When Zico dropped Any Song in January 2020, he didn’t just release a chart-topping track he unintentionally opened the floodgates for what would become a TikTok-first era in K-pop.
With the help of stars like Hwasa and Chungha, Zico launched a promotional campaign that didn’t rely on traditional music shows or long-term teasers. Instead, he pioneered the K-pop TikTok challenge formula: post a short, easy-to-follow dance on social media and let virality do the rest.
The result? Any Song went supernova dominating streaming platforms and social media feeds. But more importantly, it set a new blueprint for how K-pop songs could (and should) be promoted.
Since then, nearly every K-pop release, regardless of genre or artist status, has followed the same playbook: build a catchy point choreography, pre-load it onto TikTok, and push “challenge clips” featuring labelmates, influencers, or idols.
This shift has drawn criticism for commercializing creativity and reducing music into 15-second snippets optimized for trend algorithms. While Zico’s Any Song was a fully-formed, sonically rich track that happened to go viral, the songs that followed often feel manufactured purely for short-form attention.
Comments on Pann:
- Why are people blaming Zico for this? LOL. The ones copying it are the problem.
- “Golden phone”
- This was a culture bound to emerge anyway because of Shorts, Reels, and TikTok.
- I just don’t like it. It’s amazing that there are still followers of the golden phone trend.
- The number one culprit ruining K-pop is the damn Japanese—tone-deaf goat voices.
This shift has drawn criticism for commercializing creativity and turning music into content that feels engineered for bite-sized trends rather than crafted for artistic expression. Increasingly, tracks are designed with social media virality in mind—built not to be heard from start to finish, but to capture a few seconds of attention in an endless scroll.
