On November 4, K-pop giant SM Entertainment unveiled its "MV Remastering Project," a collaboration with YouTube that aims to digitally remaster the visual and audio quality of SM artists' older music videos. SM hopes to reintroduce the 1990s and 2000s K-pop, as well as promote the industry's heritage, with this project.

"Global fans know half of K-pop, but they don't know about the other half," remarked SM Entertainment co-CEO Lee Sung-Su at the announcement, referring to the fact that many official music videos were made before SM launched its YouTube account in 2009 were not published owing to technical constraints. "This effort was created to emphasize K'pops origins and roots."

On the same day as the announcement, boy band H.O.T.'s 1996 breakthrough single "Age of Violence" was the first restored music video to be uploaded. This year commemorates the 25th anniversary of SM's debut of H.O.T., one of the first-generation K-pop idol groups credited with laying the groundwork for today's K-pop boy bands.

"Age of Violence" is written from the perspective of a victim of school violence and begins with a famous poem about furious yelling. H.O.T. gained rapid recognition because of the odd yet accessible song, which helped the boy band become a cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s.

The restored video has received favorable feedback from K-pop fans of all ages, both Korean and foreign, with over 368,000 views in only five days. The remastered version has proved effective in its goal of reaching bigger and newer audiences since the low-resolution recorded version of the music video on H.O.T. member Jang Woo-YouTube hyuk's Channel has gathered 272,400 views in the previous 11 years.

Young Korean fans and international fans who had previously been unable to access classic K-pop songs are expressing their delight in the comments area, pointing out how relevant the issue is now and how the beat is shockingly contemporary even two decades later.