GZBkarma

Background

GZBkarma is all about K-pop. She can talk about her favorite K-pop groups for hours, debate influential members of each group without pause, and can rattle off top songs for each group without missing a beat. If you look at her YouTube channel, you’ll notice that she frequently posts about the concerts she attends with her sister, which totals 18+ already. She works hard to obtain backstage passes for both her and her sister, and some artists have even acknowledged her as a devoted supporter. When asked how she saves up to attend these concerts held worldwide, she replied that she doesn’t spend much on anything else and pools money with her sister, specifically to see these concerts. When she’s not spending money on concert tickets, she’s busy building her K-pop album collection, which she prominently displays on her videos and in special unboxing vlogs. She’s even used her love for dancing to fuel her K-pop addiction, learning different K-pop dances such as ‘Playing With Fire’ by BLACKPINK and ‘Butter’ by BTS, among others.

She wasn’t always an ardent K-pop fan, however. She has talent with languages — she’s fluent in French and English, knows Vietnamese, has learned Spanish and German at school, and knows a spattering of Korean too. Unfortunately, she suffered a breakdown during this period and had to change her plans. She only got into K-pop because she was listening to Japanese pop or J-pop. From there, she progressed to watching K-dramas, which feature a lot of K-pop songs. It was a natural transition to find and listen to these soundtracks, and somewhere while trying to decipher the lyrics, GZBkarma turned into a huge K-pop fan.

She leaned into YouTube as a medium to share her K-pop love simply because she was a regular user, posting videos on a channel co-created with a high school friend. They stopped posting, but as her K-pop love grew, GZBkarma explored the idea of putting up YouTube videos about her reaction to the latest K-pop songs. She eventually taught herself everything about YouTube and started her channel. During the early years, she would supplement her income by putting her language skills to good use; she would tutor students — adults and kids — in English and French. Today, every video she posts gets a lot of attention, her YouTube videos have been viewed about 66 million times in total, and her subscriber base is growing steadily.