Listening to KPop in a country where it is not a major genre, might still be counterculture. Think back to the 1960s and 1970s: a lot of the American rock 'n' roll even then was curated, but those young people in the Soviet Union, say, or Morocco who started listening to it where definitely seen as a counterculture within their own country.

> Listening to KPop in a country where it is not a major genre, might still be counterculture.

Abstractly maybe, but in actuality an enormous amount of money and effort is spent to market K-Pop in the US by some of the largest media companies in the world.

And it took an enormous amount of effort to get rock music into and distributed within the Soviet Union. It was produced through the systems of a leading power with organizations that would be illegal locally. I don't see how that changes that the counter culture goes against the general flow until it manages to become it.

They get pretty far by just allowing it to appear on YouTube. Japanese music companies spend all their effort on stopping anyone outside the country from listening by DMCAing all the music videos.

The product is most certainly manufactured. But the culture's response to it is not. The fandom has their own language, their own in-jokes, and will rally together for the causes they find important. They've created something real for themselves. "Counter-culture" may or may not be the right term for what they've made, but it is something independent of the corporations that own the music.

That's a distinction that should be noted because you can see it everywhere. For example: the MCU, Star Wars, and Star Trek are all corporate products produced for a mass audience. But the fandom is independent of that control. The number of good jokes, fan theories, and fan art I've seen for WandaVision has been immense. And the impact of the Star Wars & Star Trek fandoms is also enormous on the culture at large. That's something Disney or Paramount can possibly influence but never hope to control.