'Gangnam Style' Riches Grow by Clicks and Bounds, but Mostly Overseas SEOUL - As "Gangnam Style" gallops toward one billion views on YouTube, the first Asian pop artist to capture a huge global audience has gotten richer click by click. So too have his agent and his grandmother. But the money from music sales is not flowing in from the rapper's homeland, South Korea, or elsewhere in Asia. With one song, 34-year-old Park Jae-sang - better known as Psy - is set to become a millionaire from YouTube ads and iTunes downloads, underlining a shift in the way money is being made in the music business. An even bigger dollop of cash will come from TV commercials. From just those sources, Psy and his camp will rake in at least $8.1 million this year, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of publicly available information and industry estimates. But for online music sales in South Korea, he will earn less than $60,000. Here is how it works. "Gangnam Style" with its catchy tune and much imitated horse-riding dance is the most-watched video on YouTube ever. The viral video has clocked more than 889 million YouTube views since its July release, beating Justin Bieber's "Baby," which has racked up more than 808 million views since February 2010. Psy's official channel on YouTube, which curates his songs and videos of his concerts, has nearly 1.3 billion views. TubeMogul, a video ad buying platform, estimates that Psy and his agent, YG Entertainment, have raked in about $870,000 as their share of the revenue from ads that appear with YouTube videos. The Google-owned video service keeps approximately half. Psy and YG Entertainment also earn money from views of videos that parody his songs. Google detects videos that use copyrighted content. An artist can have the video removed or allow it to stay online and share ad revenue with YouTube. In the last week of September, when "Gangnam Style" had about 300 million views, more than 33,000 videos were identified by the content identification system as using "Gangnam Style." But since access to YouTube can be gained from all over the world, would Asia not be responsible for a significant chunk of the $870,000? The countries with the second- and third-highest views of the video are Thailand and South Korea. Ads rates vary, depending on which country the video is played. Developed countries have higher ad rates and developing countries lower," said Brian Suh, head of YouTube Partnership in Seoul. The country with the most views of "Gangnam Style" is the United States. "Gangnam Style" has been downloaded 2.9 million times in the United States and has been the No. 1 or No. 2 seller for most weeks since its debut, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The song sells for $1.29 on the Apple iTunes Store, the market leader in song downloads. Apple generally keeps about 30 percent of all sales, so the Psy camp could be due more than $2.6 million. How much Psy keeps and how much goes to his managers, staff and record label is unclear. South Korean industry insiders said Psy is likely to have gotten 70 percent and YG Entertainment 30 percent for U.S. downloads. But earnings from downloads in Psy's homeland are far from an embarrassment of riches. South Koreans pay less than $10 a month for a subscription to a music service that allows them to download hundreds of songs or to have unlimited access to a music streaming service. That makes the cost of a downloaded song about 10 cents on average. The average price for streaming a song is 0.2 cent. Psy's cut for downloads is 14 percent. That falls to 7.5 percent for streamed songs. Yes, 7.5 percent of 0.2 cent. And that is before Psy's "Gangnam Style" co-composer takes his share. The biggest cut goes to his agent and online retailers. According to the Gaon Chart of top music in South Korea, "Gangnam Style" had been downloaded more than 3.6 million times and streamed about 40 million times as of November. That adds up to a little more than $61,000. As for many other parts of Asia, illegal downloads and pirated CDs are so pervasive that only a small minority are willing to pay up for the legal versions. It is television commercials that are the big money spinners for the most successful of South Korea's so-called K-pop stars. Psy has been popping up in TV commercials in South Korea for top brands like Samsung Electronics and the mobile carrier LG Uplus. Chung Yu-seok, an analyst at Kyobo Securities, estimates Psy's commercial deals will amount to 5 billion won, or $4.6 million, this year. The money is cool. The products not so much. Psy is now the face of a new Samsung refrigerator and a major noodle company. A fact little known outside South Korea is that Psy's father, uncle and grandmother own a combined 30 percent of DI Corp., a company that makes equipment that semiconductor companies use to make computer chips. It is a stretch to explain how the success of "Gangnam Style" will bolster DI's profits but that does not seem to matter to the South Korean stock market. Perhaps inspired by the pure power of pop, DI shares surged eightfold from July after Psy's hit reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the U.K. singles chart. It was time to cash in for Psy's grandmother, who sold 5,378 shares for about $65,000. The share price has fallen since then but is still about double what it was before the release of "Gangnam Style." Ryan Nakashima reported from Los Angeles.