Alliance for My Idol: Analyzing the K-pop Fandom Collaboration Network

As the K-pop industry has been rapidly expanded, the strength of the K-pop fandoms is under the spotlight. In particular, the collaborations among fandoms for mutually supporting their artists have contributed to the success of the K-pop artists. This paper investigates the current practice of the fandom collaborations in K-pop. To this end, we first introduce the notion of the 'fandom collaboration network' that represents the collaborations among K-pop fandoms. By collecting and analyzing a large-scale fandom activity data from DCinside, we investigate (i) to what extent fandom collaboration is prevalent in K-pop, (ii) how fandoms collaborate with other fandoms, and (iii) what fandoms play more roles in fandom collaboration than others. We find that K-pop fandoms actively collaborate with other fandoms for mutually supporting their artists. By analyzing the structural properties of the fandom collaboration network, we show the fandom collaboration is basically based on the reciprocity. However, we also show that the amount of collaborations between the two fandoms is often unfair. Among all the active fandoms in our data, we find that there a small number of fandoms who play significant roles in fandom collaborations in K-pop. We believe our work can provide important insight for K-pop stakeholders such as fans, agencies, artists, marketers, and broadcasting companies.