Who Owns the Idol Dream?
From 500 albums to the trainee system, K-pop’s global success is built on an economy of emotional consumption.
In May 2026, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, all four members of BLACKPINK appeared at the Met Gala together for the first time. Jennie, Jisoo, Rosé and Lisa were no longer seen only as members of a Korean girl group, but as individual figures within the global fashion system, associated with houses such as Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent and Robert Wun. Vogue described the night as a historic moment in which all four members of BLACKPINK attended the Met. That same year, Lisa was also part of the Met Gala host committee. For K-pop, this was a clear signal: an idol industry once understood as part of Asian youth pop culture had become part of a global system shaped by music, fashion, luxury and social media.
K-pop’s globalisation did not happen by accident. In 2012, PSY’s “Gangnam Style” entered global public consciousness through YouTube and social media, becoming one of the first moments when K-pop captured worldwide attention through viral circulation. By 2018, BTS’s Love Yourself: Tear had reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, becoming the first K-pop album to top the US album chart. In 2020, BTS’s “Dynamite” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, pushing the Korean idol system further into the Western mainstream. Since then, K-pop has no longer been simply a “music genre exported from Korea”, but a transnational fan economy. Through albums, photocards, concerts, fan signs, livestreams, short-form videos and brand endorsements, it ties together music, bodies, fantasy and consumption.
By 2023, this influence was no longer visible only in the charts. BLACKPINK became the first K-pop act to headline Coachella. In the same year, K-pop artists including SEVENTEEN, Stray Kids and NCT DREAM occupied multiple positions in the top five of IFPI’s global album sales chart, showing the unusually strong global mobilisation behind K-pop’s physical album consumption. K-pop’s success is less the result of music alone than of a carefully designed cultural system. Idols provide performance, style and intimacy; fans provide attention, consumption, circulation and emotional investment.
But once K-pop becomes a global trend, a more complicated question appears: what exactly are fans in love with? Is it the music, the performance, the idol themselves, or a form of intimacy carefully manufactured by the industry? Through conversations with two 21-year-old fans and a 21-year-old musician who once came close to the trainee system, this article looks beyond K-pop’s global visibility to ask what the idol industry is really selling: a dream that can be consumed, collected and maintained.
Adrien, a 21-year-old Luxembourger now living in the United States, first encountered K-pop in seventh grade. A Japanese friend played TWICE’s “Signal” for him. “At first, I pretended I didn’t like it,” Adrien recalled. “But after I went home that day, my life changed. My YouTube recommendations were full of K-pop.” From TWICE, he moved on to BTS, then BLACKPINK, Red Velvet and the wider world of Korean pop culture, eventually becoming interested in Japanese and Chinese pop culture as well.
For young people in Luxembourg at the time, K-pop was not an easy interest to admit to. It was not yet a fashionable identity that European teenagers could openly display. Adrien said he even felt that he had been one of the earliest K-pop stans in Luxembourg. Here, “stan” refers to a fan who is more deeply, continuously and emotionally invested. “I used to get bullied and made fun of for listening to K-pop,” he said. “So I started hiding it. It was only after I got to college that I slowly began to own it.”
Today, K-pop in Luxembourg has also shifted from a niche interest to a part of global pop culture. “I used to buy all the albums, because stores usually only had one copy of each,” Adrien added. “Then more stores started appearing, and now Luxembourg even has K-pop-themed shops. Now it’s become huge.”
Adrien buys albums, merchandise and light sticks, and he goes to concerts. He estimates that over the past ten years, he has spent around €30,000 on K-pop and collected around 500 albums. For him, these objects are not only forms of consumption, but ways of bringing distant idols into real life. “This might sound cringe, but K-pop really made me happy,” he said. “I used to get bullied at school, and I was depressed. Listening to K-pop was a way for me to cry it all out.”
The reason K-pop can cross languages and borders is not only because of its songs or performances. It also offers an entire carefully constructed world: member dynamics, fixed personas, growth narratives, everyday interactions and physical objects that can be owned. Fans are also buying the possibility of building a relationship with an idol. Adrien also pointed out that K-pop is a highly industrialised system, one that allows young people around the world to find identity, companionship and projection within it.
