Billboard by: Jeff Benjamin
When Eshy Gazit began working with the Korean boy band BTS in 2016, the group was seen by some as a long shot for crossover success. “Early on, many people in the industry mocked my attempts to break BTS,” says Gazit, the CEO of the boutique PR, A&R and management agency Gramophone Media. “They thought that it was never going to happen in the U.S.”
Recently, Gazit has helped arrange full-band interviews for BTS with James Corden and E! News, even though only one member is fluent in English. “[Interviewers] see the charm, the smile, their humanity,” he says. “The talent doesn’t need language.”
While BTS had already headed stateside before, it wasn’t until last year when their label Big Hit Entertainment sought out a local partner to help the group grow even bigger in the U.S. “Big Hit contacted my company Gramophone Media,” CEO Eshy Gazit said. “I immediately fell in love with the band and I decided to take on breaking BTS in the U.S. personally. The rest is history.“
In August, the group will return to L.A. to headline Staples Center, a capstone of its ascent into K-pop’s A-list. And this time around, they have a U.S. major record label and the most powerful music management consortium in the country behind them.
In May, the seven-member group — which performs in Korean, Japanese and English — announced they’d signed with Sony Music subsidiary Epic Records, putting them alongside U.S. rap and pop stars like DJ Khaled, Camila Cabello and Travis Scott.
“We have always agreed on a vision for Monsta X that certainly includes, but extends beyond their core K-pop Audience,” said Ezekiel Lewis, executive vice president of A&R at Epic Records. “We see them as a potentially enormous boy band that happens to be from Korea as opposed to viewing through the more narrow lens of K-pop.
The deal was brokered by Eshy Gazit, former manager for K-Pop titans BTS. Gazit brought Monsta X with him to Maverick, the management firm owned by Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the U.S.
“It’s great that K-pop is getting more of a spotlight,” the band said, in a group-answered e-mail interview. These new deal mean they want to “go beyond K-Pop and challenge ourselves and what’s possible.”
...but they were not successful right away. In fact, when they first came to L.A. in 2014, they literally walked around the city trying to corral people to attend their first free concert at The Troubadour. Only 200 showed up. Five years later, they're filling Citi Field in New York and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena — a testament to their massive fan base, an internet-mobilized legion known as ARMY (which stands for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth). "We started a massive guerrilla campaign — radio, TV, press — with the goal to open up as many doors as possible," says Eshy Gazit, a 45-year-old manager with Maverick who was hired by Big Hit in 2016 to help break the band into the U.S. market. "And let's not forget the internet; their engagement on social media kept growing exponentially." What ultimately shot the Korean band to the top of the U.S. charts, Gazit adds, was a combination of its members' "inelegant charisma" and old-fashioned timing. "The music industry in the internet day and age is global in every aspect," he says. "The consumption of music now is at our fingertips."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/29/bts-and-big-hit-entertainment-how-k-pop-broke-through-in-the-us.html
"I believed full-heartedly regardless of the status quo and the history, that it's time for music from South Korea, and from all over the world, to cross over to the U.S.," Gazit said.
"The fans are part of the picture," said Gramophone Media CEO Eshy Gazit, whose public relations and management agency has helped to broker BTS' U.S. media engagements. "I don't think there's any fanbase anywhere [else] that is so committed and so diverse globally," he added.