Scooter Braun was in a tailspin. It was February, 2021, and the music manager, who had made his name launching the careers of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, was nearing forty and facing a brutal divorce. An equally nasty battle with Taylor Swift, over his ownership of her song catalogue, had sullied his public image. Rumors circulated that the future of Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings, was in doubt. Amid this tumult, he was surprised to receive an invitation to speak with someone who had long fascinated him: the South Korean producer Bang Si-hyuk—known to admirers as Hitman Bang.
Braun had first heard of Bang several years earlier, when a member of his social-media team told him about a boy band from South Korea whose online-engagement numbers had surpassed even Bieber’s. Braun was skeptical and asked her to check the figures again in a week. They’d gone up. The group, BTS, became the biggest act in the world—and the one with the most zealous fan community, which routinely mobilizes online to insure that their boys top the charts. Bang had handpicked the group’s members and co-written many of its early hits.
Braun and Bang met on Zoom, and bonded over the fact that both had plucked young artists from obscurity and guided their meteoric ascents. “It was like finding a kindred spirit across the sea,” Braun told me. “I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about this stuff.” Soon, they were chatting three times a week. A month later, Braun sold his company to Bang’s hybe Corporation, in a deal worth upward of a billion dollars.
hybe, founded in 2005, is part record label, part talent agency, part tech platform, part entertainment conglomerate. Bang is determined to extend the company’s influence across the international pop landscape. To this end, he named Braun a C.E.O. of hybe America—and announced a ten-year partnership with Universal Music Group, whose head, Sir Lucian Grainge, praised hybe’s “groundbreaking” model for “engaging the superfan.” John Janick, the C.E.O. of the Universal division Interscope Geffen A&M, joined forces with Bang to create Katseye, a multiracial, English-language girl group modelled on the K-pop framework. The goal was to confect a juggernaut—or, failing that, at least to score a few hits.
Janick told me, “Bang wants to have No. 1s around the world, and the biggest artists globally. But the fans are the key.” Other labels had chased fleeting TikTok sensations for short-term gain; the K-pop model, by contrast, is a long-term strategy that invests in years of training and development for each act. “Bang has helped the business continue to evolve,” Janick said.
Braun, once the Svengali of America’s biggest pop stars, now has a Svengali of his own. He told me, “The thing that made me believe that Spotify was going to work was Daniel Ek”—the service’s co-founder. “The thing that makes me believe hybe is going to work is Bang.”
Hybe’s Seoul headquarters is a nineteen-story tower swarming with activity: each day, hundreds of pilgrims show up, hoping for a glimpse of their idols. The building has several recording and rehearsal studios, and security is high. On floors where artists work and train, protective measures have included biometric scans.
By comparison, hybe’s L.A. outpost is deceptively modest: three floors in a building in Santa Monica. When I visited, this past spring, the office was almost empty. Bang was waiting for me in a spartan conference room, holding an acoustic guitar. He didn’t play anything, though.
Bang is portly and good-humored. He was born in Seoul and was a solitary, bookish child until his parents, concerned about his shyness, encouraged him to take up the guitar as a hobby. “I went a little bit further than my parents intended,” he said, wryly. He memorized the Billboard charts, got into Led Zeppelin and heavy metal, and formed a band, sometimes skipping classes to jam. He set music aside to secure entrance to Seoul National University, but he soon returned to the scene as a producer. Bang held off on telling his parents until he’d become successful enough to give them an envelope full of cash. “Musicians can make money, too,” he said.
Three decades later, Bang is a billionaire. We spoke through a translator, whom he sometimes outpaced with references to such stars as Kendrick Lamar and Joey Bada$$; often, he became so animated that he switched to English. Bang got his start at JYP Entertainment, a Korean label. In 2005, he formed his own, calling it Big Hit Entertainment. (The company became hybe in 2021.) Other K-pop outfits policed their trainees’ conduct, but Bang didn’t set curfews or confiscate phones, allowing candidates to succeed or fail on the strength of their own talent and drive. Bang said, early on, “We tell them, ‘Do whatever you want. But get out if there’s no development.’ ”
He originally wanted BTS to be a hip-hop crew. “I didn’t really believe in K-pop,” he told me. But he began to see that the genre had an unusually strong “fandom culture,” and suspected that he could leverage it more effectively than others had. He studied groups with diehard loyalists, noting a trend toward “tightly synchronized choreography” and “close, and frequent, fan communication,” he said. He also realized that hard-core supporters “get angry very easily—offended and angry. So there were things that we were not to do as well.”
