[WHY] Trot revival: The ‘old-fashioned’ genre selling out Korea’s stadiums while K-pop wows abroad

 
The biggest K-pop stars overseas are BTS, Blackpink, Stray Kids and aespa — but not in Korea. Here, the throne is taken by names that may be totally unfamiliar to music listeners abroad: Lim Young-woong, Song Ga-in, Youngtak and Lee Chan-won.
 
These stars, known as trot singers, have been topping local music charts since the late 2010s with fandoms just as fervent as K-pop fans. They stream online music with multiple accounts to push their favorite singers up the charts, make donations in their star’s name to make them look good and buy multiple album copies to get a chance to take part in a meet and greet.
 

 
Trot is a semi-traditional pop music genre that is neither ballad, dance nor jazz but a mix of all the aforementioned genres, springing up in Korea around a century ago. It was a genre once considered old-fashioned, but welcomed a new heyday in the early 2020s during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a cable TV channel brought the then-outdated genre back into the spotlight.
 
Now, the names of trot stars shine brightly on billboard signs and TV commercials, but a question still lingers: is trot’s popularity just a fling, or will it last?
 

What is trot?
 
Trot music is probably different from what will come to the minds of those abroad, to whom the genre either refers to the jazzy foxtrot music style that is often seen in black-and-white film dance scenes.
 
The Korean trot genre refers to the two-beat-based music style that began in the 1930s, with its roots in the Japanese enka music that spread in Korea during the Japanese colonial period (1910-45). It began by Korean people singing translated songs of Japanese enka music in the 1920s and led to newly composed music by local creators by the 1930s, according to the “Encyclopedia of Korean Culture,” put together by the Academy of Korean Studies.
 
Musically, trot songs typically used the “la-ti-do-mi-fa,” five-note minor scale, or the “do-re-mi-so-la” five-note major scale with emphasis on the “la,” evidence of the heavy Japanese influence. Lyrically, the words carried what Koreans called the “han” of the people — a repressed sentiment of both sadness and rage that had grown over the years — that became the collective mentality of the colonized country.
 

 
But it was only in the mid-1960s, when the genre began competing with modern, Western-style music, that it was endowed with the name trot. By the time the name trot music became common enough to be considered a genre of its own in the 1970s, it had become “the old style,” compared to the younger rock, pop and folk music that was infiltrating the peninsula.
 
The vintage feel of trot ironically made it the “safe,” and therefore, popular genre during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, but minus any political or social agenda that the lyrics had carried in the past.
 
By the 1990s, trot was called more by its nickname “bbongjjak,” a somewhat derogatory onomatopoeia of the two-beat rhythm mostly used by trot songs. It then became known as an upbeat, entertaining form of music, evolving into an even fancier version in the 2000s with younger trot singers accompanying their music with colorful costumes and backup dancers.
 

 
Has it always been popular?  


No. With the rise of K-pop music in the early 2000s, along with other types of trendy and contemporary music, trot had actually come to be known as somewhat out of style — a genre only reserved for the senior citizens who had grown up listening to it as children.
 
It was in 2019, however, when cable channel TV Chosun turned the tide with an audition program titled “Miss Trot” and succeeded in ushering in a genre renaissance.
 
Amid falling viewership ratings across all TV channels, TV Chosun took the music audition program format that the younger generation was already used to, gave it a trot twist and managed to attract the older generation that was still watching TV. The show had 100 aspiring trot singers compete for a 30 million won ($20,734) in prize money along with a new song and a guarantee of at least 100 performances across the country. It also invited viewers to vote on their favorite — a major hook of television audition programs.
 
The 2019 “Miss Trot” audition show peaked at a 16.6 percent viewership rating in its final episode, which aired on May 2, 2019, making it the highest rating for TV Chosun at the time. The winner, Song Ga-in, had already debuted in 2012 but shot to fame thanks to the show and still reigns as the most sought-after female trot singer even now.
 

 
The following year, TV Chosun rolled out a male version of the show, “Mr. Trot,” that ended with a record-high viewership rating of 34.9 percent on March 14, 2020.
 
Even the “hottest” K-pop auditions programs at that time were unable to match this. Mnet’s “Produce X 101” (2019) peaked at a mere 3.9 percent, despite its global influence, and “I-LAND” (2020) scored 1.7 percent only.
 