Alicy, who is from China and now studies in the United States, began becoming a fan around the fifth grade and started following idols more seriously in high school. “First of all, their songs were good,” she said. “And maybe the group’s style was the kind of style I liked. Their appearance, the group’s overall image, the way the members interacted with each other, and their personalities were all reasons why I wanted to keep learning more about them.” But when she looked back on this relationship, she also admitted, “I didn’t completely see him as just an idol. I might have imagined them as a kind of ideal type. Their personality, face or style created a one-sided attraction. Seeing him felt a little like seeing someone I liked, so it made me happy.”
Her words make the difference between idols and ordinary musicians clearer. Ordinary singers can also be liked and generate emotional attachment. But built into the structure of idol work is a designed sense of intimacy. Idols are not only expected to sing and dance on stage, but also to show their personalities on camera and respond to fans through livestreams, fan signs and fan platforms. What fans consume is not only a distant celebrity, but someone who appears close enough to be approached, understood or even remembered.
Alicy is not unaware of this mechanism. She now rarely buys large numbers of albums or photocards, and she is unlikely to spend tens of thousands of yuan on fan sign events. Instead, she is more willing to spend money on offline concerts. “Now I’m more willing to spend money offline,” she said. “I want to see them with my own eyes. Buying lots of albums online or trading photocards feels a bit unnecessary to me now. I would rather spend the money where it really matters.” For her, what is truly worth paying for is not an endlessly reproducible object, but a live experience through which she can confirm the idol’s existence in person.
But when asked whether idols should be allowed to date, Alicy’s answer was direct. She believes that neither male nor female idols should date. It is not that she does not understand that idols are ordinary people, but that she believes the work of being an idol includes the production of fantasy. “If his job is to create a dream, or to create this kind of utopia,” she said, “then he also has a responsibility not to let that utopia collapse.”
Adrien does not fully agree. He believes that idols are human beings first, and therefore should be allowed to have intimate relationships. “Idols are human,” he said. For him, the biggest problem in K-pop is not necessarily the idols, but the overdeveloped parasocial relationship between fans and idols. Fans can like the performance, the appearance and the personality, but they should not assume that idols have to live according to their fantasies.
If Adrien and Alicy represent the fan side, Yangyang’s experience takes the story behind the stage. She once had an experience in China that brought her close to the trainee system. During high school, she went to school during the day and trained after class in singing, dancing, stage presence and pronunciation. “During the strictest period, there was something you had to do every single day,” she recalled. “You had to follow the schedule and complete those tasks.”
Yangyang’s path as a trainee was later interrupted by changes in the talent show environment and policy restrictions, but she still considers herself lucky. She was able to continue her education and later study music production at Berklee. Some of the girls around her, however, had given up high school and come to Shanghai from other cities in order to become idols. After their trainee path became impossible, many turned to becoming influencers instead.
She still remembers the pressure of body management. “They would say things indirectly, like, ‘Have you gained weight? Should you eat less?” she said. “After hearing those things, you also become self-conscious. For example, you might only eat one meal a day, but after eating, you still have to dance. Then, because you are not dancing well enough, you have to keep practising.”
Yangyang believes that effort alone is not enough to succeed on this path. “I really don’t want to say this, but star quality is part of it,” she explained. “Some people just do things in a way that stands out more than others. When you watch them perform, your eyes naturally pick them out.” Now, she only wants to use what she has learned to make better music.
K-pop’s global success is often described as a victory for Asian pop culture on the world stage. It has certainly changed the way East Asian, and more broadly Asian, aesthetics are seen and consumed globally. But it has also created a new kind of emotional relationship. Fans search within it for companionship, fantasy and emotional release. Companies turn those emotions into albums, merchandise, concerts and fan signs. Trainees are shaped through training, selection and management into figures who can be loved and consumed.
What K-pop truly exports is a cultural system built around intimacy. It allows young people around the world to believe that through screens, albums, photocards and concerts, they can form a relationship with someone far away. It can allow a boy in Luxembourg who was once mocked for his taste to find companionship, and it can also lead young people to pour most of their pocket money into a dream. It can make trainees believe that effort can change their fate, but it can also create anxiety around body image and appearance, or even push them to sacrifice their education. Because it has truly made people feel happy, accompanied and even saved, it deserves to be taken seriously. When intimacy becomes a commodity, who gets to decide its boundaries? And who is responsible for its costs?
DIRECTION: MERCURY, RYANNE CHEN PHOTOGRAPHY: TANYA SUN
STLYING: YIYU
ASSISTANCE: YUKI
TALENT: MERCURY, COCO, CHI, YIYU, SIMONA