K-Pop Songs, Translations, and Profiles

We thought these two charts would be interesting to display side-by-side as we were curious if a larger and more diverse discography in any way correlated to an increase in popularity -- it doesn't seem to! Fascinatingly enough, we stumbled upon a new comparison: the dramatic spread in popularity and recognition among our 10 groups internationally vs. in South Korea.

Popularity/Brand Reputation Ranking from K-Pop Official.

Line distribution is the amount of lines any given member of a group gets to sing/rap on a track, typically in comparison to the other members. We found this relevant to include, because line distribution is an incredibly common talking-point within the K-Pop community. We calculated the total line count for each member (and of the song as a whole) through adding full lines and ad-libs together.

Doing this happened to create some interesting situations! For example, one member of Stray Kids, Felix, got less full lines than most of the other members in their song Back Door, but ended up with the highest line count due to his increased amount of ad-libs throughout the track.

Next, we wanted to compare the number of verses and choruses of each song side-by-side. You can see very little variance between songs (other than GOT7's Lullaby having slightly more verses than the rest), but this was rather expected. The reason behind showing you this regularity is to point out the immense forumlaic nature of K-Pop music. It's all constructed the same way, every song is built on a borderline indentical foundation. Even when the songs have wildly different styles and explore such different genres, they all share the same core structure, which is what gives K-Pop its specific, recognizable "sound."

You can read more about the process of writing K-Pop and J-Pop (Japanese Pop) music in this article.

Finally, we decided to compare the amount of roles taken by the members of two very different groups. For anyone unaware, "roles" are their duties a member has within a group, e.g. they sing, they dance, the write/produce the music, etc. It's important to note that one member can fulfill multiple roles within a group, and these graphs are counting all of that -- for example, if a member is both a rapper and dancer, the graph will count that as one rapper and one dancer. We did it that way so that idols who are prolific and well-known in multiple roles won't get miscounted (take RM from BTS as an example, his main role is "leader," but he is also a key rapper for the group).

These two charts are looking at two groups who focus on extremely different sounds/styles/aesthetics. Twice is mostly an aesthetic group with a lesser focus on vocals and dancing. They don't produce any of their own music. Contrast this with Stray Kids, who are a rap/dance focused group with three producers.