The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #4: Gangnam Style

 This video came out in July. By my presentation in November, it was the number two video in YouTube history, rapidly gaining on Justin Bieber. As of this writing, it’s now number one by a substantial margin and likely to become the first video in YouTube history to get more than a billion views.

Its immense popularity has a few lessons to teach us about media in the 21st century. First, it reminds us that our media marketplace is global. One of the few things the United States exports more than imports is media products. And here we have a piece of K-pop fluff surpassing sophisticated efforts from big record companies.

The source is also significant. South Korea tends to live in the giant media shadows of Japan and China, so PSY’s success at least got the world to recognize that Korea exists. A big part of the video’s popularity comes from viewers throughout East Asia.

Except Japan, where it seems to be more of a “meh.” Anti-Korean racism aside, the Japanese may be forgiven for their luke-warm reaction to the whole “Gangnam Style” thing. After all, Japan has been producing weird goofiness like this for decades. PSY’s magnum opus (op-op-op-op-oppa Gangnam style! damn this thing gets stuck in my head) isn’t particularly different from literally thousands of Japanese animations, music videos and other pop culture offerings.

And that’s the real million-dollar question: what makes a video that isn’t really much different from a lot of other videos suddenly catch on and “go viral”? This drives Big Media nuts. In most other realms, they’ve got success formulas all worked out. They know what makes a blockbuster movie turn a huge profit. They know which singers are going to sell tracks and get airplay. They know what works and what doesn’t in just about every medium. Sure, sometimes they guess wrong. But they’re right often enough to maintain their considerable profit margins.

But not with stuff like this. There’s no apparent formula for raising a PSY out of peninsular obscurity and selling his performance to hundreds of millions of people. This lack of predictability makes web-based media one of the most interesting things going on now and an area to watch closely in the future.