IU, 17-year old, Earned 6 Billion Won in 3 Months

IU aka Lee Ji-eun, South Korean 17 year-old singer debuted only two years ago and the recent reports showed IU earned 6 billion won (US$5.5 million) in revenue from digital music sales in just the first three months of the year. This exceeds her profits from filming TV commercials last year, which made up 5 billion won in revenue.

On 6th of April, it was reported that this figure resulted from an analysis of sales charts obtained from SK Telecomm‘s digital sales system MLB (Music License Bank) and that IU’s copyrighting earnings totaled 2 billion won.

Also, it was calculated that consumers sales brought in 3 times of this, making up an estimated 6 billion won in revenue, however, IU‘s agency, Loen Entertainment, told Edaily SPN over a phone call, “On the side of our distributors, we are still balancing the quarterly accounts, so we do not have an accurate figure yet. Reports that we made 6 billion won from just digital sales are somewhat exaggerated. That is probably not the figure for the first quarter of this year but predictions based on what hasn’t been balanced yet from last year.”

Since December 2010, IU‘s popularity started rising after her release of “Good Day”, followed by “The Story Only I Didn’t Know”, “Cruel Fairytale” and “Someday”, “Marshmallow” which all became hit songs and won awards at the Seoul Music Awards and others.

In addition, IU was a guest performer for British contemporary jazz & soul singer, Corinne Bailey Rae, at Corinne’s first Korean concert.

(아주경제 이수지 기자)

Park Sae-jin swatchsjp@ajunews.com