Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

How Corporate is K-pop?: A Classification of Major Companies

Publication Date

2024

College

Sciences and Mathematics, College of

Department

Math and Computer Science, Department of

BURS Faculty Advisor

Christina Davis

Presentation Type

Poster Presentation

Abstract

The Hallyu wave has increasingly popularized many Korean industries in the broader Western public in the last few years, from manhwa to K-dramas and K-beauty to K-pop. One of the many factors that differentiate K-pop from Western pop music is the major role of the company the artist is under. Three companies in particular are considered the founders of K-pop and are still known as the big three today: JYP Entertainment, SM Entertainment, and YG Entertainment. Experienced fans claim to be able to easily identify which of these companies a song is from, so this project attempts to test whether a classifier model can as well.

First, 4-5 representative artists were chosen from each company and then Spotify features data was collected on all of the artists’ songs. The features include basic song elements like tempo and duration as well as a few more mysterious elements such as speechiness and valence. Using this data, I built Gradient Boosting, Random Forest, and LGBM classifiers for each of the three companies. I also performed feature selection and cross-validation to improve my models as much as possible. All 9 of my models achieved higher than a 50% accuracy score indicating that the computer was able to identify differences between the companies, even from the limited Spotify features.

I also compiled a database of achievements and streams across various platforms for each artist in all three companies and attempted to classify them based on that database. The classification from this was much less successful which could indicate that despite their different sounds, the companies' levels of achievement are not that different or it could be due to the difficulty of comparing records from groups in different decades given the vast increase in K-pop popularity in the last four years.

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