South Korea

I WAS STANDING IN A HUGE DANCE STUDIO – one of 12 – near the top of a funky new office tower in the South Korean capital, Seoul. The building is home to SM Entertainment, which has strong claims to have invented one of the most potent cultural movements of the 21st century, the phenomenon of Korean pop music – K-pop. Each generation creates hit factories in its own image. The “SM Culture Universe” was originally the vision of a Korean pop entrepreneur called Lee Soo-man who, after a brief career as a singer and DJ, studied computer engineering in the US in the 1980s. He returned to Seoul “with the dream of globalising Korean music”.

In the dance studio, his nephew Chris Lee, now the chief executive, is talking me through all the ways in which this dream came true. To begin with, K-pop idols conquered Asian charts; lately, after the extraordinary success of K-poppers BTS (the biggest-selling band in the world for the past two years, managed by rival conglomerate Hybe), they have been expanding their reach to all corners of the globe. New members of boy bands and girl bands – aged 11 upwards – are recruited by SM each year on long contracts and this building becomes their de facto home. It is designed as an inside-out place, with every room a stage set for press conferences, fan chats and livestreams; one floor is an “artist’s house”, a