The album bubble
was the first to crack

In the first three months of 2024, Korea’s popular music industry encountered an unfamiliar word: decline. The album sales curve—which had risen steadily for nine years without a single pause—began to bend downward, falling by approximately 14.9% (about 8 million units) year-on-year to 47.6 million units as of the first half. For the full year, sales ultimately dropped 19.5%, marking the first such decline since 2014.

What’s intriguing is that this rift didn’t originate in music. The songs hadn’t deteriorated, nor had fans abandoned the genre. What collapsed wasn’t the music itself, but rather the “way of counting”. The real event of the first quarter wasn’t a new song—it was the unsettling of a single line in the accounting ledger that had long propped up K-POP.

For the past several years, the phrase “the era of 100 million K-pop album sales” has functioned almost like an article of faith. Yet a significant portion of that figure does not reflect individual fans purchasing one album to listen to it. Instead, it stems from a system in which fans buy the same album dozens or even hundreds of times—primarily to boost chart rankings and secure entry into fan-signing events—especially through Chinese fandoms’ group purchases (gonggu), which have artificially inflated initial sales volumes.

In 2024, this engine ground to a halt. Stricter Chinese regulatory controls on fan-driven fundraising curbed mass-purchase campaigns, while fans themselves grew increasingly fatigued by marketing tactics—such as releasing dozens of versions and random photo cards—that encouraged repeated purchases of the same album. Environmental criticism targeting plastic CD packaging added further pressure. In other words, sales volume did not decline; rather, the artificially inflated portion was removed.

The first-quarter figures were even more painful because the industry’s scale was overly concentrated on a handful of mega-sized IPs. The gunbaekgi—the period following BTS’s suspension of group activities to begin mandatory military service—revealed how precariously K-pop’s center of gravity had tilted, with the absence of just one group threatening to weaken the entire industry’s cohesion.

Major entertainment agencies’ first-quarter financial reports reflected this reality exactly. Although revenues increased thanks to the “new-artist effect,” some agencies saw their operating profits decline—or even plunge into the red. This simultaneous rise in sales and deterioration in profitability candidly revealed the limits of “push-out growth”—a model that generates more content, spends more on marketing, and leaves less profit behind.

A counterargument is possible: although album sales have declined, K-POP has not cooled off. Indeed, during the same first half of the year, ticket sales for popular music concerts rose 57.5% year-on-year to approximately ₩300.8 billion—more than offsetting the decline in album sales.

This is precisely where the true significance of the first-quarter incident lies. The center of gravity of value has begun shifting from “ownership” to “experience,” from CDs piling up in warehouses to people gathering in person. An industry in which one person buys 100 albums is fragile, but one in which 100 people each buy one album and collectively fill a concert hall is resilient. What emerged once the bubble burst was not crisis—but rather, the outlines of real demand, previously obscured by numbers.

Remembering Q1 2024 solely as “the quarter when sales declined” means seeing only half the picture. This was the quarter when K-POP first confronted the accounting bubble it had inflated around itself. Put provocatively, the decline was not a sign of the industry’s illness, but rather a health checkup report.

The question is no longer “How many photos will we produce?” It is now: How do we calculate the value of a single fan—not in 100 photos, but over their lifetime? How do we sustain the industry not with a handful of heroes, but with a robust middle layer? The cracks that emerged in the first quarter have, for the first time, posed these far more difficult and honest questions to K-POP.