On August 20, one of the year's more unusual K-pop debuts arrived from a place nobody files under K-pop: the most-watched video in the history of YouTube. The Pinkfong Company released "WAVE (Feat. JOOHONEY (MONSTA X))," the first digital single from a performer billed simply as Baby Shark Boy — the child who danced next to the pink shark in Baby Shark Dance a decade ago, now standing in front of the camera on his own terms.
The scale of the thing he is stepping out of is hard to overstate. Baby Shark Dance went up in June 2016, has since passed 17.2 billion views, and remains the most-viewed video YouTube has ever hosted; The Korea Herald reports it held the platform's global No. 1 spot for 69 consecutive months. The paper identifies the performer as Park Geon-roung, now 17, who was a small child when the clip was filmed. He made a surprise return last year in short-form videos marking the song's 10th anniversary, and those alone drew more than 22 million views.
"WAVE" is built to make that history audible. The track opens on the familiar Baby Shark melody before turning into an electropop dance record with trap-leaning rhythms, and he took part in writing the lyrics himself — words about leaving childhood behind and starting something that belongs to him. "Baby Shark Dance was like the first wave that began 10 years ago," he said in the company's announcement.
The supporting cast is unmistakably K-pop. Joohoney of Monsta X features on the track, dropping his signature rap into the back half. The performance was built by TEAM SAME, the crew led by choreographer Choi Young-jun, whose credits run through BTS, SEVENTEEN and TWICE; the routine deliberately quotes the arm-snapping signature moves of the original Baby Shark Dance and rebuilds them as a full K-pop performance. The single went out across Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music worldwide, with the music video on Baby Shark Boy's own channel. "I sincerely support his journey ahead," Joohoney said.
Why It Matters
Start with the number, because the number is the whole reason this story exists. 17.2 billion views is not a music-industry figure. It is closer to an infrastructure figure — the kind of reach that stops being a hit and becomes a fixture, the song that plays in dentists' waiting rooms in Lagos and preschool gyms in Warsaw and stadium jumbotrons in Washington. Almost nobody in entertainment gets to stand next to a number like that. One person happens to be a Korean teenager who was there by accident at the age of seven.
The second reason is that Pinkfong is no longer a private studio quietly minting nursery rhymes. The company listed on the KOSDAQ on November 18, 2025, pricing its IPO at 38,000 won and raising 76 billion won — roughly 53 million dollars — from the sale of two million shares. The stock opened at 58,000 won, touched 61,500 intraday, and closed its first session at 41,550. In 2024 the company posted consolidated revenue of 97.4 billion won and operating profit of 18.8 billion won, up 11 percent and 371 percent respectively. But in the first half of 2025 revenue slipped 2.4 percent to 45.2 billion won and net profit fell 67 percent to 3.8 billion won. Public markets ask questions about the next act, and they ask them every quarter.
Which brings up the structural problem with children's IP: the audience ages out. A preschool brand loses its entire customer base every three or four years and has to re-acquire a new one from scratch, forever. K-pop has close to the opposite property — fandoms tend to age with the artist, and a listener who arrives at fifteen can still be buying concert tickets at thirty-five. Sending the human face of a character franchise into the K-pop market is, read cynically, a customer-retention strategy. Read generously, it is the only way a company like this ever escapes the toddler ceiling.
It is worth being precise about how far Pinkfong is actually committing, though. The company told The Korea Herald that this is not a conventional idol debut but a one-off project, and that decisions about future activity will be made after the single is out. That is a test balloon, not a launch campaign — and it is a more honest description than most debut press releases manage.
The Reaction
The premise sells itself in any language, which is rare. A kid appears in the most-watched video on earth, disappears back into an ordinary childhood while the clip racks up billions of plays without him, and comes back ten years later with a song of his own. You do not need to follow K-pop, or know what Pinkfong is, or have ever willingly listened to Baby Shark, to understand the shape of that. It is a story about being famous for something you did not choose and then choosing something.
The skeptical reading is just as easy to state, and deserves to be stated. This is a nostalgia play executed by a listed company on a decade-old asset, with the hook pre-installed. The melody that opens the track is corporate property, not his. The choreography quotes a routine he performed as a small child. He is, in the most literal sense, a brand asset who has been handed a microphone — and the entertainment business does not have a spotless record with teenagers who arrive pre-loaded with an audience they did not build.
The reasons to be less cynical are also concrete. He co-wrote the lyrics, which is not a given for a debut single of this kind, and the theme he chose — outgrowing the thing you are known for — is a more self-aware subject than a marketing department would have picked. His own framing has been consistently modest rather than triumphant: he said he was grateful that people still remember a video he appeared in as a kid. The company, for its part, has been careful to say what this is not. "This isn't just about bringing back the boy from the video," a Pinkfong representative told The Korea Herald.
