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Park Jin-young became obsessed with Michael Jackson as a child living in New York City. The singer-songwriter and founder JYP Entertainment was also enamored by African American soul music, and artists such as Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson.

The musical foundation and tastes he developed as a child became the starting point and core of his music under his moniker JYP.

Park has since stated that he “wanted to come back to where it all started and find artists to form a global K-pop group based in the US,” and that he “wants to build a group that will make the US, and the world, fall in love.”

Park’s ambitions are finally coming to fruition in “A2K,” a project led hand-in-hand by the US’ Republic Records and JYP. The acronym stands for “America to Korea,” and the idea is to find American artists to create girl groups using the K-pop system.

First, participants selected from auditions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas will attend a week-long boot camp in Los Angeles.

From there, the finalists head to the JYP Training Centre in South Korea to prepare for their actual debut.

The first stage in this process was shared on the JYP YouTube Channel on July 14. In Dallas, Canadian 17-year-old Camila Ribeaux Valdes got through with her performance of the Adele song “Easy on Me.”

Kendall Ebeling, a 16-year-old who said she had gone to Korea to study abroad at a K-pop dance academy, earned a medal of approval with a winsome dance performance.

Lexus Vang, a 16-year-old from Chicago, had studied ballet for 12 years since the age of 4 when she decided to take on the challenge of a new style. She too earned a medal after impressing Park with a lean and forceful dance performance.

The project is part of a strategy adopted by JYP since 2018 for “globalization by localization.” The aim is to gain popularity in a particular overseas region by selecting members there to train in the K-pop system, while also working to develop them into a globally popular act.

JYP’s successful launch of the Chinese boy band Boy Story in 2018 was followed by more success with the Japanese girl group NiziU in 2010. Season two of the “Nizi Project,” the audition program behind NiziU, begins on Friday and focuses on the selection of a boy band.

Other major entertainment agencies are adopting similar localization strategies.

Hybe launched the boy band &Team late last year through its local Japan label Hybe Labels Japan. Of its nine members, all but one South Korean and one Taiwanese member are Japanese. The band has mainly been working in Japan to date, but it began performing in South Korea too last month.

SM Entertainment has been using NCT sub-groups as part of its localization strategy.

In 2019, it launched WayV as a boy band working mainly in Chinese-speaking countries. Its members hail from China, Taiwan, Macau and Thailand. In 2020, those members officially joined NCT.

SM will be showing the process of forming its new Japan-based NCT team through the reality show “NCT Universe: LASTART” (ENA/Tving), which begins airing on July 27.

While Lee Soo-man, the namesake and former creative director at SM Entertainment, had originally dreamed up an “NCT Hollywood” that would be active in America, the project was canceled upon Lee leaving the company.

More than any other factor, what has enabled these types of localization strategies has been the monumental rise in the status of K-pop. There’s been a huge surge of people across the world who idolize K-pop and want to become K-pop stars themselves. Culling the talented among them and training them in the K-pop system will allow for more K-pop singers in more places, growing the market and amplifying its influence.

In a time when going global is a requirement, not a choice, we’re likely to see more of these types of strategies from entertainment agencies. JYP calls this strategy “the future of K-pop,” and has underscored that while his artists may debut for local audiences, “the goal is the global market.”

By Suh Jung-min, staff reporter

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