How Choi Ye-na's 'Catch Catch' stayed globally viral for 3+ months — and what K-pop labels are doing to engineer it
From Lee Jun's *Workman* challenge to RIIZE's 'Geoje Yaho' meme, K-pop labels are now engineering the viral moments they once left to chance.
Choi Ye-na's Catch Catch stayed global for over three months. Fans kept recreating it. Other fans kept recreating those recreations. Long enough that it became a textbook case in how K-pop tracks escape the fandom bubble.
Lee Jun performed the Catch Catch challenge on Workman. That sparked a second wave—fans recreating a celebrity recreation. Labels now build for exactly that kind of compounding spread.
RIIZE's example is sharper. Won-i runs a YouTube channel, and on it, Minami did a gal concept bit shouting "거제 야호~"—a Japanese-style greeting referencing Geoje, Won-i's hometown. The clip hit the algorithm. LOVE ATTACK, released in August 2024, climbed back to the top 5. RIIZE then performed a special stage on M Countdown off the meme.
BOYNEXTDOOR made it explicit. Their June 8, 2026 release VIRAL includes the lyric: "이 노랜 도배될 거야 네 피드에 / 그때 날 마주한다면 꼭 click해"—a song about becoming a song that floods your feed.
The engineering is now visible. Over the past one to two years, producers cut track lengths to under three minutes to maximize streaming repetition. Labels release sped-up versions as official audio to seed content creation. Fifty Fifty's Cupid (2023) proved it works: the sped-up version spread as background music among global TikTokers and landed the group a long-term run on the US Billboard Hot 100.
This isn't new. EXID's 위아래 (2014) hit number one after a fan-shot fancam of Hani went viral through YouTube. Yoon Jong-shin's 좋니 (2017) exploded via Facebook music pages. Brave Girls' 롤린 (2017) got its moment in 2021 when a military base tribute concert video spread four years after release. Zico's 아무노래 (2020) rode the dance challenge wave.
What changed is the waiting. Labels are no longer sitting around for the accident. Some agencies have faced questions about these tactics, with companies maintaining that Facebook targeted advertising constitutes "legitimate viral marketing, not illegal bulk purchasing."
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