Wow. Ever since I fell in love with KPOP. I have been reading/watching things. Then I came across this talk: JYP 2.0 in 2018 July 26th. Which is surprisingly good.
First, usually music industry CEO you expect they don't know anything. The conference you would expect a spokesperson, but J.Y. Park himself is giving the talk!1
He started by introduce the company. JYP was one person and now a very big company. That became the home for artists like Wonder girls, SUZY, TWICE, GOT7, ITZY. And he also introduced a new company office plan. That seems to be the first among the others to put so many resources:
- Organic Cafe and Kitchen
- 9 Dance Studios
- 18 Vocal Rooms
- 7 Producing Rooms
- 11 Recording Booths
- 2 Mixing Rooms
- Actor Rooms
- Roof Top with lots of greens
Then JYP talks about the company that is currently at high growth stage. He talks about 4 visions, JYP 2.0, to better operate at high growth. He talked about 4 visions of JYP 2.0.
Usually a company divided into departments. When artist has a need, they asked for the specific department to do the thing for the artist, say marketing. Which this new company in company is to divide the company into labels, which has an artist and a dedicated functional task force to support the artist.
The task force has everything: Marketing, management, promoting, etc. Instead of traditional way, all artists sharing these people. This is to solve the speed of creating more contents slow down after company grew too fast. The communication between artists and task force is much better because one artist, one task force. This experiment was run on TWICE and worked.
Which is to build talent groups by local people. Using the KPOP operational knowledge. First was Boy Story, now NiziU, which are all Japanese targeting Japanese market. But they all trained in Korea and the ways that worked for all JYP artists.
Scaling the content creations. But more contents created, quality goes down. J.Y. Park came up with a idea called JYP Music Factory, which are
- 9 Dance Studios
- 18 Vocal Rooms
- 7 Producing Rooms
- 11 Recording Booths
- 2 Mixing Rooms
That they put all talent and producer together that fostering inter-group learning and working together.
He talks about in creative business. Not long working hours lead to good results. It is about brilliant ideas. So he want his artists, producers, musicians, and employees to rest well. So they can create many more ideas.
Take better care of their employees.2 To have better work-life Balance. Part of the reason to Korean new law work less than 52 hours. Healthy lifestyle which he served all organic food in the JYP building. And what is more surprisingly is that he hired psychiatrist to regularly help all his artists3 and employees.
He also talked about
- Language learning. All artists now need to learn at least English. So they target people around age of 12-15.
- The key metric. They only thing they measure is albums sold, not views on streaming sites. Because people could be listening to the song, but that is only because the song is currently popular and it is cheap to listen online. That does not translate to real sales afterwales. But albums sold means they are loyal fans, which is a storng indicator of buying merchandise, concerts, and other events that may bring profits.
- Experiments and Systems. J.Y. Park was running a lot of experiments to prepare the company can continue running without himself. One example he brought up is that in early days, all the greatest hits are written by him. Which is definitely a difficult job and taking him a lot of time. Now he started a company called JYP publishing, he trained 50 people to become great song writers and composers. He built a system to solve the writing song problem. He also try to make all areas of running the company into systems. But you cannot have the perfect system at day 1, especially in their industry, so he was doing lots of experiments to see what works and what doesn’t.
Overall I am very surprised of this talk. He is passionate and being very honest and working very hard to run the company. I also found many similarities of his talk and the tech industry. He completely blows off my wrong stereotype of music industry that they all work long hours and have unethical work ethics. And my impression of Korean working culture.
Finally allow me to recommend J.Y. Park’s latest single: