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Trot, written in Korean as 트로트, is the oldest continuously popular music genre in South Korea, and for most of the 2010s it lived in the shadow of K-pop. Then in 2019 and 2020, two TV Chosun audition shows reset the conversation. Miss Trot and Mr. Trot turned veteran ballads and brand new compositions into stadium anthems, minted a new generation of stars led by Lim Young-woong and Song Ga-in, and pulled trot back to the center of Korean pop culture.
What is trot?
Trot is often described as Korea's equivalent of country music or American oldies, a sentimental genre built on a steady duple beat, expressive vocals, and lyrics about love, longing, hometowns, and life's hardships. Its name comes from the foxtrot, the Western ballroom dance rhythm that arrived in Korea by way of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. Early trot fused that two-step pulse with Korean melodic patterns and pansori-influenced vocal techniques, producing a homegrown style that Koreans simply call teuroteu. Over the decades trot has absorbed Latin grooves, big-band swing, and synth-pop production, but its melodic DNA has stayed remarkably consistent.
The legacy stars
The first golden age of trot stretched from the 1960s into the 1980s, when its singers were national celebrities on a scale comparable to today's idols. Lee Mi-ja, often called the Queen of Elegy, recorded the 1964 mega-hit "Tear of Camellia Lady" (Dongbaek Agassi), one of the most covered Korean songs of the 20th century. Joo Hyun-mi, Tae Jin-ah, and Hyun Cheol kept the genre alive through the 1980s and 1990s with appearances on KBS gayo broadcasts and tireless regional concerts. Above all stood Na Hoon-a, the so-called Emperor of Trot, who debuted in 1966 and has released over 3,000 songs across a 58-year career, according to The Korea Herald.
Why trot came back
Trot's mainstream comeback was driven by a mix of demographic shifts and pandemic timing. K-pop's idol industry was producing global hits but underserving older Korean audiences, who had grown up on Lee Mi-ja and Na Hoon-a and were looking for new singers who could deliver that same emotional register. COVID-19 then locked Korea indoors at exactly the moment Mr. Trot was airing in early 2020. The show offered the comforting nostalgia of trot standards mixed with fresh competition drama, and it became a cross-generational living-room ritual. Na Hoon-a's first-ever online concert in September 2020, aired by KBS during the Chuseok holiday, drew a 29 percent viewership rating, a number unheard of for a contemporary music broadcast.
Mr. Trot and the new kings
TV Chosun's Mr. Trot aired its finale on March 14, 2020, after a server-crashing wave of audience votes. Lim Young-woong was crowned the winner with 1,374,748 fan votes, edging out Young Tak and Lee Chan-won, while teen prodigy Jeong Dong-won finished in the top six, as reported by The Korea Herald. The top six contestants were repackaged as a touring unit under the name New Era Project and dominated Korean variety programming for years. Lim Young-woong in particular vaulted into a tier of stardom usually reserved for global idols, becoming the face of Hana Bank and a top-billed advertising model commanding endorsement fees on par with footballer Son Heung-min.
Stadium-filling concerts
Lim Young-woong's IM HERO tour turned trot into a stadium business. His May 2022 concert at Seoul World Cup Stadium drew roughly 100,000 spectators over two nights and was later released as the concert film IM HERO: The Stadium, which topped the South Korean box office in August 2024. He has since headlined the KSPO Dome and other large arenas on annual tours, with tickets selling out in minutes through ticketing platforms that strained under demand. His fan base, known as Heroic Era (Yeong-ung Sidae), pioneered the open-run lines at Hana Bank branches for photocard pickups, a behavior pattern more familiar from K-pop fandoms.
Miss Trot and the trot queen
The female counterpart, Miss Trot, actually predated the men's edition, premiering in 2019 and crowning Song Ga-in as its first winner. Trained originally in pansori, Song Ga-in brought a traditional vocal approach that anchored her appeal as the so-called Trot Queen. According to The Korea Herald, the second season, Miss Trot 2, crossed the 30 percent viewership threshold in February 2021. Jung Mi-ae rose through later editions as another headliner, while Song Ga-in's later solo concerts in Vietnam in 2026 and announced shows at the Pechanga Theater in Los Angeles confirmed trot's growing reach beyond Korea.
Cross-genre hits and K-pop crossover
Trot's rhythmic and melodic sensibility has bled into mainstream K-pop. PSY's 2022 single "That That," produced and co-written by BTS member Suga, leaned on a swung two-beat pulse and shout-along melody that felt closer to trot than to standard pop. IU has openly cited older trot ballads as influences on her retro-flavored singles. K-pop idols have also tested trot directly, with Solbi releasing trot tracks early in her career and the comedy-rock duo NORAZO scoring viral hits like "Cider" and "Wilderness" that combine trot vocal styling with EDM and rock arrangements. In 2024 SM Entertainment partnered with TV Chosun to debut MYTRO, a five-member trot idol group, the first attempt to apply the K-pop trainee system directly to trot.
The middle-aged fandom revolution
What separates today's trot scene from previous eras is the visible reorganization of middle-aged and older fans into K-pop-style fandoms. Korean media has nicknamed Lim Young-woong's core base the noona and imo army, a reference to fans in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond who run social media groups, organize subway and bus ad campaigns, and queue overnight for promotional merchandise. The Korea Times reported on so-called filial-piety tents set up at his concerts where adult children waited for parents inside the venue. KAIST's Graduate School of Culture Technology has even announced brainwave studies comparing Lim Young-woong and NCT 127 fans, treating older trot fandoms as a serious cultural and neuroscientific phenomenon.
Mr. Trot 2, semi-trot, and global exports
The franchise has continued to mint stars. Mr. Trot 2 in 2023 crowned Cheong-ryong, a singer who blended traditional trot phrasing with rock vocal techniques, while Miss Trot 3 in 2024 ended with Park Jihyun as its winner. New subgenres have proliferated: semi-trot blends trot melodies with pop ballad production, urban trot adds R&B and hip-hop textures, and trot-pop fusion has become a standard format for crossover hits. Trot exports are also growing in Japan, where the genre's shared lineage with Japanese enka has created an unusually receptive market for Korean trot tours and collaborations. Song Ga-in's 700-seat Vietnam concert and Lim Young-woong's overseas tour stops suggest that trot, once dismissed as a relic, is now joining K-pop and K-drama as another export of the Korean Wave.
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