By then Park had already concluded that financial success in the entertainment business wasn’t based on creating music but on creating stars whose appeal can be leveraged into merchandising, corporate sponsorships and pricey concert tickets. Their music, he decided, was best seen as a marketing vehicle.
“The problem of the U.S. music industry is that music companies, management companies and performance planning companies work individually,” he observed. “It’s hard to create added value with music only, so companies are likely to make a loss. We are going to do these three sectors at the same time, centering on stars. This is the Korean style.”
To that end JYPE had developed a system to train and groom about one hundred young talents for stardom at its Seoul Academy. A potential star is put through a four- to seven-year regimen of song, dance, language and media instruction before being allowed to debut with an act. The talents live in dorms and get an allowance from JYPE to cover clothes, travel and even spending money. It costs about a half-million dollars to groom a multi-member act, Park estimates.
Park quickly learned that while JYPE could find and train top-flight singers and dancers, it was a different matter to find artists with enough gifts to be taken seriously in a mature, highly-competitive pop music market like the U.S. In early 2008 Park launched a series of concert-auditions across the U.S. sponsored by Helio in hopes of seeking out new Asian American talent to develop and to give exposure to top JYPE stars-in-embryo who had been apprenticing for a year and a half with U.S. singers like R. Kelly and Big Boi.
Meanwhile Park himself used what he had learned from his intense exposure to the U.S. music scene to power his hiatus-ending seventh album Back To Stage (2007). The delightfully witty music video for his hit single “Kiss” displays relaxed fluency with the stylings of U.S. hiphop culture.
Much of 2008 was taken up with the effort to expand JYPE into China with the April opening of the Beijing Center, followed in May by a collaboration with Jackie Chan on the I Love Asia album project for victims of the devastating Sichuan earthquake. Two of his new acts, 2AM and 2PM, which included Chinese talent, were heavily promoted in the China market, with some success.
Just as the big pieces of Park’s global entertainment empire was falling into place, he found that his marriage had fallen apart. On March 27, 2009 he announced on his homepage divorce from his wife of 10 years Seo Yun Jung.
“I was 20 years old when I met my first love,” he stated. “We stayed together for 16 years. The time we had together was the most valuable and beautiful time of my life and I deeply loved her. But a few years ago, little by little, we started to drift apart. When I was 20 years old, we appeared very similar to many people but over the course of 16 years we slowly grew apart. We came to understand that we had become very different people. We worried and wondered for a few years and finally decided to separate.”
The raw emotional scars from the divorce seems to have provided the juice for Sad Freedom, especially “No Love No More”. The couple never had children. Seo now runs a Seoul flower shop as she did during her marriage to Park.
In other ways 2009 was a banner year. Park was a keynote speaker at the Midem 2009 international conference for 9,000 professionals from over 90 different countries. In June JYPE signed a deal to have its Wonder Girls open for the Jonas Brothers on their global concert tour. In October Park became the first Korean songwriter along with Rainstone to enter the Billboard Hot 100 Chart when the Wonder Girls hit single “Nobody” debuted at number 76.
But for Park the biggest event of 2009 was the release of his eighth album Sad Freedom. The hit single “No Love No More” debuted with a live performance on December 2nd at Korea’s 30th Blue Dragon Awards that won raves all around. Park’s two-year layoff from performing had only added authority to his style. Park also performed his first hit single “Don’t Leave Me” and “Honey” from his fourth album, reminding the audience of his long successful career. He was joined on stage by 2PM, one of JYPE’s hot new K-pop acts, creating the distinct impression that Park was Korea’s entertainment juggernaut. That same month Park kicked off his Korea-wide Heartless tour.
At this stage of Park Jin-young’s career it’s hard to say whether his day job is music mogul or performing artist. The energies he devotes to keeping up his stardom serve equally well to promote JYPE. For example, in July of 2010 he became one of the celebrity judges of the hit TV show Superstar K. And he keeps his 6-1 frame superstar-toned at around 172 pounds with basketball and skiing as well as regular workouts in the gym.
Park is said to enjoy playing baduk, the Korean version of go as much as playing around with rifts on the piano. That love of strategic thinking is evident in his keen observations of popular culture; Park apparently sees the global cultural terrain as though it were a baduk board.
“I believe three factors have contributed to the success of the Korean culture wave,” Park explained to Chosun Daily. “First, Korea has a great capacity for absorbing U.S. culture. In Korea, AFN (the American Forces Network) has been one of the major channels for a long time. Secondly, Koreans have a strong will to go beyond the crowded domestic market and a population of only 50 million. Koreans have no choice but to make inroads into overseas markets. Thirdly, Koreans have artistic potential as a people living on a peninsula, like Italians.
“But the problem is the standardization of Korean public education. What can we expect from children who get standardized and equalized education from school, crammers and other private institutions? Education in Korea has been destroying the creativity of youngsters. If I were to invest in Korea’s artistic future, I’d choose to invest in juvenile reformatories rather than schools.”
This interest in global cultural trends suggests that Park is likely to stay focused on building JYPE as its CEO rather than its top talent. But Park is also keen on sharing his experiences of life at its most intense.
“It is my wish that people remember me as a player who lived a joyful life,” Park told an interviewer. There’s no better way to be remembered for joie-de-vivre than to keep making music that taps into his experiences at the deepest levels.
Regardless of which way Park ends up going, he’s likely to go at it with his usual intensity. As Lil’ Jon, one of JYPE’s U.S. partners, remarked, “J-Y doesn’t do anything half-assed.”
