K-Pop Veteran Kevin Woo’s Career Takes Off
In the past one and a half months, K-Pop veteran Kevin Woo’s career has shot up thanks to the unexpected global takeover of Netflix’s KPOP – Demon Hunter. Woo was already a large part of his life in K-Pop and started the Boy Band U-Kiss in 2008, before starting a solo career in 2018. However, today he has the greatest moment of his career after making the singing voice available for one of the characters of the film Mystery Saja.
The Impact of KPOP – Demon Hunter
The film Demon Hunter has pulled Woo over 100,000 new followers online, and the soundtrack songs on which he is alone, Woo’s counted monthly listeners from just over 10,000 a few months ago to over 28 million on Spotify. Woo expressed his surprise at the film’s success, saying "I loved the songs and knew that they were great, but we didn’t know that it would be something like that."
Turning Virality into a Bigger Moment
Now Woo wants to transform this unexpected moment of virality into a bigger moment for the rest of his career, and he hopes to do this through a new app engagement app from Do-eVermanming fan called Openwav. Last week Woo sold about 2,500 tickets for a pop-up event in downtown LA to Kcon, where he as Mystery Saja Cosplayte and a flash mob for the organized Demon hunter follow “Soda Pop” with over 2,000 fans present.
The OpenWAV App
OpenWAV was co-founded by long-standing music tech entrepreneurs Jaeson Ma, a co-founder of the 88rising record label. OpenWAV officially started in June and rapper Wyclef Jean functions as Chief Music Officer. The app was supported by the Warner Music Group, the CAA-Backed Connect Ventures and Goodwater Capital. Ma created Openwav in the hope that it can give minor actions from the streaming economy and described the current dynamic "broken".
A More Sustainable Option
Instead of competing with the 100,000 songs that were uploaded to Spotify every day, in the hope of getting hundreds of millions of streams, Ma says that the more sustainable option is to find "a thousand true fans" that are actually not only with music, but also with merch and tickets. MA is one of many that concentrate more on these so-called super fans because the industry has determined that an area of potential growth after streaming is more and more saturated.
Kevin Woo’s Experience with OpenWAV
"Kevin is the perfect artist to show this thesis that a thousand fans can mean a sustainable career that you can build on," says Ma. In March, OpenWAV made a beta drop, Kevin had less than 10,000 monthly listeners. He had maybe 100 superfans on Openwav. Two Merch drops have achieved over 20,000 US dollars. OpenWAV takes the service of 20 percent income while the artists keep the rest.
The Future of OpenWAV
Ma compares Openwav with Wechat, the Chinese Super app, in which its users can do everything from send messages to the payment of their bills. Fan commitment, says Ma, is fragmented, and he hopes that the fans will pull to a place where they can listen to music, speak directly to the artist and buy products to build artists more easily and to monetize them from their fan base. Woo itself calls this model "proof of urgency" that goes hand in hand with the independent artist.
Independence and Control
Ma hopes that OpenWAV can enable the artists to keep their independence and control over their career, and says: “The message that we repeatedly tell independent artists is that they begin their music, their masters, their data and the connection to their fans.” Woo also shares this philosophy, saying "The strategy that I have now is still that I am the front and the captain of my own ship and take what I need to bring my music out there. I don’t think I will ever return to a traditional label where you have the full possession of my career. I have the feeling that I have to have full say and control and such things."
