Weverse seems to fly under most of the music industry's radar despite its strategic importance to its owner, HYBE, the K-pop juggernaut that has successfully leveraged the success of BTS to create an increasingly global , technologically advanced music company.
The social media company's 10 million monthly active users — 90% of whom come from outside South Korea — are small by some standards. TikTok, Instagram and Facebook have more than 1 billion each. But it's the turf for artists with some of the most loyal fans on the planet. And HYBE is leveraging the popularity of these acts to create a must-visit destination for fans of K-pop and, eventually, other genres as well.
When BTS member Jimin performed a solo performance at Lollapalooza in 2023, it was streamed live on Weverse. When Jung Kook, another BTS member, hosted a live stream at home in February, Weverse garnered 16 million real-time views. When the HYBE ENHYPEN team presented a showcase for her Dark blood EP, brought in 2.4 million real-time views on the platform.
Artists use Weverse to host live chats with fans to promote new albums and its e-commerce platform to sell merchandise. Last year, Weverse Shop sold more than 18 million branded light sticks from K-pop group Seventeen, a handheld device used in the group's concerts that carries a price tag of $64 in the United States.
All this seems to be just the beginning. As K-pop grows in popularity worldwide, Weverse's traffic grows. Last year, its average user spent 250 minutes on the platform and visited 10.2 days per month, up from 171 minutes and 9.2 days in 2022. Traffic grew by 47% in Africa and 25% in the Middle East. It now has 117 artist communities, including 13 SM Entertainment artists — including Super Junior, Riize and NCT Wish — who joined in September. And as the president of Weverse Jun Choi he explained in an interview Advertising signthe company's next target is the United States.
Are artists bringing their fans to Weverse or are they leveraging the passionate user base you have?
This goes both ways. Existing Weverse users have contributed a lot to SM Entertainment's new artist community. But at the same time, we could clearly see the increase in new user registration right after SM artists joined Weverse. So we are very happy with this kind of migration. It was done without any hassle.
What about adding artists from the United States to Weverse? Many artists under the HYBE umbrella could potentially be added to the platform to reach new fans.
This is still under discussion. I think we can have more exciting news in the near future.
Weverse has an office in Los Angeles [in Santa Monica]. What are you doing to build Weverse and build the brand in the United States?
The first thing is that we are aggressively hiring people to serve the core functions, including commercial functions, as well as artist support. In terms of increasing and improving market awareness, I think that's something we'll be working on more aggressively in 2024. So as we get momentum from new artists and North American artists coming together and creating communities on Weverse in America , we will work aggressively on market awareness this year.
Fandom is a word that has become more common as K-pop has become more popular. I think it's also a difficult word to define properly. How do you define fandom?
I think there are many segments — or should I say cohorts — among the users of our services. Starting with light listeners, and then we would have more active listeners, we would probably consider monthly subscribers to Spotify or Apple, they will probably be the most active listeners. And then there has to be a group that is more dedicated. And these will probably be concert goers or those people who actively buy albums by those particular artists. From this particular cohort or segment of users, we will probably call them fans. As their level of engagement rises and they become more active in their fan activities, they will be considered more engaged or enthusiastic fans. When you think about any business, you think about the context of the user acquisition funnel from top to bottom. When it gets down to the bottom, the core of users, there are users or fans who are ready to buy anything the artist has to offer. So, from the bottom up, Weverse ascends to the light users.
What exactly is Weverse doing to serve artists' super fans better than other social media platforms or a streaming platform like Spotify?
Before Weverse, the superfan experience was scattered here and there. You buy goods here, go to the concert and gather in certain places. These experiences were all scattered. But I think Weverse was the first service to bring everything together in the best way, [most] convenient way. Number two would be global. To go global, we really appreciate the importance of translation. So we provide real-time translation in 15 languages.
How does Weverse make money? Is it advertising? Does he get a percentage of sales?
As for advertising, we don't have that yet, but we're working on it. So we will be launching our advertising service this year. And before that, we basically get a revenue share from album sales, merchandise sales, or any kind of digital value provided to fans.
I have noticed a lot of merchandise for sale. How do you fulfill these orders? Do you have partners in different countries to help?
