Yunho: Shot while preparing the bday party with cute maknaes EXO! Took this pic especially for naver star column. They're doing their best so please always support them.^^ 

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Source: [naver]
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Source: [smtown]
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Major Korean entertainment company SM Entertainment (henceforth SM Ent) revealed on the 6th that their carol album [The Warmest Gift], in which all their agency's singers like TVXQ, BoA, SUPER JUNIOR, SNSD and more participated in, will be released on 13 December.

It has been 4 years since SM Ent released their last carol album in 2007.

In this album, the agency's singers KANGTA, BoA, TVXQ, TRAX, DANA&SUNDAY, SUPER JUNIOR, SNSD, SHINEE, f(x), Jang Ri In and J-min will sing 7 songs and 4 remake songs, and all 11 songs were sung and recorded in English.

SUPER JUNIOR sang the title track [Santa U Are The One].

SM Ent said, "In order to express our thanks to all the fans around the world who support SMTOWN, all the songs were recorded in English." And, "It will be an album that everyone around the world can enjoy."

[The Warmest Gift] will also be released in Japan on 14 December.

Source: [asahi]
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Words can't express the boom of popularity right now. These 3 groups who are representatives of Korean power are continuing their advance in Japan, all the way to Kouhaku's stage. In particular, SNSD and KARA are the first girl groups to achieve this feat.

SNSD's first Japanese album [GIRLS' GENERATION] was released in June this year, debuting first on the Oricon Album Weekly Chart. With sales of 232,000 copies within the first week of release, they also made a new record for first albums released by foreign artists.

On the other hand, in April this year, KARA became the first foreign girl group to top the charts with the release of their single [Jet Coaster Love]. Their second Japanese album [Super Girl] also ranked first on the charts for the week of 5 December and became the first foreign girl group to achieve the number one ranking on both the single and album charts in 30 years, since The Nolans.

Both groups made their major debut in Japan last year. SNSD caught the eyes of the public with their beautiful legs and the brilliant dancing and singing of the 9 members while the 5-member group KARA became a hot topic with their "butt dance" in their debut single [Mister]. However, they were not selected for last year's Kouhaku.

While their participation was considered, the production side said last year, "It (t/n: the selection) just missed by a bit. To boost this movement, we definitely hope to invite them next year."

In response to that yell (t/n: support) the momentum for both groups began building from the start of the year onwards. According to sources, their contributions towards the NHK music programme [MUSIC JAPAN] whenever they attend are also recognized and the decision for their appearances were also undisputed.

Also, Tohoshinki, who have attended Kouhaku twice, released their single [Why? (Keep Your Head Down] in January this year and achieved first place with their unchanging popularity. This will be their first time taking the Kouhaku stage after making a comeback from their two-year absence.

Young Hallyu stars like Jang Geuk Suk (24) and male groups like Supernova, 2PM and SHINee were also up for consideration. However, finally, it is expected that these 3 groups' attendance is confirmed.

Source: [sanspo]
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T/N: "it is expected that these 3 groups' attendance is confirmed" = this is not official info from Kouhaku.

Additional performers have been added for the FujiYV special programme [2011 FNS Music Festival], which will be broadcasted on 7 December.

-omitted-

There will be 77 teams (artists) attending the event. That day, over the course of 4 hours, more than 80 songs will be performed during the programme. Out of this, 60 songs will be collaborations between attending artists.

[2011 FNS Music Festival]

-Attending Artists-

Arashi / ANN / AKB48 / EXILE / KinKi Kids / Toshinobu Bota / Mai Kuraki / CHEMISTRY / Go Hiromi / Gospellers / JUJU / SNSD / Masayuki Suzuki / SPEED / SMAP / Shinji Tanimura / T.M.Revolution / TOKIO / Hideaki Tokunaga / B.B. Queens / Hikawa Kiyoshi / Hirai Ken / Ayaka Hirahara / V6 / Masaharu Fukuyama / BoA / Makihara Noriyuki /Matsuzaki Shigeru / Minami Kosetsu / miwa / yuzu / LOVE PSYCHEDELICO / Wada Akiko / Watase Maki / WaT / w-inds. / SKE48 / KARA / Kis-My-Ft2 / Third Generation J Soul Brothers / Shoko Nakagawa / Nishino Kana / AI / Nanase Aikawa / Ashida Mana / Akashiya Sanma / Iwasaki Hiromi / Osawa Yoshiyuki / Kaoru to Tomoki, Tama ni Mukku / Ganbarou Nippon Ai wa Katsu Singers / Kikkawa Koji / Kobayashi Akira / Sexy Zone / Tohoshinki / Dream Morning Musume / BEGIN / Fairies / Fuse Akira / Ben E. King / Matsudaira Ken / Morning Musume / Moritaka Chisato / Yaida Hitomi / Yakushimaru Hiroko


Source: [Natalie]
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SM artists like TVXQ, Super Junior and SNSD have sent aid to victims of the Thai floods.

According to Thairath Online, "TVXQ, Super Junior, SNSD and other artists from SM Entertainment have sent relief supplies to the victims of the Thai flood." Having received a lot of love from the people of Thailand, they have pitched in to help those who are suffering from the worst flood Thailand has faced in the past 50 years.

