As SM Entertainment prepares to bring its decades-spanning roster to London for SMTOWN LIVE IN LONDON at Allianz Twickenham Stadium on June 28, 2025, we’re tracing the moments that shaped its legacy as a K-pop powerhouse and blueprint builder for an entire industry. 

Welcome to the SM Legacy Series.

Photo credit: SM Entertainment.

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in BoA’s “ID; Peace B” music video: SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo Man watches from behind a swarm of cameras and frantic staffers with a quiet, knowing pride — as if he can already see not just her future, but his company’s. That future wouldn’t just be BoA’s rise as a pop juggernaut, but would mark the start of SM’s evolution from local tastemaker to global power player.

Before TVXQ packed out Tokyo Dome. Before EXO sparked a new fandom era. Before aespa charted KWANGYA’s digital multiverse — there was BoA, the artist SM staked everything on with a make-or-break global strategy. Through her 2000 debut ID; Peace B, SM didn’t just launch a new idol. They rolled out a blueprint for what 21st-century K-pop could be: multilingual, media-literate, and built for export. At 13, BoA became a system, a signal, a test run for a future no one else in Korean pop had dared to touch. And with SM’s full strategic weight behind her, she delivered.

Released on August 25, 2000, ID; Peace B became a mission statement in disguise. Behind the bouncy hooks and genre-hopping production was a new kind of star: polished, cyber-aware, and fluently futuristic. The title track, a glitchy, slick pop anthem wired with early-internet references, saw BoA declaring herself — quite literally — as a digital entity. “Peace B is my network ID,” she says, like a login screen to the future. At a time when most pop stars were still living in analogue, BoA was already logged in.

Visually, the MV leaned into late-’90s, Matrix-coded aesthetics that hinted at something more than just teenage attitude. It was one of the earliest flickers of SM’s now-famous “cultural technology” philosophy: the blending of music, visuals, and virtuality into a self-sustaining pop universe. That same philosophy now powers NCT’s infinite-member matrix and aespa’s AI-laced lore (the reference to Neverland in BoA’s lyrics mirrors KWANGYA, the expansive fictional universe where aespa’s storyline unfolds) — but ID; Peace B was the spark. And then came the leap.

In 2001, while other agencies were still fine-tuning domestic formulas, SM did the unthinkable: they launched BoA in Japan, the world’s second-largest music market and a terrain Korean acts had barely touched. It was high-risk, high-reward, and high-stakes. The Guri-born teenager wasn’t just SM’s next project, but a full-on global experiment.

At the time, Korea and Japan were still wrestling with deep-rooted political tension. Korean pop culture had only just begun trickling into Japan. A 14-year-old Korean girl, singing in Japanese, crossing over? Unprecedented. But SM didn’t blink. They doubled down by retraining BoA linguistically, reshaping her image to balance J-pop sensibilities with K-pop sharpness, and launching a full-throttle campaign. It was a frontline mission in their global playbook, but one question remained: would it work?

Photo credit: SM Entertainment.

BoA didn’t just break through in Japan — she dominated. Shattering records and cultural barriers alike, she became the first non-Japanese Asian artist to sell millions of albums there, turning soft power into hard numbers. Her success wasn’t just commercial; it funded SM’s future, literally financing their first major headquarters. More than a star, BoA became the economic engine and cultural proof-of-concept behind SM’s entire next chapter.

More than that, BoA reshaped what “training” meant inside SM, and her success overseas gave them a viable model to follow. It wasn’t just about clean dance lines and powerhouse vocal runs anymore. It was about building adaptability on top of that star power: fluency across languages, cultures, platforms. BoA’s talent combined with SM’s business-savvy approach pioneered the idea that idols could be cultural shapeshifters: at home in Seoul, fluent in Tokyo, resonant worldwide.

From NCT’s modular avatars to aespa’s hyperreal narrative world, the seeds were planted in ID; Peace B. Without BoA’s success, TVXQ’s Japan breakthrough wouldn’t have had a blueprint. As much as BoA’s overseas success sparked a new business model for the then-struggling company, she also became the heart of SM’s creative mythology. She generated the revenue, proved the model, and set the tone as a one-woman case study in how to think bigger, go bolder, and move first.

While an all-singing, all-dancing female soloist may have been trending in the West at that time, SM’s move with BoA wasn’t simply to put out Korea’s answer to Britney or Christina. She was something else entirely for SM: the prototype for the global K-pop star. Not a copy, but an origin point.

Today, her legacy pulses through SM’s DNA. aespa’s virtual idols, RIIZE’s cross-market fluidity, NCT’s limitless scope — it’s all seeded in BoA’s radical beginning, and ID; Peace B was the moment SM realised what was possible, and started building toward it. She mentored EXO’s Chen, inspired Taemin’s solo finesse and Mark’s genre-hopping fluency. Her impact is archived as much as it’s alive, passing the torch from one idol generation to the next. 

BoA wasn’t just the company’s first global star. She was the reason SM could afford — financially and creatively — to dream on that scale in the first place, and became an industry-wide masterclass in how to successfully take risks.