South Korea's content industry continued to grow in both sales and exports on the back of strong performances in music and films, while 3 out of 10 related companies have adopted generative artificial intelligence (AI) in planning and production.

The Korea Creative Content Agency, known as KOCCA, published the "Report on fourth-quarter and annual trends in the content industry for 2025" on Wednesday.

The report said sales in the domestic content industry last year rose 2.6 percent from a year earlier to 161.48 trillion won. By genre, music, up 15.8 percent, knowledge information, up 7.8 percent, and comics, up 7.4 percent, led growth. In music, revenue at entertainment agencies increased and the performance market continued to recover. In comics, rising demand for webtoons was a positive factor. Some areas such as advertising, broadcasting and publishing edged down.

Exports rose 5.9 percent from a year earlier to $14.91 billion. Music, up 32.4 percent, film, up 19.9 percent, and the character business, up 12.8 percent, led the increase. Music benefited from expanding global activities by K-pop artists, and film was influenced by strong results for anticipated titles.

As of the fourth quarter last year, the rate of generative AI use among content businesses was 32.1 percent. Of the businesses using it, 66.2 percent introduced it in some departments and 33.8 percent adopted it companywide.

By industry, use was highest in games at 70.0 percent, followed by animation at 51.6 percent and advertising at 40.9 percent. The areas of adoption were content production at 62.7 percent, business planning at 43.7 percent and content creation at 32.8 percent. Among businesses that have not adopted it, 16.6 percent said they intend to do so in the future.