from entertainment industries that existed before it.
We don't classify K-pop according to those ancestors.
We classify the system that emerged after those influences were absorbed, adapted and combined within South Korea.
So I can't find a convincing reason to apply a completely different rule when K-pop becomes the exporter.
If borrowing and adapting Japanese idol practices didn't make the resulting Korean industry Japanese, then borrowing and adapting Korean idol practices doesn't automatically make the resulting system Korean.
HYBE's involvement makes the lineage unusually direct.
It doesn't erase the process of localisation.
And I think that's where the distinction between participating in an ecosystem and being produced by an industry becomes useful.
KATSEYE perform on Korean music shows.
Absolutely.
But performing on M Countdown doesn't retroactively move their training programme from Los Angeles to Seoul or turn Geffen Records into a Korean idol company.
They use Weverse.
So do artists outside K-pop.
They work with HYBE personnel and participate in HYBE projects.
Of course they do. HYBE is literally one half of the joint venture that created them.
Those connections tell us that KATSEYE have a very close relationship with the K-pop industry.
They don't necessarily tell us that KATSEYE are a product of the Korean idol industry.
And there's another thing that bothers me about using participation as the deciding factor.
K-pop has spent years becoming more globally connected.
K-pop artists collaborate with Western artists. Western producers and songwriters work on K-pop records. Korean artists promote in the United States. Western artists appear on Korean television. Companies partner across borders. Fan platforms host artists from multiple industries.
If every point of contact changes an artist's industrial classification, the categories stop telling us very much.
An ecosystem can overlap with another ecosystem without becoming the same ecosystem.
Which brings me back, again, to HYBE x Geffen.
The entire point of that partnership was that the two companies brought different expertise to the project.
HYBE brought its experience developing idols.
Geffen brought its experience operating within the American music industry.
If those two things were already the same industry, there wouldn't have been much to combine.
KATSEYE exist because those systems met.
And the result reflects both of them.
That's why "K-pop-influenced" doesn't feel strong enough to describe KATSEYE, but "K-pop group" still doesn't feel accurate to me either.
They're not standing outside K-pop borrowing a few aesthetic ideas.
Their connection goes much deeper than that.
But they're also not simply another group produced through the Korean idol industry.
They're something that became possible because the Korean idol system could be taken somewhere else, combined with another industry's infrastructure and adapted into something new.
And maybe that's the part we're missing when we keep trying to squeeze KATSEYE back into a category we already know.
Maybe the more interesting question isn't whether KATSEYE fit inside K-pop.
Maybe it's what comes after K-pop becomes influential enough that other industries start building with it.
Maybe we're watching K-pop create descendants
Maybe part of the problem is that we're trying to describe something new using categories that were created before it existed.
For most of K-pop's history, the direction of travel was relatively easy to understand.
The Korean idol industry developed artists in South Korea and then exported those artists and their music to the rest of the world.
The reach became global.
The industry producing them remained recognisably Korean.
But exporting an artist isn't the same thing as exporting the system that creates the artist.
And that's the shift I think KATSEYE represent.
HYBE didn't develop KATSEYE in Korea and then send them to America.
It took knowledge developed within the Korean idol industry, partnered with an American record company and built an infrastructure in Los Angeles capable of using that knowledge there.
That's a fundamentally different kind of globalisation.
And KATSEYE aren't the only sign that this is happening.
HYBE has been experimenting with localisation in multiple markets. Other companies have done the same. Different projects use different structures, so I'm not going to throw every internationally developed group into one convenient new category either.
I've just spent an entire article complaining about people doing exactly that.
But the direction is interesting.
We may be reaching a point where K-pop's most important global export isn't always the idols themselves.
Sometimes it's the knowledge of how to make them.
And once that knowledge travels, other entertainment industries can do what the Korean industry once did with ideas it encountered elsewhere.
Borrow.
Adapt.
Combine.
Localise.
Build something new.
That doesn't mean the connection to K-pop disappears.
Quite the opposite.
A descendant only exists because something came before it.
You can acknowledge where a system came from, recognise the enormous influence of the thing that inspired it and still allow the result to develop an identity of its own.
Maybe that's what we're beginning to see with KATSEYE and other global idol projects.
Not the disappearance of K-pop.
Not necessarily the expansion of the label "K-pop" until it covers every artist developed using Korean methods.
But the beginning of a world in which K-pop has descendants.
And honestly, I think that's far more interesting.
So, are KATSEYE K-pop?
After all of that, my answer is still no.
I don't think KATSEYE are a K-pop group.
But probably not for any of the reasons people usually reach for first.
It's not because most of their music is in English.
It's not because they don't have Korean members. They do; they have one.
It's not because they're based in the United States.
It's not because their music doesn't "sound K-pop enough," whatever that would even mean.
And it's definitely not because I think there's some purity test an artist has to pass before they're allowed into K-pop.
It's because I don't think K-pop is a musical genre in the first place.
I think it's an industry classification.
KATSEYE were created through a joint project between HYBE and Geffen that deliberately took a training and development system developed within the Korean idol industry and transplanted it into an American environment.
HYBE brought one set of expertise.
Geffen brought another.
The training infrastructure was built in Los Angeles. The group was designed to be global. And the people who actually created the project have repeatedly described KATSEYE as a global or U.S.-based global girl group formed through, modeled on or based on K-pop methodology.
That distinction makes sense to me.
KATSEYE are deeply connected to K-pop.
They are unquestionably a product of K-pop's influence.
They participate in parts of the K-pop ecosystem.
And without the Korean idol industry, KATSEYE as we know them probably wouldn't exist.
None of that requires them to be K-pop.
Because influence isn't identity.
Methodology isn't identity.
And ancestry isn't identity.
If it were, we'd have to start tracing every entertainment system backwards through everything it ever borrowed from, and eventually the categories would become useless.
K-pop itself deserves more credit than that.
The Korean idol industry spent decades taking influences from elsewhere, adapting them, experimenting with them and building an extraordinarily successful system of its own.
Now that system has become influential enough that the process can run in the other direction.
Other markets can borrow from K-pop.
Korean companies can export their expertise.
New partnerships can combine Korean idol development with local entertainment industries.
And the things that emerge from that process don't have to remain K-pop forever in order for K-pop's influence on them to matter.
I also don't think people who call KATSEYE K-pop are being ridiculous.
There is a genuine grey area here.
HYBE didn't disappear after handing Geffen a trainee manual. KATSEYE still operate within parts of HYBE's ecosystem. They promote in Korea. They appear on Korean music shows. They use infrastructure strongly associated with K-pop.
And if your definition of K-pop has expanded from the Korean idol industry to a transnational idol-production system that originated in Korea, you're probably going to reach a different conclusion than I did.
I can understand that argument.
It just isn't the definition I find most useful.
Because once K-pop becomes something that can be detached from the Korean idol industry, transplanted anywhere in the world, adapted to another entertainment industry and still remain K-pop simply because we can trace the methodology back to Korea, I'm no longer sure what boundary the term describes.
I'd rather acknowledge the influence without collapsing the distinction.
So no.
I don't think KATSEYE are K-pop.
I think they're something arguably more interesting: a global pop group that could only exist because K-pop became influential enough for its system, and not just its music, to go global.
And maybe that's the story we've been missing while arguing about which box to put them in.
KATSEYE don't have to be K-pop for their existence to tell us something remarkable about K-pop.
They might be showing us what happens after the influence becomes bigger than the label.
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