Awesome article... just wonder how applicable lessons from the South Korean music industry are to the US, where the market is roughly 30x bigger (according to figures in the article).
I'm going to chalk this up as a cultural thing. The relationship that people have with pop music in Asia is different from the relationship American tweens have with pop music. The closest thing we have is a WalMart selling Hannah Montana beach towels and trapper-keepers. But you can't extend much more than that. There's no digital immersion environment nor do we have a fanaticism with pop stars.