Culture that outlasts trends

Nearly half of the K-pop idol groups that debuted over the past thirty years left the market within three years. Meanwhile, some music crosses decades of time and is loved all over again. Our thinking began with asking where that difference comes from.

Timeless Culture

Among the words listeners left behind were regrets such as ‘all the songs sound the same’ and ‘just following the formula.’ A familiar formula can be a quick way to reach people, but as time passes, the reason to play it again fades in equal measure. That is why the heart goes to a story of one’s own rather than a borrowed concept.

Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill,’ which peaked at number three on the UK chart in 1985, reached number one thirty-seven years later with a generation hearing it for the first time. Even as time passes, a person’s own story does not fade easily.

SOTA in Method, Timeless in Art

Music made to follow a trend tends to fade along with that trend. In contrast, we believe music that reaches the essence of art and captures the spirit of its time returns long after, as nostalgia for the older generation and as a new stimulus for the new one. So whatever the trend, the aim is to hold on to that essence first and, on top of it, to carry the hearts of people living today.

The way music reaches people has changed a great deal in the meantime. It moved from records and radio to streaming and then to short video, and fans now go beyond listening, taking part in an artist’s choices in apps or sharing music through content they make themselves. Discovering talent, too, now happens across borders. Rather than trailing those changes, we want to keep thinking first about new ways for music to reach people.

New Kit

At the 2020 Academy Awards, director Bong Joon Ho, accepting Best Director, recalled words by Martin Scorsese that he had taken to heart as a young film student. “The most personal is the most creative.”

The raw gems we look for are possibilities not yet unwrapped. Rather than fitting that possibility to someone else’s mold, the work begins by drawing out, as they are, the time a person has lived through and the grain they were born with.

Many hands touch a song before it lasts. We believe that when planning and artists, technology and fans each look from their own place in the same direction, toward the essence of art, music moves beyond the trend of one season and becomes a culture.

The aim is to craft art precisely enough to outlast time, and to open the paths it travels with the newest technology and methods.