When it comes to a trading system, we built everything in-house except the fulfillment side. Obviously, we have international fulfillment partners. We have warehouses in Korea, Japan and the USA — in Carson, south of Los Angeles Well, we receive orders from more than 200 countries around the world. We ship everywhere.
Do you sell CDs, sound and digital downloads?
Right.
Do fans in Korea still buy CDs and download albums and tracks in high numbers?
They do both, apparently. Physical albums are still very loud. And on top of that, Weverse is also trying to provide digital/physical experiences together. That's why we released the Weverse album last year, which is basically an album without a CD. The album comes with the QR code and then users can download the original high-quality music source and enjoy it on Weverse.
What is more popular in Korea, CDs or vinyl?
CD. Vinyl is not as popular as it is in the US
Weverse by Fans launched, allowing users to customize merchandise. Can you tell me how many artists are using it and what the first results have been?
Weverse by Fans is currently in beta. So far, we have eight Korean artists using Weverse by Fans: TOMORROW X TOGETHER, ENHYPEN, Le Sserafim, NewJeans, BOYNEXTDOOR, XIA, Hwang Min Hyun, and Baekho.
Weverse streams live, whether it's a live performance or artist chats. How important is this to Weverse?
Weverse Live is very important to us. Weverse Live offers several different levels of what I would call different types of live streaming. With the former, we might have some special arrangement celebrating or marking an album release or album exhibition. So, Weverse Live can be used for this. And there can be more immediate or occasional live streaming, using Weverse Live as well. BTS member Jimin's Lollapalooza performance last year was also on Weverse Live. Weverse Live offers many different types of live streaming, starting from very large-scale concert streaming to a very simple or direct live streaming done by individual artists.
I would like to add the three reasons why Weverse Live is of great value and importance to Weverse. First, after we launch the service, Weverse Live, the duration of users [of visit] and also the likelihood of them revisiting Weverse have increased. Thus, the retention rate has improved significantly thanks to Weverse Live. And the second reason is that users are very satisfied with the quality of our live streaming services. They often give us feedback that compared to other major live streaming services they are very satisfied with the quality of the live streams we provide. And the third reason is that Weverse Live is integrated with live commerce, Weverse Commerce. When an artist or company decides to do so, we can also enable Weverse Commerce. This really helped increase sales.
What can one sell with Weverse Commerce? New album release?
Yes, our albums have been the best selling products using the live trade feature. Artists and companies prefer to sell albums. This was the main item sold in the live trade. But, as I mentioned earlier, artists want to add the Weverse by Fans feature as part of the live trade. So that's something we're working on right now.
Since HYBE owns Weverse, it also has a lot of data for its fans. How does HYBE leverage this data for either insights or marketing?
As you know, HYBE is a multi-tag system. Under the multi-tag system, each tag actively leverages the fandom data that comes from each community. However, what you need to understand is that on Weverse, there are many artists who are not HYBE artists, right? Thus, each label acts as a silo — they only access and leverage the data within their community. So this is what I want to clarify first.
As you know, Weverse is a platform and data neutrality and neutrality of our service has been emphasized from the very beginning. Since the early days of Weverse, this has been something we've always emphasized. Perhaps because we have emphasized this importance, more than 90% of the artists who have joined Weverse are not HYBE artists.
Could you give me an idea of the size of the company, where are your employees located, where do you have offices? How would you describe your footprint size?
When we first started Weverse, we started with 50 to 60 people. But as I mentioned earlier, we've been through a very solid, rapid growth over the last three or four years. So now we have about 370 people in Korea. So, in total around the world in three headquarters in Pangyo [South Korea], where I am based in Tokyo and Santa Monica, we have a total of about 450 employees. More than half of them are human engineers. I think it's very hard to find any music company that has so many human engineers in-house. Well, I think this has been the biggest challenge we've been through and it's also been very successful so far.
Do you expect growth in 2024?
Yes. I am very sure. Because, I mean, it was [an] investment up front because Weverse has huge traffic and global scale. This requires a lot of work under the hood, much more than the surface features you can see from the web or app. There are many things underneath. So it was a very heavy lift, and that requires a lot of technology investment and investment.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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