Music industry sales revenue South Korea 2014-2022

In 2021, the sales revenue of the music industry in South Korea totaled around 11 trillion South Korean won. This represents an increase of around 17.5 percent since the previous year. The music industry accounted for 7.3 percent of the total sales revenue of the domestic content industry that year.

The explosion of album sales in South Korea

With a massive increase in album sales in the last decade, selling music albums has become one of the main income sources for the music industry. In 2023, sales drastically rose to reach over 115 million, accelerated by the K-pop fandom tendency to buy physical albums in order to achieve benefits such as artist photo cards. As a result of this incentive, most physical album sales are seized by K-pop groups instead of individual artists. In the previous decade, the top-selling music albums were all dominated by K-pop groups, with BTS having won seven times in a row. 

Streaming services as a market driver

Besides the explosion of album sales, online music distribution is one of the key driving forces of the successful music industry in the country. As most South Koreans have access to music via streaming, there is a huge preference for using domestic streaming music services. Internationally, YouTube is considered a necessary platform for Korean music artists for expanding their fandom as roughly 81 percent of respondents in a global survey chose the platform as the most preferred online music service for K-pop content.