[EAI Working Paper] YouTube Comments Speak of BTS

Editor's Note

The East Asia Institute (EAI) launched the "BTS Charm Theory" research team in September 2019. Ahead of the publication of the monograph "The Global Charm Story of BTS," which analyzes the BTS phenomenon from the perspectives of cultural sociology, communication studies, and international politics, EAI is releasing "The BTS Phenomenon and Engaging Storytelling" as its second working paper series.

This study presents big data analysis on BTS's fandom and fan sentiment, focusing on comments from the YouTube music videos of BTS's 2020 new songs, 'Stay Gold' and 'Dynamite.' It analyzes how comments are used within the BTS fandom 'ARMY' and what their main content is.

※ The following is an excerpt of the content. Please refer to the attached file above for the full version.

The Social Media-Savvy Group BTS: It's Time to Focus on YouTube MV Comments

BTS, the global seven-member boy group from South Korea, has achieved unprecedented success, including four number-one entries on the Billboard Album and Singles charts as of late September 2020. This success has spurred active academic engagement. Existing research suggests that BTS's strategic use of social media to communicate directly with fans and provide diverse content, overcoming limitations in exposure to mass media faced by groups from small to medium-sized agencies at their debut, played a crucial role in building a global fandom.

YouTube, a social media platform, serves as a primary communication space where artists release music videos (MVs) through official channels and fans share their thoughts and opinions on the MVs without temporal or spatial constraints. Despite the vast and exponentially growing volume of information exchanged here, academic approaches remain limited. This paper aims to offer insights into the formation and expansion of K-pop fandom through YouTube by analyzing the types of comments predominantly found on BTS's recent MVs, whether comment patterns differ between Korean and English comments, how comment patterns change depending on the song, even for the same artist, and finally, whether comments evolve over time.

To this end, we conducted a text analysis of comments from two of BTS's most recent MVs released through their agency's official YouTube channel in June and August 2020, 'Stay Gold' and 'Dynamite.' The analysis focuses on differences in comments based on language (Korean and English) and the time elapsed since the MV's release. Prior to the analysis, we will first provide background information on the evolution of music videos, fan activities on YouTube, and cultural differences among fandoms.

The Evolution and Transformation of Music Videos

While music itself has a history too ancient to pinpoint its exact origins, its popularization began in the late 1800s with the invention of recording technology, record production techniques, and mass media such as radio. From the 1950s onwards, music transcended its auditory form to merge with visual media (video) in the form of music videos (MVs), a new audiovisual medium initially introduced as a significant way for people to enjoy music. The cable channel MTV, which began broadcasting in the United States on August 1, 1981, greatly contributed to the mass consumption of MVs and enjoyed a golden age until the late 1990s. Subsequently, with the advent of digital technology innovations and a downturn in the music industry, MVs shifted their primary distribution channels from television to the internet.

YouTube, a video-sharing site launched in the United States on December 15, 2005, offered an interface that allowed users to easily and conveniently watch MVs online without the need to download MV files, moving away from the file-sharing methods prevalent for consuming MVs on the internet at the time. It has since achieved global success and, as of October 2020, stands as the most influential online video-sharing platform and the second most visited internet site worldwide after Google.

Social media, which gained traction in the 2000s, has blurred the lines between producers and consumers, erased the distinction between mass media and personal media, and minimized physical and resource-based constraints in communication with the public. YouTube, embodying these characteristics of social media, allows agencies to create official channels and officially release MVs. This enables them to bypass reliance on traditional mass media and expand the audience for MV viewership from specific regions to a global scale, overcoming temporal and spatial limitations.

■ Author:Lee Hye-eun_Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media, Ewha Womans University. She majored in Statistics at Ewha Womans University, with a double major in Journalism and Broadcasting, and completed her Master's and Ph.D. in Communication at Michigan State University. She began her academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu in 2007 and received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in July 2014. Her primary research areas include research methodology, human communication, and particularly intercultural communication, focusing on cross-cultural comparisons of interpersonal communication. She has published over 40 papers in various international journals across communication, psychology, hotel management, and social welfare, including "I am sorry to send you SPAM": Cross-cultural differences in use of apologies in e-mail advertising in Korea and USA" in Human Communication Research, one of the top journals in communication. Her recent publication is "Young Women's Sex Talk Online: Roles of Anonymity, Social Closeness, and Cultural Background on Perceived Appropriateness and Behavioral Intention" in Psychology of Women Quarterly.

■ Managed and Edited by: Jeon Ju-hyun, EAI Research Fellow

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