SM’s Lee Soo-man, K-pop’s Genghis Khan, ruminates on Web 3.0

SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man could be seen milling around the booths at CES 2023 in Las Vegas on Jan. 5, the opening day of the trade show.

“For three months now I’ve been looking for a wireless TV, and I finally found one here — the LG Signature Oled M,” Lee, who remains chief producer of SM Entertainment. “I’m so proud to see domestic companies like LG transitioning itself to a ‘first mover’ company.”

The LG Electronics model wirelessly receives all of its audio and video from the Zero Connect box.

Lee, who’s said that he’s been visiting the world’s largest electronics and IT trade show almost every year since 2000, told the JoongAng Ilbo on Saturday that this year’s show has “properly materialized Web 3.0.”

Born in 1952, Lee is known as one of the pioneers of K-pop. He sought to combine entertainment and technology in the music industry, believing that the value of a music artist can be heightened with the help of technology.

In 2012, he found a virtual nation dubbed as “SM Town,” which was the early form of SMCU, or SM Cultural Universe, a shared universe made by the agency featuring its artists. He set up a booth at CES from 2017 to 2019, working with IT companies, such as SK Telecom, to demonstrate how technology can advance an artist’s value even further. Lee didn’t stop there. In 2020, he formed aespa, a metaverse girl group with four human members and their four avatars.

“I want to become Genghis Khan of the culture realm,” he said.

During the show, Lee kept is eye on Web 3.0, or the next generation web in which most users will be connected via a decentralized network.

The following are edited excerpts from the interview.

Q. What was noteworthy about this year’s show?

A. Technology and culture have always been a pair in which one cannot progress without the other. The way content is delivered to others has evolved from a lone person shouting something at a middle of a plaza to putting up posters, newspapers, radio, television and then the internet. If Web 1.0 was an environment where people merely consumed the information through reading the news, Web 2.0 transited to a format where people could actually participate and spread the information.

At this year’s CES, I took note of the Web 3.0 and its materials, such as the metaverse, blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFT). The critical difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is that people can now actually possess the content.

Q. Can you elaborate on the distinction?

A. Web 1.0 was about transitioning from an analog way of content distribution to digital. In Web 2.0, a medium of a platform or online streaming service emerges. During this progress, if you take your eyes off for just one second, you found yourself pushed to the corner in a blink of an eye. For instance, a lot of record companies shut down in the early 2000s as music CDs transited to digital format. SM was also struggling for a few years until artists such as BoA and TVXQ entered the Japanese market, where people were still keeping to the analog consumption of music. Web 3.0, on the other hand, is truly an emergence of the era of content.

Q. Hasn’t content always been at the heart of your businesses?  

A. No, it has not. In the past, technological development led the way. When TV first came out, everyone was amazed by the moving pictures, but then it transitioned to competition among local broadcasters, then content itself, which is how content became the barometer to decide success. Now is an era where if there are 7 billion people in the world, there can potentially be 7 billion different channels. We now need technology to back up what kind of content we want to express or portray, not the other way around.

As I look around this year’s CES, I could even say that ‘there is no technology.’ If I put it in a different way, technology has made all kinds of content possible. A foremost example would be the metaverse, where the virtual and real worlds meet.

Q. Was there any metaverse booth that caught your eye?

A. There was a metaverse zone at the Lotte Data Communication booth, which offers immersive content of users visiting department stores and movie theaters through 3-D real-time rendering. I saw potential in the content.

Q. What is the core of metaverse?

A. The actual reality and the virtual world must co-exist together in metaverse Everyone should be able to lead different lives on the metaverse. The Korean population could even expand to 500 million if every virtual human was given an artificial intelligence (AI) brain. A country that does not prepare for such change is sure to fall behind.

Q. You also seem to have your own set vision on K-pop, metaverse and intellectual property (IP).

A. IT and content IP are two variables in a symbiotic relationship. Without technology, content cannot be created, and technology without content soon disappears from the market.

A celebrity who leads K-pop becomes “a living IP” and content in their own right. If their avatars are able to perform in the metaverse, they become incomparably, immensely valuable. At this year’s CES, I truly felt that we could lead the world by mixing technology with content, by collaborating with K-pop powerhouses such as JYP Entertainment and HYBE.

Q. What about other exhibitions?

A. I empathized greatly with Samsung and SK’s vision about sustainability, and contemplated about what we  could do and contribute to the world. It’s how we came up with an eco-friendly festival where we aim to have SM’s celebrities perform in Mongolia this summer, where desertification is accelerating.

Since K-pop’s primary consumer base is younger people, we wanted to provide a ground where fans can both enjoy music and raise awareness about desertification of Mongolia by planting trees. I hope to spread this festival into a global movement. Then wouldn’t I be worthy of the title as a cultural monarch equivalent to the influence of Genghis Khan?

BY CHOI EUN-KYUNG [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]