From Stray Kids to Aespa, K-pop-loving business expert breaks down the industry’s systems

Like many other things in Korea, K-pop rarely pauses to explain itself. New groups debut, concepts cycle, controversies surface and fade. The industry absorbs the moment, recalibrates and quickly moves on.

That forward momentum has long been part of its appeal. It is also what makes the system difficult to read from the outside.

However, beneath the choreography and camera-ready polish, a quieter question persists: why does K-pop feel so engineered, not just in sound or style, but in how its artists are trained, presented and sustained over time?

That question sits at the centre of Almost Everything You Need to Know About K-pop, a new book by Choi Jung-kiu that was published in Korea in December. Positioned as a cultural primer, the book breaks K-pop down into its working parts, grounding its analysis in concrete examples drawn from active idol groups, recent releases and everyday industry practices.

Rather than treating K-pop as a trend-driven genre or a series of isolated successes, Choi frames it as a system shaped over time, one in which training, production, performance, technology and fandom are designed to move in unison.

“My perspective is a product of ‘dual citizenship’ in the worlds of global strategy and K-pop fandom,” Choi says. With over two decades of experience at consulting firms such as McKinsey and Kearney, and now as a partner at Boston Consulting Group Singapore, he brings an analytical lens to a field he has long followed as a fan.