[Samseog Ko's Insight]BTS Is Home. Now Comes the Harder Work.

Korea has built one of the world's most beloved pop cultures. Whether we build an ecosystem truly worthy of it is a question we can no longer defer.

By  Samseog Ko

Author, The Next Korean Wave  ·  Distinguished Chair Professor, Dongguk University  · Member, National Artificial Intelligence Strategy Committee, Republic of Korea,   former Commissioner(KCC),

Seoul — March 21, 2026 Originally published in Korean in Firenze's Table (피렌체의 식탁, Medici Media, Seoul), March 20, 2026.  Adapted and expanded by the author for international readers.

Today, as I write this, up to 260,000 people are gathering at Gwanghwamun Square in the heart of Seoul. BTS is coming home.

After nearly four years apart — divided by mandatory military service — the seven members stand together again on a stage in front of the plaza that has witnessed some of the defining moments of modern Korean history. Netflix is carrying the concert live to roughly 190 countries. Economists are already calculating the ripple effects and reaching for comparisons to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. The phrase "BTSnomics" has entered the conversation.

I have spent much of my career at the intersection of Korean media, culture, and technology policy — as a Standing Commissioner (Vice Minister level) of the Korea Communications Commission, in the Office of the President, in the National Assembly, and now as a professor and as a member of the Presidential AI Strategy Committee. I have watched the Korean Wave build from a regional curiosity into a genuine global force, and I wrote about where it is heading in my book The Next Korean Wave.

Today, watching the crowds gather at Gwanghwamun, I feel two things simultaneously: genuine pride, and a kind of productive unease.

The unease is this: BTS's return is a mirror. And mirrors, if you look at them honestly, show you not only what you've achieved — but what you haven't yet built.

The question is not whether K-culture has arrived. It has. The question is whether Korea is building an ecosystem worthy of what it has become.

What BTS Actually Did to the World

Let me be precise about BTS's achievement, because it is too often described in terms of chart positions and streaming numbers — and that misses the deeper structural shifts they drove.

Before BTS, K-pop was largely an Asian and Latin American phenomenon. It was admired, but not taken seriously as mainstream by Western industry gatekeepers. BTS didn't just cross that threshold. They demolished it. They reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 — in Korean. They became the first Asian act to win at the American Music Awards. They earned Grammy nominations in an industry that had treated non-English music as a novelty for decades. They proved, in the most commercially legible way possible, that a song's message matters more than its language. That proof has since opened doors for artists from dozens of countries.

But the more consequential shift was in what they did to the fan-artist relationship. ARMY — their fandom — was never a passive audience. From the beginning, BTS treated their fans as collaborators: sharing daily life on social media when other idol groups maintained careful mystery, building elaborate narrative universes across albums and music videos that invited fans to interpret and co-create. ARMY translated press coverage, organized global charity campaigns, amplified social justice movements, and moved chart numbers through coordinated collective action. The fan stopped being a consumer of culture and became a co-owner of it. That model is now widely copied, but BTS invented the template.

And commercially, BTS effectively built HYBE. Big Hit Entertainment was a mid-tier agency when BTS debuted in 2013. BTS turned it into a global entertainment conglomerate. The irony is precise and worth naming: HYBE made BTS, and BTS made HYBE a world-class company. Rolling Stone captured it well: BTS "redefined how the world communicates through music." The BBC called them "the 21st Century Beatles — and simultaneously, something entirely their own."

Question 1: Does Our Infrastructure Match Our Ambition?

Here is something worth sitting with on a day like today: one reason BTS is performing in a public plaza is that South Korea doesn't have a single permanent concert venue with a capacity of 50,000 or more. The BTS world tour — 79 shows across 34 cities — will begin not at some landmark Seoul arena, but at Goyang Sports Complex Stadium, a multipurpose facility north of the capital that was built for athletics, not music.

Most major K-pop concerts in this country happen in converted sports stadiums. We have built a world-class content industry. We have not yet built a world-class content experience industry.

This is a policy failure, and I acknowledge it with some discomfort given my years in cultural policy. The United States operates more than 130 stadiums with capacities exceeding 40,000. Las Vegas's Sphere has redefined what a concert can be — an immersive, technology-integrated experience where the building itself becomes part of the artwork. COSM is building a new market category around XR-enabled venues that combine sport and performance. Japan and Singapore are both investing in large-scale performance infrastructure as explicit national strategic priorities.