But TV Chosun’s success soon led to similar shows from other channels, including KBS2’s “National Trot Festival” (2020), MBC’s “Trot Nation” (2020), SBS’s “K-Trot in Town” (2020) and MBN’s “Trot Man on Fire” (2022-23). TV Chosun also aired two more “Miss Trot” and “Mr. Trot” shows since the first editions. The third season of “Mr. Trot” began on Dec. 19, 2024, and is set to end on March 13. The show has peaked at a 15.2 percent viewership rating so far.
 

How popular is the new generation of trot singers?
 
The short answer is: very. The long answer would be: they may not be able to compete with K-pop groups with multiple members and whose fandoms transcend national boarders, but as individual singers, their influence in Korean society may be bigger than the individual members of global K-pop acts.
 
In fact, there have only been six acts that have held solo concerts at western Seoul’s World Cup Stadium: Psy in 2013, Big Bang in 2016, G-Dragon in 2017 and three in 2024 — Seventeen, IU and the first “Mr. Trot” winner Lim Young-woong.
 
Lim is now the biggest trot star in Korea and managed to sell out two days of World Cup Stadium concerts, held on May 25 and 26, 2024, becoming the first trot singer to fill one of Korea’s largest stadiums on his own. Over the two concerts, he performed for a whopping 100,000 audience members.
 
The Korean Association for the Study of Popular Music even held a forum on the so-called Lim Young-woong phenomena in an effort to break down just how Lim got so big and the effects he has had on society. The first “Miss Trot” winner Song is also nabbing major television advertisements due to her popularity, along with other singers such as Lee Chan-won, Youngtak and Kim Ho-joong — although Kim has fallen from grace due to an alleged drunk-driving incident.
 

Why so popular?
 
The main listeners of trot music tend to be Korea’s older citizens who grew up listening to trot music. They like watching TV and seek refuge from loud, modern K-pop.
 
Television broadcasters don’t disclose the age distribution of viewers, but the general consensus is that trot TV series have been mostly enjoyed by people in their 40s and over, especially those in their 50s and 60s. According to a study revealed by market tracker Trend Monitor in 2021, over half of people in their 50s, or 52.4 percent, said they liked trot, as opposed to 24.4 percent of people in their 20s and 26 percent of people in their 30s.
 
But more than televised entertainment, these trot programs were a break from the ever-growing influence of K-pop, which had been driving the older generation further away from the contemporary music market.
 

 
The new generation of trot singers gracefully mixed trot with elements of younger music genres, such as rock and ballad, allowing older consumers to enjoy something that felt old enough to make them comfortable but new enough to make them feel trendy.
 
“In this fast-aging Korean society, older listeners in their 60s and 70s have become active consumers of culture, not just passive receivers of conventional music,” said music critic Lim Jin-mo.
 
“The fact that the newer generation of trot singers mixes music with trendier genres makes the older people feel trendy as well. The musical expansion of trot is leading to the expansion of the trot fandom and as long as K-pop keeps growing, so will the number of people seeking a quieter, more familiar type of music.”

Is trot here to stay?
 
Trot is definitely here to stay. It just might not stay as big as it is now.
 
One thing to note is that trot had never actually “gone” anywhere. Singers such as Lee Mi-ja, Na Hoon-a, Nam Jin, Tae Jin-ah and Seol Un-do kept their fame among the public during the 1980s and 1990s, and the relatively younger trot singers such as Jang Yoon-jeong and Park Han-bin had been keeping the trot lineage alive in Korea during the 2000s and 2010s.
 
So, even without the TV boost that TV Chosun gave the genre five years ago, trot would have kept living on — just as country, reggae, jazz and other types of music genres keep on seeing new singers and new listeners — albeit smaller in size when compared to the past.  
 

 
What will matter is whether the genre can get another boost to keep the it afloat. As of 2025, the biggest trot stars are still the winners of the first seasons of “Miss Trot” and “Mr. Trot,” and the programs that came afterward failed to receive the same fanfare as the first season did.
 
Right now, the trot stars are big, but the trot genre may already be facing a downward trend due to the prolonged absence of a new star or a new TV format to keep the fire going, according to pop culture critic Jung Duk-hyun.
 
“Everyone desires to stay young — they want to like new things and enjoy what younger people are enjoying,” he said.
 
“Lim Young-woong allowed that to happen, but there hasn’t been anyone who has surpassed his power since. There has to be new stars to keep the audience interested, which trot audition shows haven’t been able to do in recent years. The success and the manner of the survival of the trot scene will depend on whether an audition program, or whatever new format there can be, can birth another megastar to lead the market.”

BY YOON SO-YEON [[email protected]]

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