When prospective U.S. partners ask music mogul Jin-Young Park where he's from, he has a conversation-stopping answer: "I'm from the future."

It's a deft riposte that opens up space for Park, who discovered and managed Asian pop phenomenon Rain for many years, to spool out a string of facts that make record execs weak in the knees. "In meetings with music labels here, they talk to me about releasing albums," says Park. "They can't accept that there's no such thing anymore. Where I come from, CDs are nothing—they're just souvenirs. I tell them, 'Wake up!'"

In South Korea, where Park is building a new kind of music-business model, 80 percent of households have a broadband connection; downloads via both PCs and cell phones make up an overwhelming share of the nation's music market. Download revenue there has soared 422 percent since 2000, to $366 million, while CD sales have declined 83 percent over the same period to just $70 million in 2007. And because almost all digital music is purchased on a song-by-song basis, to the general South Korean consumer, albums have become an irrelevant—even alien—concept.

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Take Park's most recent phenomenon, the Wonder Girls—a quintet of winsome teens whose addictively breathy vocals and synchronized dance steps have taken Asia by storm (their song "Tell Me" was one of the bestselling singles in Asia last year, and the band has generated about $5 million so far for Park's company, J.Y.P. Entertainment, with only half of that coming from music sales). Fans of the group can buy tickets for their live concerts at $110 a pop; purchase a growing array of their merchandise (the names and faces of top K-pop stars adorn everything from $5 phone cards to $500 cell phones and music players); download ringtones featuring their songs ($2); and even make bids on a charity auction for a dinner date with the girls on the popular social-networking site CyWorld (five fans paid between $3,800 and $6,000 for the privilege last year). And if all that's not enough, fans can always tune in to the Wonder Girls' reality TV series, now in its third season as one of MTV Korea's top-rated programs.

It's a strategy that U.S. artists and record companies are increasingly trying to follow as revenues from music sales continue to decline. Madonna's mammoth deal last year with LiveNation, for example, encompasses not just music sales but also concerts, merchandising, DVDs, TV and film projects, and sponsorship agreements.

But while in the U.S. this arrangement was seen as revolutionary, in Korea, it's par for the course. Park's company has built itself into one of Korea's most powerful and consistently profitable music companies by developing a killer portfolio of brands like the Wonder Girls, leveraging the popularity of its girl groups, boy bands, and pop idols across dozens of revenue streams. By far, the most successful of these has been Rain, whom Park plucked from obscurity back in 2000, trained for four years, and watched blossom into Asia's biggest pop idol, topping charts in South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, and selling out 30,000-seat arenas from Taipei to Bangkok. For five years, the company's revenue related to Rain averaged about $10 million a year, and while Rain left J.Y.P.E. last year with Park's blessing (he says) to start his own management company, other stars like the Wonder Girls and a new, 12-member boy-band, code-named Hot Blooded Youth, may be well on their way to replacing him.