Fictional K-pop bands zoom to top of US music charts

Yeah. Also sounds like Gorillaz (which for those unfamiliar is a cartoon "fictional band" publicly associated with Damon Albarn from Blur, one of the iconic British bands of the nineties. Their mixture of catchy music and cartoon characters sold very well when they launched in the early 2000s, collaborated with other bestselling artists and are still releasing albums, and even touring with a cartoon band projected behind the silhouetted actual band). Would an obscure cartoonist releasing similarly catchy songs without a Blur connection have gained the momentum to manage multiplatinum albums and UK No 1s? Probably not...

> vocal performance by members of Twice, consistently one of the most popular kpop groups in the past decade

This is lampshaded in the movie where HUNTR/X is a clear number one, Twice is #2 and then the others are WAAAY behind :)

"Fictional band" is pretty apt considering it's a band that appears in a work of fiction. I think it's just that with the rise of AIslop, one might think that it means a completely made up band that's just computer-generated, and not real voice actors performing in character with professional musicians composing, arranging and performing the music.

In many ways I find Korean music to encapsulate the worst parts of capitalism, the way they order the younger and most impressionable (AKA manipulable) fans of k-pop bands to post about those non-stop in their social media accounts to the point the sites suspect them of being spam bots ("stans" as they call them in modern lingo), the way they strongly push for people to call them "idols" and not just "celebrities", "singers" or "boy bands", the way that even genres that used to be dominated by outcasts like metal are now pre-selected with members that have zero ownership of the band and zero input in the creation of the songs melodies such as baby metal, that is all corporate selected and audience researched, in many ways it's the best example of last stage capitalism of the music business.

Yea, I picked it as a rainy day movie for the family.

Didn't expect to have the biggest laugh I've had for a movie this year (the popcorn eyes bit) and almost teared up at the end because of the music.

...And now the kids are obsessed with finding more Kpop that sounds like HUNTR/X :D

I mean, I think the dances used to promote the song are just part of the film, like any other music video that isn't just the band playing the song (my mind immediately fell to The White Stripes: Fell In Love With a Girl but there must be tonnes of examples).

I think that a song by a vtuber is unlikely to top the charts right now because they're still not quite mainstream enough for that. I think the current perception of them is similar to how anime was perceived in the past ("Look at all those weebs simping over their fictional girlfriends"), but it is heading towards mainstream. HoloEN did a lot to popularise it in the western world, and I don't think it's unlikely that a song by a vtuber could gain more widespread popularity in the near future. They have the talent for it, it's just not quite escaped the "streamer" bubble

> K-pop is probably the most commercial genre that ever existed

Italo Disco would like to have a word I think ;)

Arte TV aired a really good documentary about the Italo Disco phenomenon recently, unfortunately it doesn't seem to be officially available on the internet yet - but they basically had it all, factory-line produced music with singers and "stage artists" being entirely different people, but among all that trash also sometimes really good stuff.

And they used synthesizers as "shameless" as nobody else, today they would go full AI slop I think.

Actually it's a state / military backed venture.

It’s not that long ago that League of Legends virtual Kpop band KD/A was charting world wide.

I've always hated pop music because something like this was the logical end of it. I'm glad to see it frankly.

I remember my girlfriend at the time scoffing at "Clooney's singing"... Um, it was dubbed by an already successful bluegrass band, and won a Grammy.

Gorillaz had five top-ten albums in the US, of which two were number one in the UK.

> K-Pop is also becoming more widely popular outside of Asian countries (see BTS),

Its probably more accurate to say k pop has already peaked its been popular massively in the west for almost a decade since at least 2016

Blackpink, newjeans, and BTS are all mega acts that are on their nth albums, the trend for kpop is fully established not really emerging just now.

You do raise an extremely good ontopic point about gorillaz being a prior example of a fictional band. I always hated their mtv cribs episode because their fake animated house always scored no.1 on the best of cribs lists.

The example that came to mind for me is The Monkees.

Fictional bands and artist are pretty common in Japan and also sweeped over to South-Korea at some point I think. But funny enough, the oldest are western bands. Remember "Alvin and the Chipmunks"? From 1958, with new series and movies even released today. Long before the first virtual Idol appeared in Japan in 198x. It seems in the 60s&70s there were a bunch of them in the USA, from Hanna-Barbera and others. Japan started with Macross in 1981 and continued for decades until today. I guess, now South-Korea and probably China are trying to take the crown of anime and virtual artists, they had some very disruptive successes in the last years.

When you can get Murdoc of Gorillaz, preloaded with both? :D

Did you mean Josie and the Pussycats?

This is just an animated movie sound track which had a normal production team and voice actors.

If by "all these bands", you mean BTS and Blackpink, they do not exist only in fiction. They are flesh and blood entertainers.

This article isn’t referring to ai generated music