Global Rise of Girl Group Katseye
Katseye is a 6 member Global Girl Group formed under Hybe X Geffen through the survival show Dream Academy in 2023. Since then the group has made their official debut in June of this year with their song Debut. The Group consists of members Manon, Sophia, Yoonchae, Daniela, Megan, and Lara. Although half of the group is from the United States all members come from unique ethnic backgrounds from Switzerland, Philippines, Cuba, South Korea, China, and India.
Along with their debut album The PopStar Academy documentary series was released on Netflix to highlight the real behind the scenes training to debut. Viewers of the Dream Academy survival show felt that there was a lack of connection with the audience. As a result many have been happy with the newly released documentary.
The term Global Group has been used in the K-pop world to describe many groups. Fans have been struggling to define what the term means. Some might consider a group global simply because they cater to a global audience while others might focus on the individual ethnicities of the members. Katseye has most aspects that one would consider in a global group such as various ethnicities, languages, and global promotions. Katseye is a very unique group as their training to become a group matched those of typical K-pop groups training for countless hours.
To name a few promotions the group has performed on American TV shows such as Good Morning America and on Korean and Japanese music shows. They have also performed in the Philippines and are set to perform at the Jingle Ball this year. Each week they travel to a brand-new country performing and connecting with many different groups of people around the world online and offline.
To gain some more insight of the global rise and popularity of Katseye I decided to Zoom interview North Central College student Alyssa Martinez. At the time of the interview Alyssa said that she was watching the Netflix documentary and had previously watched the survival show on YouTube last year. Her initial thoughts on the documentary were that “having context to all of that is just really dramatic to see how actually serious it was behind the scenes”. We conversed more and I asked her if she considered the group a K-Pop or a Global Group and she said that “in the show they kept referring to them as both global and then K-pop group so it was kind of confusing like you can’t be both you have to choose one I think I would consider them more a global group because the girls are from everywhere and then they are mainly doing their music in English”. We also talked about how promotions are what mainly set Katseye apart from other Global Girl Groups. Other so called global groups even under Hybe are not being promoted at the same level as Katseye. Besides promotions we also talked about how Katseye is set apart due to their various different backgrounds “and also… they look like professionals even though they debuted a couple of months ago”. Their song Debut received little success. Until they released their song Touch the group saw more success. I asked Alyssa her thoughts on the success and we agreed that it was due to more promotions and we “still see them promoting it right now so they’re really leaning into that…and the music video is better quality”. Moving forward we both think that the several content and combination of choreographies that the group is releasing is what will keep fans engaged and hooked besides their music albums.