Billboard K-Town
Billboard K-Town is an online magazine column presented weekly, on various days, by Billboard on its Billboard.com site. The column, launched on January 29, 2013, reports on K-pop music; artists, concerts, chart information and news events. Billboard and its website had reported on K-pop for a number of years, following the evolution of K-pop, increasing the number of articles with the spike in 2009, and finally culminated in a column specifically for the genre after Psy's July 2012, "Gangnam Style" hit made K-pop history and doubled online viewership. K-Town was created as part of the popular music publication's website relaunch, with new features for fans, and the goal of providing more on-site reporting of festivals, award shows, and other major music events.
Type
Music column
Graphics, text, videos
Jeff Benjamin
January 29, 2013
English
New York City, New York, U.S.
Online
Readership and reception[edit]
In April 2013, The Korea Herald said, "the more Billboard talks about K-pop, the faster the speed of K-pop advancement in the U.S. will be."[28]
As a K-Town columnist, Benjamin has been called upon for his opinions on K-pop from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, New York's Korea Society, Mnet America's Headliner series, Television in South Korea, NBC News, and Time, among others;[139][145][146] and has appeared in panels for KCON,[147][139] and Global Hallyu Forum 2013 Washington, D.C.[148][149] South Korean media, including South Korea's own music chart's, Gaon Music Chart,[150] has posted interviews and articles about Benjamin.[151][152][153][154] K-Town articles have been re-phrased and quoted in media in the U.S., South Korea, and around the world.[155][156][31][157][158][159]