Before BTS, K-pop idols were polished and often remote. When a group launched, its members went on television to promote their album, then retreated until the next release. Bang realized that the Internet was a better way to reach young people. For BTS, he didn’t bother with TV appearances. His strategy, he said, was “trying to figure out the most fandom-friendly thing to do and then taking it to the extreme.” He established a YouTube channel for BTS well before its first single was released, filling it with behind-the-scenes clips. The group’s seven members ran their own Twitter account—unusual for a K-pop act—and kept up a lively dialogue with their followers, live-tweeting drunken nights on the town and publicly teasing one another about staged “candid” photographs. This breezy puncturing of their own mystique was central to their appeal.
The boys also stood out for writing many of their own lyrics, occasionally in a regional dialect. When BTS débuted, in 2013, the dominant K-pop group, BigBang, promoted an image of glamorous misbehavior. BTS’s members foregrounded their uncertainties about the future, airing mental-health and personal struggles. (“Reflection,” a song co-written by the group’s leader, RM, ends with the refrain “I wish I could love myself.”) To young listeners, the group was more accessible—thematically and literally—than its K-pop predecessors. “I didn’t want them to be false idols,” Bang has said. “I wanted to create a BTS that could become a close friend.”
This cultivation of “authenticity” has been rewarded. BTS has sold more than forty million albums in South Korea alone, contributing an estimated five billion dollars a year to the national economy. When its eldest member, Kim Seok-jin, approached twenty-eight—then the mandatory age of enlistment—the country’s Military Service Act was amended to offer him a reprieve: as “a pop-culture artist” who’d “greatly enhanced the image of Korea,” he could defer for two years.
Katseye, the English-language girl group that Bang has developed with his American partners, reflects his international ambitions. “I feel lucky I’ve had the opportunity, since I was very young, to work in a lot of cross-cultural environments,” Bang told me. The knowledge he’d gained would help drive hybe’s worldwide expansion. He compared his process, without irony, to A.I.: “You know how machine learning happens?” he asked. He studied local music industries and fan behavior across the globe in an attempt to target listeners in various countries more precisely. “We don’t apply our methodologies uniformly in each region, but we don’t follow the practices of each region blindly, either,” he said. “We take what works.”
Before Braun joined hybe, Bang barely interacted with American music executives. “He’d come to the U.S. and then not meet with anybody,” Braun said. He traced this reluctance to a formative failure: when Bang was in his late twenties, he and a collaborator, J. Y. Park, rented a room outside L.A., where they’d been told they could become what Bang called “star producers.” In Korea, they were certified hitmakers; in the States, they couldn’t even get a meeting. Bang retreated to Seoul within months.
Braun calls Bang “a studiohead,” and Bang’s reputation is as a producer and a lyricist first, and an executive second. He’s adept at a wide variety of musical styles. Among the hits that he helped to create for BTS are “Spring Day,” an emotional anthem for lost loved ones, and “Idol,” a high-energy track that combines traditional Korean instruments with E.D.M. stylings.
“Paula, do you know where my green jacket is? I’m leaving you.”
Cartoon by Juliana Castro Varón
Braun’s role at hybe, as he saw it, was “to be the cheerleader Bang deserved,” introducing Bang and his artists to potential Western collaborators. The greatest triumph of their partnership so far is the solo career of BTS’s Jung Kook, who, as Bang put it, had always wanted to become “a U.S. pop superstar.” After becoming C.E.O., Braun played Jung Kook a track, “Seven,” which had been written for Justin Bieber. The chorus: “I’ll be fucking you right, seven days a week.” Jung Kook had been the baby of BTS, but Braun told him, “When Justin Timberlake did a solo record without ’NSync, he leaned in with edge.” Jung Kook’s album, “Golden,” on which “Seven” appeared, was the first by a BTS member entirely in English. Braun enlisted such guest artists as Jack Harlow and Usher, who joined Jung Kook on a remix of “Standing Next to You”—and invited him to perform it with him at the Super Bowl. (Jung Kook’s military service prevented him from accepting.) Last November, the album débuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
