Kwangya Club

» see kwangyaclub.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

This one belongs to people who pay a yearly membership to follow a group properly, and I have never been one of those people. Kwangya Club is also recent enough that it was born and buried while I was in my late thirties, watching Korean entertainment restructure itself from a long way outside. What follows is the corporate shape of it, which is the part that is legible from here.

SM Entertainment, the oldest of the big Korean music companies, built its own fan club app and opened it fully on 1 September 2022 after a pilot run in July. It was operated by SM Brand Marketing and it was the first real service under Kwangya, the metaverse brand SM had been building out of aespa's lyrics, where 광야 is a wilderness you walk into. The app ran in four languages and organized itself into clubs, one per act.

Inside a club you got the artist's schedule and a lounge where they wrote posts and fans answered underneath, along with content that existed nowhere else. Paid membership was the point of the thing: the official fan club, the one with the number and the physical kit, now lived in an app instead of a mailing list. Kwangya Club replaced Lysn, SM's previous community app, which had been shut down on 20 July 2022.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a club actually was ~

The Korean fan platform of the early 2020s was a ticketing office wearing the clothes of a social network. Your account held the membership that let you enter the ballot for concert tickets, so leaving the platform was never a matter of taste. Weverse, built by HYBE for its own acts, had already proven the model worked at scale, and every large Korean label wanted one of its own instead of renting a competitor's.

SM launched Kwangya Club into that logic in September 2022. Nine months later SM itself was being fought over by two larger companies.

~ the takeover ~

At the start of 2023 SM's founder Lee Soo-man fell out with the company's management, and the resulting fight for control of SM ran in public between HYBE and Kakao for months. Kakao ended up with the company. HYBE ended up with a settlement, and part of what that settlement moved was the fan platform business.

By 14 April 2023 the Korean trade press was reporting that SM's artists would be joining Weverse and that Kwangya Club's service would be transferred there. SM had built a platform to avoid depending on a rival, and then the ownership of SM changed hands above it.

~ the twelfth of September ~

Kwangya Club stopped on 11 September 2023. Memberships people had bought inside it were carried across automatically, and on 12 September thirteen SM acts appeared on Weverse: Girls' Generation, Red Velvet, aespa, TVXQ!, Super Junior, SHINee, EXO, NCT 127, NCT Dream, WayV, RIIZE, plus Kangta and BoA as soloists.

The app had been open for one year and ten days. It sat between Lysn, which it replaced, and Weverse, which replaced it, and the only reason anybody remembers which one they were using in 2023 is that their membership number followed them through all three.

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