XG's Viral Growth, International Marketing, and Live Performance Choices..
I stumbled on this video today that takes a look at XG by the numbers. It's all in Japanese, but the English subtitles work well. I thought it was really interesting to see the numbers (though not exact) behind XG's worldwide growth, which regions they are doing well in, and how online viral marketing and a local region's music culture directly affects the choices they make about where to perform.
A few takeaways..
- It's really interesting to me that XG hasn't done as well as you might expect in the K-Pop scene (compared to other markets) given that is where they are headquartered and their strong ties to the scene. They are basically leveraging the K-pop industry infrastructure to leapfrog the K-pop scene in favor of a global market. We all kind of knew this but it's neat seeing the numbers.
- Japan's music culture is very insular compared to many other markets and XG's global positioning has kind of set them outside the Japanese market. They don't do badly in Japan, but they also don't do as well as you might expect because it seems the Japanese music scene kind of brushes them off as K-pop.
- XG's main and most successful markets are the US, Europe, South East Asia, and China. These are HUGE markets and while XG is having a lot of success there, they are barely scratching the surface and have much more headroom to grow, which is great. Big festivals like Coachella in the US and various other festivals in Europe are huge ways for XG to boost their numbers in those regions. Brazil and Mexico are heating up as big markets as well. India has a huge potential market but the live concert culture there is far less developed than other regions so India's XG fandom is almost purely digital. China is massive and growing for XG.
Anyway I just thought this video was interesting and maybe give people some insight into why XG markets and tours the way they do.