Spotify is launching its service in South Korea today, giving Korean users access to over 60 million songs and over 4 billion playlists from around the world beginning today and making them the widest catalog of music in the country. This launch brings the total number of markets in which Spotify operates to 93 and will see the streamer compete with local platforms, as well as Youtube and Apple Music.
As the world’s most popular subscription audio streaming service, Spotify offers a perfectly intuitive interface, an innovative technological framework, daily discovery of new music and personalizes the music experience for each market and individual musical tastes.
As part of this new launch, Spotify offers an array of new music playlists specifically tailored for South Korean users with 120 playlist spanning K-pop, rock, hip-hop, indie, new music, soundtracks and orchestral ballads.
This long-anticipated entry comes against the backdrop of increased growth of K-pop in the global market. Spotify featured K-pop playlists since 2014, supporting the genre with its global platform and helping the rise of current superstars such as BTS and BLACKPINK.
Spotify noted that in the last six years K-pop’s streams share jumped over 2,000% to a total of 180 billion minutes of streaming.
The company’s global co-head of music Jeremy Erlich said to Billboard “We know we’re coming in as a new player in town and all the success we’ve had around the world doesn’t really mean a tremendous amount once we get on the ground,” adding that “We need to win domestically, and we need to support local culture and local artists.”
He justified the reason why the company waited so far for this new wave in South Korea and told Billboard it was because “we wanted to do it the right way” South Korea, he says, “is obviously a mature market. There are incumbent players, and we respect them, the local culture and the local dynamics, so we took our time”.
Peace.Love.Spotify