Having heard about the Thai floods through the news, SM Entertainment gathered relief supplies like water, medicine and food, and donated these to the Thai Red Cross through Thai SM TRUE.

TVXQ, Super Junior, SNSD, together with SHINee and f(x), sent messages of encouragement to the flood victims through a video. Through the video, they sent their message of hope, "We hope that all the Thai citizens will get through this difficult time with their strong willpower" and "We hope that all the victims of the Thai flood will be able to recover from the damages of the flood as soon as possible."

Source: [innolife]
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The symptoms are uncontrollable shrieks, intense heart palpitations, soaked palms, speaking — and squealing — in foreign tongues.

Now arriving in New York City: The South Korean phenomenon known as "hallyu," or "Korean Wave."

Already a craze in Asia, the wave has opened the floodgates of K-Pop in France, Brazil, Germany and Australia. Now it's about to take over New York.

Fans will pack a sold-out Madison Square Garden Sunday night for a concert presented by SM, one of South Korea's biggest record labels. The lineup: Girls' Generation, f(x), BoA, Kangta, TVXQ, Super Junior and SHINee.

If you don't know the names, don't worry. Think of the show as a combination of the annual Jingle Ball extravaganza and a big helping of Seoul Train.

And if fans are pumped, so are the performers.

"It is absolutely a dream come true," Tiffany Hwang, 22, one member of Girls' Generation told the Daily News. "I'm so excited. All I've been looking forward to was this weekend for a pretty long time."

A previous SM concert in Paris sold out in under 15 minutes. A second show was added and tickets went in less than 10 minutes.

Korean pop has been causing a frenzy in NYC, too.

On a recent Monday afternoon, hordes of fans outnumbered tourists in Times Square, holding colorful cardboard signs outside of MTV's TRL studios. The cheers weren't for Katy Perry or Justin Bieber, but for a group of South Korean acts including B2ST and 4 Minute. One fan issued a familiar cry.

"Oh my God, this is a dream come true!" exclaimed Nicole Asmat, 19, who was part of the lucky audience inside TRL studios. A flood of tears drenched her face after one of her favorite stars held her hand from the stage.

"I haven't seen this in years," Peter Griffin, executive vice president at MTV said while peering at the crowd outside. "It reminds me of when 'N Sync was here and the fans lined up around the studio."

Just one day earlier, 40,000 fans screamed as K-Pop heartthrobs 2PM and TVXQ, among others, performed at the New York Korean Festival in Overpeck County Park in Bergen County, N.J. The next morning residents complained to authorities about the crowd noise.

"They mean so much to me. I started dancing again because of them," Ana Ciprian, 15, shrieked from her seat, wildly clapping her hands.

Others, like Katerin Morales, 21, traveled from Texas to get her up-close and personal dose of K-Pop. "I'm having a moment," she said, her left hand covering her mouth. "They're so far away that I never thought I'd see them."

Ashley Diomedi, 20, drove eight hours from Virginia; Kharla Salazar, 22, took a red-eye flight from Miami; Virgine Cote and five of her friends traveled from Quebec.

"Korean pop stars are beautiful, and I love them because they care so much about their fans," said Cote, sporting a bright shirt with the words SHINee — her favorite band — emblazoned in bold letters, while tugging on her art book, filled with sketches of Korean celebrities.

"We don't have singers like them in Canada."



Hwang admits that she and the rest of Girls' Generation consider fans the most important people in their lives.

"Words cannot describe [our fans]," she says. "They are our inspiration and the foundation behind our music. Without the fans we wouldn't be here."

Performers hold regular fan meetings in Seoul and keep up with them on SM's Facebook wall.

Korean pop is serious business, too. Since the turn of the millennium South Korea has been pumping out dramas and music videos as a means of influencing the broader culture throughout Asia. South Korean president Lee Myung-bak ranked K-Pop as one of the country's greatest achievements in an August speech celebrating Korea's independence from Japan.

K-Pop videos are "just slick, extremely well produced, always have different themes that really capture audiences' attentions," says Cedarbough Saeji, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA in culture and performance with a focus on Korean culture.

"The production value is very sophisticated. Every K-Pop video is as high-quality as any top American act like Lady Gaga or Britney Spears, but the image is a lot cleaner, less sexualization."

Saeji says one appeal of Korean pop music is that the stars become friends with their audiences. And Korean singers perform multiple times on several TV networks a week.

"People like these Korean stars because they seem like someone they can be friends with," she says. "They're taught to be humble, friendly. There's no diva attitude. And they're fun."

This sense of fondness for these artists has everyone from teens in London to singing groups in Vietnam remaking Korean pop songs or emulating their dance moves and fashion styles.

"Social media has definitely impacted how accessible and easy it is to find these groups," says Young Ji Park, who founded a website dedicated to K-Pop called SeoulBeats.

"Twitter and Facebook have made these groups widely known and Korean pop groups are even featured on the top music videos of the day on YouTube. It's very visible."

