As VLIVE Shuts Down, Fans Become Archivists
For the past seven years, K-Pop idols have live streamed video releases, mukbangs, and their daily lives on VLIVE. The app is the largest archive of K-Pop content on the internet. Nearly every K-Pop artist has used it in their career. But on October 31, HYBE, the conglomerate that houses the companies Big Hit Music, SOURCE, and PLEDIS, among others, announced that VLIVE would shut down on December 31, 2022. The news is expected: Earlier this year HYBE’s app Weverse, a platform for idols to post directly to fans, acquired VLIVE in a purely competitive move. Nearly every idol has used vlive at some point in their careers. The same cannot be said for Weverse.
In a statement given to Mashable, a Weverse representative said,
"We have consistently informed channel operators... with full information on content backup and download for about a year. We are in the process of executing content migration to Weverse and [are] planning to complete the process by Dec. 28, 2022... Following the integration, non-Weverse artists’ contents will no longer be accessible to the public."
But the app’s closure is troubling for a number of reasons. One, many artists on VLIVE come from companies that have now folded or groups that are disbanded. There is no reason – or even an ability – for a company to preserve their content. Second, the closure promotes HYBE taking an even larger stake in K-Pop, which continues to stomp out any chance of smaller companies or groups having platforms to be recognized. Unless a company can sign with Weverse, there is a big likelihood that their content will be lost to YouTube or Instagram livestreams.
VLIVE was an excellent way to preserve, specifically, what third and fourth generation K-Pop looked like. But as several Reddit users glumly observed when the closure was announced, “Memories don’t make money.” They’re right: It’s difficult to monetize old videos. But as K-Pop evolves, it is vital that we keep records of its history.
This has caused fandoms to rally together as archivists, a role that typically is affiliated with registrars and curators in museums. Through Twitter and Google Drive, fans have begun downloading and harvesting VLIVE content from several groups: TWICE, IZ*ONE, SNSD, INFINITE, SHINee, and Stray Kids. While I would wager that corporations like JYP Entertainment and SM Entertainment likely have their files backed up, they are not, and likely will not be, available on the public domain anytime soon. This is bad for K-Pop and bad for researchers, like me, who frequently dig through old videos for stories.
Over the past twenty years, K-Pop has uniquely and thoroughly documented its growth through videos and photos. This is done, monetarily, as a form of fan-service: The more a group streams and hosts intimate live-streams, the more likely a fan will feel close to them. This will, in turn, bolster album sales. But from a historical perspective, the live-streams are worth preserving. It may not matter today, for example, how SNSD celebrated the release of “Lion Heart” (as one V-Live video depicts), but it will add important context as researchers chart first and second generation girl groups.
There are no curators of K-Pop collections like there would be in an art museum. Instead, our collections are homespun, uploaded to Twitter stan spaces, Reddit collector communities or shelved in dusty bedrooms. This concept might seem silly on the surface, but over the weekend I was reminded how powerful well-researched and documented information can be in telling stories in K-Pop. In the light of the explosive SBS story about OMEGA X, a photo of the group’s member Sebin was uploaded to his first group, SNUPER’s, official Twitter page. A fan quickly traced the selfie to an exact, dated SNUPER fan sign based on livestreams and photographs, proving that the photo was not, in fact, owned by OMEGA X’s label. Sebin’s image could be used in this instance, and as a result, the photo felt like a quiet rebuke to the company. This micro-example will be a useful investigative tactic in a few decades as we begin to track down timelines of groups and companies.
But I would like to propose a solution to an inevitable situation as more dominoes in K-Pop fall. I hope to one day see a database that holds videos, photographs, and scans/ photos of merchandise across the industry’s thirty years. A Discogs for K-Pop, if you will, but bigger and more expansive: This would be a database that allows you to search and find any fan-uploaded content about a specific group or company. Creating a database like this will do more than just provide content for fans, it will empower scholars in future years. Maybe I’ll write a grant to fund it one day.
Memories may not be monetizable, but they are essential in storytelling. Companies may have no interest in the preservation of history, but we, as fans, do. Save your albums, your polaroids, and those VLIVE videos. They’ll be useful one day when we take appraisal of how K-Pop and the Hallyu wave became a globalized force.