We have celebrated the product while underinvesting in the stage.

A nation's cultural competitiveness in the coming decade will be determined not only by what it creates, but by the quality of the spaces and technologies through which people experience it.

This is not just a facilities problem — it is a strategic one. Korean cultural policy has focused heavily on content production subsidies and export promotion. It has been much slower to recognize the "experience economy" as equally critical infrastructure. We need purpose-built K-pop arenas. We need immersive XR venues. The Gwanghwamun concert will turn that plaza into a global IP almost overnight — much as the Netflix animated series K-Pop Demon Hunters recently made Namsan and Naksan Park into international tourist destinations. Imagine if that kind of impact were the result of deliberate design, not happy accident.

Question 2: Is K-Culture Inclusive Enough for the World That Loves It?

For three decades, we measured the success of the Korean Wave in export terms: how much Korean content went abroad, how many markets it reached, how many fans it gained. Those metrics produced real results. K-pop, K-drama, K-food, K-beauty — all have achieved extraordinary global reach. But a recent wave of anti-Hallyu sentiment emerging in Southeast Asia is a signal we should not dismiss.

A K-pop concert in Malaysia recently triggered online conflicts between Korean and Southeast Asian fan communities. Some users moved toward boycotts of Korean content and products. Southeast Asian netizens organized under the hashtag #SEAbling — Southeast Asian Siblings — in a rare show of regional solidarity against what some perceived as cultural condescension. Experts who have studied the episode note that what surfaced was not just a fan dispute but an accumulation of something deeper: a sense among some Southeast Asian audiences that they are welcome as consumers of K-culture, but not as equals within it.

Cultural researchers call this dynamic "sibling rivalry" — conflict is most acute between cultures that are close, not distant. The closeness that K-culture has achieved with Southeast Asia is itself a measure of how far we've come. But closeness also creates the conditions for resentment when the relationship remains asymmetrical. K-culture is still largely structured as: Korea creates, the world consumes. That is an unstable foundation for long-term global influence.

Sustainable cultural power is built through participation, not broadcast. I believe we need to shift from an export strategy to what I call a co-evolution strategy: building a K-culture ecosystem in which global audiences — particularly in the regions that loved us earliest and most loyally — are not consumers but co-creators.

K-culture exports have been extraordinary. But a culture that only flows one direction eventually meets resistance. The next chapter requires genuine co-creation.

BTS already showed us how. ARMY was never treated as a passive audience to be marketed to. It was built into the creative and commercial structure of the enterprise from day one — a genuine partner in the cultural project. We should take that lesson seriously at the level of industry strategy and government policy, not just for music, but across all of K-culture.

Question 3: Are We Ready for the AI Era in Culture?

The third challenge concerns me most in my capacity as an AI policy advisor, and as someone who has watched the Korean content industry up close for two decades. The global content industry is in the middle of a structural transformation — from content competition to what I call entertech: the convergence of entertainment and technology.

AI is reshaping how content is produced. Data analytics are restructuring how fandoms are managed and monetized. Immersive technologies are fundamentally changing what it means to experience a performance. The competitive landscape is shifting from a race between creators to a race between ecosystems.

South Korea has world-class content production capability — no one disputes that. What we lack is a systematic national strategy that bridges our content strength and our AI ambitions. The current administration has set "Cultural Powerhouse" and "AI Powerhouse" as twin national goals. But in practice, the two industries are developing on parallel tracks that rarely intersect. With the notable exception of the National AI Action Plan our Committee has developed, I do not yet see the integrated policy framework that connects the two.

This gap will become costly faster than most people in our industry expect. AI will dramatically lower the barriers to content production globally — which means it will dramatically lower the barriers to competition. The Korean production quality advantage that exists today is real, but time-limited. Countries and companies that currently cannot match it will close the gap within a few years. The durable competitive advantage will belong to whoever can design integrated content-technology experiences: AI-powered production pipelines, data-driven fandom platforms, immersive virtual performance environments, personalized global distribution at scale.

In the AI era, creative quality alone is not a moat. The decisive advantage will go to those who can fuse content with technology into experiences that no competitor can easily replicate.

To remain competitive, South Korea must evolve from content powerhouse to entertech powerhouse. That requires a genuinely integrated national strategy — not two ministries pursuing adjacent goals in separate corridors, but a unified framework in which cultural competitiveness and technological capability are treated as a single challenge requiring a single answer

Question 4: How Should K-Culture Connect to Korean Cities?

