Second partnership with the South Korean music industry in just 2 weeks for Binance. The platform has just announced a collaboration with SM Brand Marketing, a branch of SM Entertainment, one of the 3 biggest management companies in South Korea. This association will allow for the first time K-pop fans to create digital content themselves and resell it as non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Binance takes another step forward in South Korea
Just 2 weeks after its partnership with the record company YG Entertainment, the behemoth of the exchange platforms Binance is doing it again. Indeed, a new strategic collaboration has just been signed, this time with SM Brand Marketing (SMBM), a subsidiary of the South Korean entertainment company SM Entertainment.
According to the release, the agreement will allow the two entities to build an exclusive “Play-to-Create” (P2C) system around non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and K-pop stars.
SM Entertainment is a successful label that has established itself as one of the leading labels in South Korea, producing internationally renowned acts such as DBSK, SHINee, Red Velvet, Super Junior and EXO.
Binance did not choose its partners at random: JYP Entertainment, SM Entertainment and YG Entertainment are considered the 3 biggest management companies in South Korea. Along with other entities, these 3 labels have also joined forces in 2011 to create United Asia Management (UAM), an agency to promote K-pop worldwide.
For Helen Hai, the international manager of Binance NFT, the alliance of the NFTs and the K-pop industry makes sense:
“We would like to provide SMBM with the technology to support K-pop fans around the world who want to create content based on their favorite Korean celebrities and who can now earn passive income from their passion.”
A strategy for growth in the music industry
“Play-to-Create” is a concept developed by Soo-Man Lee, the founder of SM Entertainment, which defines the possibility for users to produce digital content through the intellectual property of artists produced by the label.
In other words, fans will be able to directly add their personal touch to the K-pop universe by developing unique products in the metaverse themselves, which can then be sold as NFTs. In this way, anyone can create digital content to generate profit using their own creativity.
According to Sung-Su Lee, SMBM’s CEO, this partnership could revolutionize the music industry as we know it:
“By combining SM’s music production, the technology capabilities of SMBM’s e-commerce platform and Binance’s technology infrastructure, we expect this partnership to bring great innovation to the development of the Play-to-Create ecosystem and more broadly to the expansion of businesses in the blockchain industry.”
Binance, however, is not a special case. Indeed, the border between the metaverse and the music industry is getting thinner and thinner, as Universal Music Group’s latest partnership with the Curio platform or Warner Music’s partnership with The Sandbox to create a virtual music theme park can attest.
