In the heart of Seoul's Yeouido financial district, inside an office designed to look like a crash-landed spacecraft — complete with towering astronauts and floating robotic jellyfish — a 36-year-old CEO is making a pitch that the K-pop industry is not sure whether to laugh at or fear.

Choi Yong-ho, founder of Galaxy Corp., believes human idols are optional.

The company manages G-Dragon, one of K-pop's most globally recognized artists. G-Dragon currently accounts for approximately 75 to 80 percent of Galaxy's revenue. In the first half of 2025 alone, the company generated 126 billion won — a number that essentially doubled after G-Dragon signed in 2023. Galaxy is now a unicorn, valued at 1 trillion won, with institutional investors from Seoul to Taipei to Hong Kong.

But Choi's pitch to investors is not that Galaxy has better artists than HYBE or SM Entertainment. It is that Galaxy is building a model where artists become optional.

The components are already in motion. In December 2025, at the ComeUp startup conference in Seoul, a humanoid robot in G-Dragon-inspired attire performed choreography to "Power" onstage. Galaxy has announced plans to open a large-scale Robot Park in Seoul's Songpa-gu on Children's Day, May 5. The company is developing AI glasses called "White Whole" — a name inspired by the theoretical opposite of a black hole — designed to give fans real-time translation and the sensation of experiencing a concert from the artist's own perspective.

The most ambitious project is called "The Day After Tomorrow": AI-powered digital twins trained on an artist's voice, personality, and memory data, capable of releasing content, interacting with fans, and generating revenue indefinitely — including after the artist's death.

Nasdaq's vice chairman visited Galaxy's Seoul headquarters in March. A dual IPO in Seoul and New York is under consideration.

The industry's skepticism is pointed and specific. Galaxy has no track record of discovering or developing idol groups. Its current revenue still comes from G-Dragon performing at stadiums in person. The robot's December performance was a demonstration, not a product. The digital twin raises immediate questions about consent and what it means for a fandom to be in a parasocial relationship with a synthetic artist.

And yet the question Galaxy is forcing the K-pop industry to sit with is real: when AI can generate the voice, the face, the personality, and the choreography — what exactly is the idol for?

(Sources: Bloomberg, Korea Herald, Seoul Economic Daily, KoreaPortal — April 2026)

Tokyo 🇯🇵 — Tokyo invented this. Hatsune Miku debuted in 2007 — a synthesized voice with a character, a wardrobe, and a fanbase that filled concert arenas to watch a hologram perform. She has since released thousands of songs, collaborated with major artists, and sold merchandise globally. Japan's VTuber industry — virtual YouTubers operating as anime-style characters with human voice actors — generates billions of dollars annually, led by Hololive and Nijisanji. Galaxy Corp. is not building something Tokyo hasn't seen. It is building the Korean industrial version of something Tokyo has been living for nearly two decades. The difference is scale and infrastructure: Galaxy wants to industrialize the virtual idol model, apply it to the global K-pop pipeline, and list it on Nasdaq. Tokyo built the culture. Seoul is now trying to build the company.

London 🇬🇧 — In 2022, ABBA Voyage opened at a purpose-built arena in east London. The four original members of ABBA — then in their 70s — performed as digital avatars, captured through months of motion capture sessions. The show runs without them. Four years later, it is still selling out. London's entertainment industry has been watching this proof of concept carefully. The question ABBA Voyage answered is not whether audiences will accept virtual performers. They will — if the experience is emotionally real enough. The question it left open is whether the model works without the original human asset to anchor the avatar's authenticity. Galaxy is betting that AI can generate that authenticity from scratch. ABBA Voyage suggests the audience needs to have loved the human first.

Shanghai 🇨🇳 — China has its own virtual idol ecosystem, largely invisible to Western audiences but enormous in scale. Luo Tianyi, launched in 2012, has performed at major festivals and collaborated with established musicians. AYAYI, a photorealistic AI influencer, has 3 million followers and brand partnerships with luxury labels. The virtual idol market in China is estimated to be worth several billion dollars. What China built, however, is culturally contained — its virtual idols operate within a domestic ecosystem shaped by Chinese platforms, Chinese aesthetics, and Chinese fandom culture. Galaxy's ambition is to build the first virtual idol system that scales globally, the way K-pop scaled globally through BTS and BLACKPINK. Shanghai is watching to see if Seoul can do what Beijing couldn't: make the virtual idol a universal export.