The final dimension I think we consistently underestimate is the role of cities. Korean cultural policy has been almost entirely national in orientation: subsidies, export promotion, industry development at the macro level. That approach has generated measurable results. But at the city level, South Korea has largely failed to convert K-culture's extraordinary global brand equity into lasting, structured urban value.

Today's concert will embed Gwanghwamun into global pop culture consciousness in a way that no tourism campaign could match. The Netflix series K-Pop Demon Hunters did something similar for Namsan and Naksan Park — turning them into international destinations through a piece of animated content. These moments reveal the power of what is possible. But they are still largely accidental, not the product of deliberate city-level cultural strategy.

Cultural competition today is not only competition between nations. It is competition between cities. People do not consume countries — they experience cities. They travel to attend concerts and festivals, visit the locations they've seen in the content they love, seek the feeling of being inside a cultural world they've known only through screens. As K-culture's global reach expands, the city becomes the arena in which that reach is either converted into lasting economic and cultural value — or left on the table.

What South Korea needs is what I call an Entertech Hub City strategy. Not a city with more concert halls, but a city in which content, technology, platforms, tourism, education, entrepreneurship, and urban identity are integrated into a single dynamic ecosystem. Austin has built a global cultural identity around SXSW. Barcelona has done the same around MWC. Both cities made themselves destinations not just for consumption but for creation and convergence — places where the future of a whole industry is made, not just performed.

We have better raw material than either. K-culture is one of the world's most powerful and emotionally resonant cultural brands. What we have lacked is the strategic will to build the city-level ecosystem around it. That has to change.

From Content Powerhouse to Cultural Powerhouse

The question I keep returning to is deceptively simple: will we remain a content powerhouse, or will we become a true cultural powerhouse?

The distinction matters more than it might seem. A content powerhouse produces exceptional creative work and exports it efficiently — and Korea has done that better than almost any country in modern history. A cultural powerhouse builds the full ecosystem around that creative work: the experience infrastructure, the technology integration, the cities, the participatory structures, the global relationships — everything that makes a culture genuinely alive in the world, not merely consumed by it.

BTS's return is, by any measure, one of the defining cultural events of 2026. The scale of attention it commands today — 260,000 people at Gwanghwamun, 190 countries streaming live, a new album named Arirang after Korea's most beloved folk melody — testifies to something real and extraordinary that this country has built. I do not want to diminish that for a moment. I am proud of it.

But pride and strategic complacency are different things — and in my experience, proximity to great success is precisely when strategic complacency is most dangerous. The next chapter of the Korean Wave will not be written by any single artist, however extraordinary. It will be written by the infrastructure investments we make or don't make, by whether we build a genuinely inclusive global cultural ecosystem, by how seriously we pursue the integration of content and technology, and by the cities we choose to become.

BTS came home. The harder question — the one only we can answer — is whether we are building a home worthy of what they represent to the world.

I congratulate them on their return, wholeheartedly. And I invite everyone — in industry, in government, in the cities — to use this extraordinary moment not just to celebrate what we've built, but to be honest about what we still need to build.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samseog Ko

Samseog Ko is the author of The Next Korean Wave (Hallyu), one of Korea's leading books on the future of Korean cultural exports and entertainment-technology convergence. He is a Distinguished Chair Professor at the College of Advanced Convergence Engineering, Dongguk University, Seoul, and serves as a Commissioner on the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy Committee of the Office of the President of the Republic of Korea.

Prior to his academic career, Ko served as a Standing Commissioner (Vice Minister level) of the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) for 5.5 years — appointed first by the National Assembly and later by President Moon Jae-in — where he chaired the KCC's committees on universal service, broadcast policy, viewer rights, and regulatory reform. Earlier in his career he worked in the Office of the President and the National Assembly, and played a central role in drafting the legislation that established the Korea Communications Commission in 2008 and launched Korea's IPTV industry.

Ko is also the Chairman of the National Assembly's Entertainment & Technology Forum (Forum NET), a media and ICT columnist, and a YouTube channel host. His previous books include 5G Hyper-Connected Society (winner of the 2020 Korea Science & Technology Book Award), published in both Korean and Chinese. He holds a Ph.D. in journalism and digital policy from Chung-Ang University.

The views expressed in this column are the author's own.