In 1953, Seoul lay in ruins. Seventy years later, a band from the same city was filling stadiums on five continents, with audiences singing back lyrics in a language most of them did not speak. How did this happen?
The conventional answer is talent, hard work, and a dedicated fanbase. All of that is true. The seven members of BTS spent years training before they ever performed for a paying audience, wrote and produced much of their own music, and built a relationship with their listeners that few artists in any era have matched. But it is not the whole story, and it is not the most interesting part. How BTS Conquered the World is an analysis of the infrastructure that made BTS possible - the half-century of broadband networks, studio software, recommendation algorithms, smartphones, and translation systems that, between them, dismantled the gatekeepers of the twentieth-century music industry and built something new in their place.
Drawing on reporting from the BBC, Reuters, and Rolling Stone, alongside two Harvard Business School case studies on Big Hit Entertainment and the BTS phenomenon, this book traces how a small country devastated by war chose to build an industrial economy, then a wired one, then a cultural-export one - and how seven young men from Seoul stepped into the resulting global system and made something inside it that millions of people, in dozens of countries and dozens of languages, decided they could not do without. From the rise of YouTube as the world's largest music distribution platform, through the streaming economy that has rewritten how music makes money, to the algorithmic gatekeepers that have replaced the human ones, this is a book about the architecture of modern fame - and about what happens when seven specific human beings are asked to live at the centre of it.
Sitting at the intersection of history, technology, and music, How BTS Conquered the World is for readers who want to understand not just what happened, but why it happened, what it took from the people at the centre of it, and what it cost.
