K-pop more western?

The use of English phrases is a feature of modern K-pop. Among Korean lyrics one can hear some English words or even whole sentences. The whole songs in English happen as well. Artist names, song titles, and lyrics have exhibited a significant growth in the usage of English words.

But it wasn’t always this way. No singers in the top fifty charts in 1990 had English in their names: people who worked in the Korean music industry viewed using Korean names as standard. After the 1997 financial crisis, the government stopped censoring English lyrics and Korea started to have a boom in English. Since the late 1990s, English usage in singers' names, song titles, and lyrics has grown quickly.

This phenomenon is primarily the effect of Korean idols who were born or used to live in the USA or another English-speaking country. The Korean Wave has enabled K-pop artists to get into music market outside Asia. Thus, Korean agencies apply the technique of English in K-pop to gain more popularity in the West. Most idols learn English, because it’s a common (similar trends are found in the case of Japanese). More and more K-pop bands use English names rather than Korean ones. Analogously, idols chose English stage names.

Korean names (e.g. Baekhyun and Jeongyeon) are seen less frequently, and many K-pop singers have English names (e.g. I.U.and GOT7). Notably, until the early 1990s, musicians with English names would transliterate them into hangul, but now singers would use English names written with the roman alphabet.

EXO's Baekhyun

I.U.