It shows a cartoon of him sitting on the numerals 4.0. Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, uploaded a celebratory image Sunday on his Twitter account and on the Instagram account of P Nation, an entertainment company he founded. The music video of the 2012 worldwide hit “Gangnam Style” by singer-songwriter Psy reached 4 billion views on YouTube on Sunday, a first for a K-pop single. Ryan Nakashima reported from Los Angeles.Singer-songwriter Psy uploaded this image to celebrate that the music video of his 2012 worldwide hit “Gangnam Style” reached 4 billion views on YouTube on Sunday, a first for a K-pop single.
The share price has fallen since then but is still about double what it was before the release of “Gangnam Style.” It was time to cash in for Psy’s grandmother, who sold 5,378 shares for about $65,000.
Perhaps inspired by the pure power of pop, DI shares surged eightfold from July after Psy’s hit reached No. It is a stretch to explain how the success of “Gangnam Style” will bolster DI’s profits but that does not seem to matter to the South Korean stock market. Psy is now the face of a new Samsung refrigerator and a major noodle company.Ī fact little known outside South Korea is that Psy’s father, uncle and grandmother own a combined 30 percent of DI Corp., a company that makes equipment that semiconductor companies use to make computer chips.
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Psy has been popping up in TV commercials in South Korea for top brands like Samsung Electronics and the mobile carrier LG Uplus.Ĭhung Yu-seok, an analyst at Kyobo Securities, estimates Psy’s commercial deals will amount to 5 billion won, or $4.6 million, this year. It is television commercials that are the big money spinners for the most successful of South Korea’s so-called K-pop stars. That adds up to a little more than $61,000.Īs for many other parts of Asia, illegal downloads and pirated CDs are so pervasive that only a small minority are willing to pay up for the legal versions. The biggest cut goes to his agent and online retailers.Īccording to the Gaon Chart of top music in South Korea, “Gangnam Style” had been downloaded more than 3.6 million times and streamed about 40 million times as of November. And that is before Psy’s “Gangnam Style” co-composer takes his share. That falls to 7.5 percent for streamed songs. The average price for streaming a song is 0.2 cent. That makes the cost of a downloaded song about 10 cents on average.
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South Koreans pay less than $10 a month for a subscription to a music service that allows them to download hundreds of songs or to have unlimited access to a music streaming service. downloads.īut earnings from downloads in Psy’s homeland are far from an embarrassment of riches. South Korean industry insiders said Psy is likely to have gotten 70 percent and YG Entertainment 30 percent for U.S. How much Psy keeps and how much goes to his managers, staff and record label is unclear. Apple generally keeps about 30 percent of all sales, so the Psy camp could be due more than $2.6 million. The song sells for $1.29 on the Apple iTunes Store, the market leader in song downloads.