Case Study: The Industry Still Thinks Fans Are a Byproduct to an Artist
In reality, fans are the co-producers and the driving force behind success
On Make Them Cry, from his surprise triple album release this May, Drake raps: "I'm feeling like BTS 'cause it took the whole career for me to be so discovered."
This line caused confusion among BTS fans for several days. Some heard it as a dig, diminishing the group that's sold out stadiums and topped global charts for nearly a decade. Others heard something closer to a shared frustration with institutional barriers within the music industry. While the latter is especially true for BTS, either interpretation carries significance for the group considering their exhaustive efforts to achieve international commercial success. Drake, one of the most commercially successful artists in America, has won only five Grammys from fifty-five nominations over his entire career — and none in the Recording Academy's top general field categories.
In this one line about BTS, Drake paints a mental picture of the gap between commercial success and industry acknowledgment. In order to close that gap, ARMY, BTS's wildly supportive fandom, worked through collective action, co-production, and strategic effort to get their favorite band to chart and become industry-recognized within the American market.
While this piece primarily focuses on BTS as an anchor to this case study in fandom and the power of an organized collective, it merely sheds light on how this approach can be adopted as a replicable strategy across various forms of media and entertainment to achieve similar business outcomes.
Inside the Platform that Turned Fans into Co-producers
The music industry has historically treated fanbases as the product that shows up once an artist succeeds, and as a number that then justifies the budgets and promotion the artist receives. From this perspective, the industry sees itself as the key valuable player in the artist's success. But what if the industry looked at it from the opposite end — where the fans and supporters are the ones truly driving capital, through album sales, streams, concerts, and through powerful collective action such as flooding radio stations for music plays and mobilizing as a unit to support the charitable causes the artist also champions?
This is exactly the case with BTS and ARMY. ARMY was the infrastructure that produced streaming campaigns to move charts, created translation networks to make the Korean act's meaningful lyrics accessible to non-Korean speaking fans broadly, and built community at a scale that marketing departments would dream of. This engine is the pivotal component that accounts for much of BTS's U.S. and international success.
To understand how deliberate that engine actually was, it helps to look at the ecosystem of the Weverse platform. It functions not only as a fan club but as a fully operational marketplace. Its one-stop-shop atmosphere brings together consumers who stream, buy, and attend, and more involved ARMY members who co-produce, translate, organize, and create. Every member on the platform adds value to everyone else, while the large audience of ARMY members pulls in brand partners and merchants who want access to that scale.
What Fans Say When You Ask Them Directly
To further understand ARMY from a personal perspective, I surveyed 119 ARMY members across 18 countries this spring — asking what they purchase, why they purchase, and what they get in return.
The numbers revealed real insight into what fans gravitate toward when it comes to BTS. Nearly 75% have purchased Korean products or food as a direct result of their fandom, and over 67% want to visit South Korea. When asked to rank what actually drove BTS's global success, respondents ranked the members' talent first, but ranked the organization and power of ARMY itself above the parent company's infrastructure and involvement. Fans, in other words, identify themselves as a primary driver of the band's success.
The open-ended responses are where the most valuable information lies. Fans described identity, community, and belonging as the primary reasons for their love of the K-pop group. One respondent, a mother in her thirties, described rediscovering herself through the fandom after years of quietly losing her sense of self. Another called BTS the reason she has real, lasting friendships today. Several used some version of the phrase "BTS found me when I needed it most."
According to the Harvard Business School case study on BTS and ARMY, dedicated fans spend upwards of $1,400 annually on BTS-related purchases (Chung & Koo, 2022). While some might see this spending as irrational, the open survey responses reveal that the return on participants' investment is worth far more than the dollar amount itself. ARMY members are making financial investments in the band with a return of identity, community, and belonging to something that feels both globally significant and personally intimate.
What Had to Align for This to Work
The clearest way to explain BTS's breakthrough is that it required three things to converge at once.
First: talent and chemistry strong enough to generate genuine emotional investment across a real language and cultural gap.
Second: a business infrastructure, including record labels, managers, marketing and PR teams, booking agents, and brand partnership units, all coordinated toward a single goal of executing a long-term strategy for commercial success.
Third: a digital infrastructure precise and accessible enough to let a fanbase organize at global scale, even without the benefit of shared geography.
If we remove any one of those three key components, the outcome almost certainly wouldn't happen. A talented act without infrastructure lacks scalability. Solid infrastructure without talent leaves nothing worth organizing around. And both talent and infrastructure without the digital ecosystem would force an artist to remain locally successful, forfeiting global domination.
Again, this case study uses BTS as a focal point, given how amplified their global influence is, but the underlying mechanics aren't unique to BTS at all.
Beyond BTS
If we take away the K-pop specifics, what's left is a transferable model for how any global act breaks through, regardless of language or culture.
Typically, industry professionals ask artists to soften their edges in order to fit what the industry expects. But a fan infrastructure organized enough to do real work can accomplish what a totally curated, inauthentic image never could.
The question worth asking with any artist trying to cross into a new market today is whether the fan-driven ecosystem supporting them is being taken as seriously as the artist's primary product. Is anyone in the room paying attention to that ecosystem the way they're paying attention to the music itself?
BTS's case suggests it's time to start treating fandom as the strategy itself, instead of something to measure after the fact.
This piece draws on original survey research and a longer case study examining BTS's U.S. market entry through frameworks in international business, platform economics, and institutional theory.
Want the full picture?
The complete, in-depth case study: BTS & ARMY: A Case Study in Global Market Entry, Fan Economics, and Cultural Power, is available for download below.
The study includes citations, frameworks, and findings in full.
The raw survey dataset is also available here.