So eye-catching in fact, that a live K-Pop invasion was inevitable. Here's one example:

Hip-hop sensation 2NE1, a four-girl group that sings and raps about girl empowerment, has become designer Jeremy Scott's muses. Scott created a shoe: the JS Collage Wings x 2NE1, which will debut next month.

The group's look — high fashion with a colorful, punky twist — has even inspired some updated costumes in the new production of Broadway's "Rent."

Rapper and producer will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas fell in love with the group after watching one of their videos online. He's now producing their first all-English album.

And singing isn't the only thing these young performers do. The American tween market gets its introduction to K-Pop next year when the Wonder Girls — a five-member group that once toured with the Jonas Brothers — star in a made-for-TV movie for TeenNick.


K-POP'S SECRET WEARPON: GIRLS' GENERATION HAS BEEN GROOMED TO ZOOM UP THE CHARTS

Korean pop has become an alternative for audiences bored with the current top-100 charts.

"Look at American pop music today — it's great, it's very high-quality, but there is a sameness to it," says Nusrat Durrani, general manager at MTV World.

"With something like K-Pop, you're seeing something very different. I mean, the visual vocabulary of this music is completely different, as you'll see. It's like, sometimes you feel like this is, wow, David Bowie in the Ziggy Stardust period — but South Korean.

"Why should pop music be only American-dominated?"

It's a question Durrani will answer in January with the launch of MTV K. The channel will be an American resource for all things Korean pop-related and will be streamed on all MTV platforms. This means K-Pop elements will play throughout programming on MTV as well as at MTV.com.

"The other thing, too, is I think it reflects a certain innocence and naivete missing from the American pop-culture scene. This is pop idols as they used to be, with a certain innocence about them that I think the audience misses," Durrani says.

While turn-of-the-millennium pop featured sleek dance moves and heartthrobs like Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and 98 Degrees, today's audience is missing out on bubblegum pop, he says.

But what differentiatesK-Pop, Durrani says, is that it's so refined, with every dance move in sync, every note precisely hit.

"K-pop is very interesting because it comes from a place of great discipline," he explains.

"A lot of these acts have been professionally trained for years and years. A lot of K-Pop acts actually have gone through very rigorous training, gone through a lot of discipline and have worked extremely hard. So the quality you see in K-Pop is quite extraordinary."

Tiffany Hwang can attest to that.



Born in San Francisco and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Diamond Bar, Hwang was discovered at an open casting call for an L.A.-based Asian-American talent show called "Kollaboration." After practicing in her room, the 15-year-old auditioned with Christina Aguilera's "The Voice Within."

She didn't make it onto the show but did catch the eye of record label scouts there.

"I guess I got the bigger end of the deal," she says.

The company, SM Entertainment, agreed to train her in all aspects of pop stardom: singing, dancing, acting and language courses.

"I practiced a minimum of 4-6 hours every day," she recalls. "Being there alone gave me a lot of motivation to keep going on."

Hwang and Girls' Generation would top the Asian charts for seven weeks with their single "Gee." The group maintained the same level of success in Japan, topping all the charts there. That's what drew the attention of Steve Berman, vice chairman at Interscope, and Max Hole, chief operating officer
at Universal's international divison.

"They're obviously a pretty impressive-looking act," says Hole. "They're nine girls doing incredible dance routines and are great singers. For me it was the songs, and it always comes to the songs. Their songs are really, really strong."

Berman says that he was impressed by the fact that the group would book venues like L.A.'s Staples Center in a matter of minutes.

"When you dig a little bit deeper and you realize that the makeup of the audience of these shows are 75-plus percent non-Korean/non-Asian," he says. "Then you realize what the incredible potential here is."

"Now is the Girls' Generation moment," says Hole. "K-Pop is here."

Their first English single, "The Boys," was released on iTunes and zipped to No. 52 — without any promotion.

But with a music market dominated by the Lady Gagas, Rihannas and Beyoncés, can a fairly unknown group from a very faraway country succeed?

"We're definitely ready," says Hwang. "I'm not nervous. We're looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it."

Source: [NYDailyNews]
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Continuing from Los Angeles, Paris and Tokyo, SMTOWN also charms the New York fans.

On 23 October, 7.30pm (local time), SMTOWN was presented at the [SMTOWN Live World Tour in New York] at Madison Square Garden, New York, driving a crowd of 15,000 fans wild.

Asia's representative singers like Kangta, BoA, Super Junior, TVXQ, SNSD, SHINee and f(x) were all presented in this concert. Besides performing the hit songs by each team, there were also special stages as well as joint stages that are unique only to SMTOWN. SNSD also revealed the English version of their new song [The Boys], which also had a worldwide release.

This concert has made a record as the first concert by Asian singers to be held at Madison Square Garden, the mecca of American pop culture.

In order to report the event, the concert was also attended by local reporters from the New York Times and the New York Daily, as well as international reporters from Japan's Sankei Sports and Nikkan Sports.

About 70% of the audience comprised of non-Asians, which reaffirmed the international popularity of SMTOWN.

The audience also had a lot of fun singing along and mimicking the Korean cheers perfectly.

Source: [JPJOINS]
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