K-Pop's Fourth Generation and the Economy of the Reference

The K-Pop business runs on a generational clock that nobody officially keeps but everyone tacitly agrees on. Roughly every five years a new cohort of Korean idol groups debuts under a format that breaks with the prior one, and the trade press settles on a number.

The first generation — H.O.T., S.E.S., Sechs Kies, Fin.K.L. — established the template in the late 1990s. The second, from 2003 onward, was the export wave: BoA, TVXQ, Super Junior, Girls' Generation, Wonder Girls. The third, starting around 2012, was the global one: BTS, BLACKPINK, TWICE, EXO, Red Velvet. The fourth, the one this piece is about, debuted clustered around 2020: aespa, IVE, ITZY, LE SSERAFIM, and the one that broke the format hardest, NewJeans.

From the second generation onward, the operating unit of K-Pop creativity was the "concept" — a coordinated palette of color, costume, choreography, and narrative pinned to an album cycle. A group was expected to own a universe and update it.

BLACKPINK held a sharp-edged, luxury-coded femininity. BTS spent half a decade serializing a cinematic mythos across albums and short films. TWICE staked out a brighter, more saccharine register and rarely strayed. The work was vertical: each group dug deeper into a single distinctive register, and the fan economy rewarded them for it.

The track here is BLACKPINK's DDU-DU DDU-DU from 2018, released on YG Entertainment — a song that compresses the third-generation playbook into three minutes of trap-edged maximalism.

What the fourth generation does differently is that its concepts are openly cited rather than constructed. The reference is the product. NewJeans, working with producer 250 and director Min Hee-jin at ADOR, foregrounds 1990s American R&B and early-2000s Y2K visual codes — Aaliyah, Destiny's Child, the Tamagotchi-era teen movie. IVE quotes the same Y2K palette through a Z-Gen self-empowerment filter. aespa builds a metaverse storyline that openly draws on Björk, Grimes, and Japanese mecha anime.

LE SSERAFIM, signed to Source Music under HYBE, leans on late-1990s and early-2000s American R&B and the MTV TRL aesthetic of the same window. The point is not that earlier groups never had influences — they did — but that the fourth generation treats those influences as visible scaffolding for the listener to recognize, not as a hidden ingredient.

The embed is BTS's Spring Day from 2017, released on Big Hit. It sits right at the hinge: the moment a third-generation group reached a scale large enough that the next cohort would be making music about reaching that scale.

What BTS and BLACKPINK accomplished in global reach, the fourth generation has converted into a different kind of asset. The strategy now is to be the citation a future group will reach for — to build a sound and a visual language sharp enough that ten years from now a debuting group can say "this is our NewJeans reference" and be understood instantly.

In 2026, the groups already being tagged as fifth-generation — BABYMONSTER from YG, Kiss of Life, ILLIT — are visibly working in that economy. The references they pull from will include the fourth generation itself. The cycle was always going to compress, and now it has.