What Comes Next
Pinkfong plans to release WAVE: Becoming Baby Shark Boy, a behind-the-scenes documentary tracing his growth and the making of the single. Further collaborations are under discussion, including a possible appearance in a Baby Shark film slated for release in winter 2026 — which is where the one-off project quietly starts looking like a pipeline. Seoul Economic Daily reported the same slate from the Korean-language announcement.
Three things are worth watching, and none of them is first-week streaming volume. The first is retention past week one, because curiosity traffic on a story this shareable is guaranteed and therefore tells you nothing. The second is whether the choreography travels — the original video became what it became on the strength of a dance simple enough for a four-year-old to copy, and if TEAM SAME's routine catches as a short-form challenge, that is the same mechanism firing twice. The third is whether Pinkfong converts. A one-off single with a documentary attached is cheap optionality; a second release would mean the company decided the answer was yes.
Closing Thoughts
Let the cynical version stand first, because it is not wrong. A publicly traded content company with a softening first half took a ten-year-old asset off the shelf, attached a rapper from an established group and a choreographer with elite credits, and shipped a product engineered for maximum shareability. Every element of that sentence is accurate, and anyone who has watched IP companies work will recognize the moves.
What makes it worth more than an eye-roll is the inversion at the center. The usual complaint about intellectual property is that it outlives the humans attached to it — characters get recast, franchises grind on, and the people who made the original moment become trivia. Here a person outlasted the moment instead. The shark is a drawing, and it will still be selling shower gel in Rotterdam supermarkets long after everyone reading this is gone. The boy grew up, learned to write, and came back to put his name on the credits of something the drawing cannot do.
He is seventeen, and the honest thing to say is that the industry's track record with debuts at that age is uneven enough that "one-off project, we will decide later" reads less like hedging and more like a slower door. Whether "WAVE" charts is close to beside the point. The first wave was not his; he was just in the frame. This one has his name on it.
한글 요약
2026년 8월 20일, 더핑크퐁컴퍼니가 '베이비샤크 보이'의 첫 디지털 싱글 'WAVE (Feat. 주헌(몬스타엑스))'를 국내외 주요 음원 플랫폼에 발매했습니다. 베이비샤크 보이는 2016년 6월 공개된 '핑크퐁 상어가족(Baby Shark Dance)' 영상에 어린이로 출연했던 인물로, 코리아헤럴드는 그를 박건렁(17)으로 소개했습니다. 이 영상은 누적 조회수 172억 회를 넘기며 유튜브 역사상 가장 많이 본 영상 자리를 지키고 있고, 69개월 연속 글로벌 1위를 기록했습니다. 지난해 10주년 숏폼에 깜짝 등장했을 때만 2,200만 회가 넘는 조회수를 모았습니다.
'WAVE'는 익숙한 상어가족 멜로디로 시작해 트랩 요소를 얹은 일렉트로팝 댄스곡으로 전개되며, 본인이 작사에 참여해 어린 시절을 지나 새로운 출발선에 선 심경을 담았습니다. 몬스타엑스 주헌이 피처링으로 참여했고, 퍼포먼스는 방탄소년단·세븐틴·트와이스 안무를 만든 최영준이 이끄는 'TEAM SAME'이 맡아 원곡의 시그니처 동작을 K-POP 무대로 재해석했습니다. 배경에는 사업적 맥락도 있습니다. 핑크퐁은 2025년 11월 18일 코스닥에 상장했고(공모가 3만 8,000원, 200만 주 760억 원 조달), 2024년 매출 974억 원·영업이익 188억 원을 기록했으나 2025년 상반기 매출은 2.4% 감소한 452억 원, 순이익은 67% 줄어든 38억 원이었습니다. 유아 IP는 관객이 몇 년마다 통째로 교체되는 반면 K-POP 팬덤은 아티스트와 함께 나이 들기 때문에, 캐릭터 브랜드의 '사람 얼굴'을 K-POP으로 보내는 선택은 그 천장을 넘어보려는 시도로 읽힙니다.
회사는 이번 프로젝트가 일반적인 아이돌 데뷔가 아니라 일회성 기획이며 향후 활동은 발매 이후 결정하겠다고 밝혔습니다. 다만 제작 과정을 담은 다큐멘터리 'WAVE: Becoming Baby Shark Boy' 공개가 예고돼 있고, 2026년 겨울 개봉 예정인 베이비샤크 영화 참여를 포함한 후속 협업도 검토 중입니다. 관전 포인트는 첫 주 스트리밍 수치보다는 그 이후의 잔존율, 안무가 숏폼 챌린지로 퍼지는지 여부, 그리고 회사가 일회성을 연속 프로젝트로 전환하는지입니다. 10년 전의 파도는 그의 것이 아니었지만, 이번 곡의 크레디트에는 그의 이름이 적혀 있습니다.
참고: The Korea Herald · Seoul Economic Daily · The Pinkfong Company (PR Newswire)