The precarity of being a hit K-pop girl group in 2024

Since April, we have witnessed brewing tension between Hybe, the biggest entertainment company in South Korea, and Min Hee-jin, then the CEO of Hybe subsidiary, now former CEO. A very dirty, very public battle has since played out in the court of public opinion, one of several this year, which is why I've dubbed 2024 the K-pop Year of Mess.

On Wednesday (September 11), NewJeans' members appeared in a livestream on a new YouTube channel, where they shared their thoughts and feelings about the situation. They shared that they've experienced hardship, said that Hybe staff and executives for not treating them properly, and asked Hybe to reinstate Min Hee-jin by September 25, which is speculated to be them essentially giving their two weeks notice before filing a contract nullifcation lawsuit. They stated that they did this livestream on their own, with no outside force pushing them towards this.

There is a lot of speculation about what's going on behind closed doors to lead to this video, and it's being seen by many as either a damning moment that will ruin the rising star of NewJeans' career forever, or a laudatory moment of K-pop stars and creatives revolting against major labels. "K-pop Stars Send Ultimatum to Managers in Rare Industry Revolt," reads Bloomberg's headline. "Um, is NewJeans Okay?" wrote Vulture's staff. Fan reactions are intense: some believe that this is the end of NewJeans and/or that they're being manipulated terribly by Min, and others think that they're icons for workers everywhere. I know Threads finally is making it, since a really quick post I wrote after I saw the news got relatively heavy engagement as fans debate the situation.

On Instagram, I asked the thoughts of Notes on K-pop's subscribers. Several people responded, showing the range of thought around this whole situation:

• "Girls are brave! The most respectable idols who speak up!"
• "worried for the girls. don't see this ending well for them."
• "Find the whole thing confusing - hard to know what to believe."
• "Protect them at all costs 🥹"
• "Hard to see professional reason & doubt it's just goodwill/attachment."
• "Much like in the US, capitalism ruins creative, fun things."
• "Seems like a one way door to go public with this."
• "Dana at the Bangtan News on Tik Tok has an interesting take."
• "I love newjeans but what is going on???"

The split response to NewJeans' video is pretty fascinating, especially the way it's playing out amid English-speaking and Korean-speaking audiences: mostly, in Korea the response I'm seeing online and hearing from friends is that there is positive feelings generally towards both MHJ and NewJeans' general actions towards a giant, male-dominated company (though also criticism towards Min, particularly towards her alleged behavior towards NewJeans and other ADOR employees, including an investigation into sexual harassment), while English-speaking spaces, often driven by fans, are either rousingly supportive or intensely upset that Min, and therefore NewJeans, have dragged other artists into it, potentially smearing the career of everyone involved.

Being a girl group used as the rope in a corporate tug of war is probably a very scary place to be.

So what is that situation exactly? Because a lot has been flying ever since Min and Hybe's fight began fighting back in April. Things kicked off when Hybe launched an audit into Min allegedly trying to leave Hybe and take ADOR with her and Min denied it all. Then she aired a lot of dirty laundry, including accusations of other creatives under Hybe plagiarizing her creative vision for NewJeans and Hybe delaying NewJeans' debut, and went viral while doing so.

Since then, there have been press conferences, memes, text messages made public, and statements galore. There are several lawsuits, injunctions, and corporate changes at ADOR. The biggest thing is that last month Min was removed from ADOR's leadership.

For those struggling to keep up, or just hopping into this situation now, both Billboard and NME recently published timelines about the feud. The latest news on the legal side of things is Min has filed an injunction to be reappointed as a director of ADOR.

But while I have covered that aspect of the blow up between Min and Hybe this year, over the past few days I think it's become more apparent than ever that, unless you're an investor, the winner here doesn't necessarily matter. However, the losers do, especially when those losers appear to be primarily young women who rely on a corporation to ensure their career longevity. And I'm not just talking about NewJeans: since this debacle started, pretty much every single one of Hybe's girl groups has been in someway impacted by this. And now we're seeing the group this primarily revolves around come forward and become the matter of public debate because they are speaking up.

At the end of the day, this is all because NewJeans is immensely popular and lucrative. Min, with the apparent support of NewJeans' parents' appears to see it as her right that she continues to work with them with no restrictions, while Hybe's perspective is that Min is making problems and not necessary. Both sides are fighting for the ability to keep working with NewJeans, inarguably the most noise-making, lucrative new K-pop act since they arrived in 2022 with music that has entered the zeitgeist and received acclaim from music critics worldwide.

But the fight to essentially control, and really own the power to direct the career, of NewJeans, is all about business. There are obvious emotions and personal artistic or commercial visions involved, but this is a girl group featuring young women whose futures have now come into serious question because industry giants have decided to spar over that very future.

NewJeans' members are still very young; Minji is the oldest at 20. All of them were teens when they debuted, and the youngest member, Hyein, is only recently 16-years-old. Several of the members have been involved in the entertainment industry since childhood, atypical from any other sort of powerplayers involved in all of this. For them to get up in public and speak up for themselves, whether directed by someone else or not as some people have alleged, is immense: there is a very real feeling, and fear, that NewJeans will never be what they once were, and it's that which appears to have driven the members to this point. While people may speculate about intentions revolving around the adults who run the companies and careers surrounding this group, they are the heart of this whole debacle, and for them to say anything is an expression of just how fraught things have become.

While fan discourse and media thinkpieces may say what they will about all this, I think the most important thing to note is that many artists in South Korea, ranging from first gen idols like S.E.S's Bada to even from BTS's Jungkook (via his dog's Instagram account), have been seen supporting NewJeans. (After people believed Jungkook's account to be hacked, BigHit confirmed with him that he did indeed post. “We have confirmed that he made the posts because he thought that under no circumstances should young artists be dragged into conflicts or used as a shield," the company said, according to Soompi's translation.)

There's a famous Korean idiom that I keep thinking about throughout all of this: 고래 싸움에 새우 등 터진다, "when whales fight, it is the shrimp's back that breaks." Essentially, when giants, or in this case executives, fight, it is the less-powerful, in this case NewJeans, who are harmed. NewJeans as an idea are immensely lucrative, leading to Hybe's stock often shifting in line with the situation, but the members themselves are young women whose voices have relatively little power: they even stated in their discussion how frustrated they were not being heard in the corporate environment they operate in. They've come forward apparently because they're the golden shrimp, whose entire future is up in the air right now and is not being handled well by any of the adults in the room with power.

Artists rallying around Newjeans emphasizes this point, and perhaps is the most important thing I feel other people haven't been talking about that much: NewJeans aren't just a popular K-pop group, they're a girl group, and girl groups are seen as the most general public-friendly sort of K-pop group. NewJeans are the golden ticket of K-pop success.

The general adage in K-pop for most of its existence is that while both can get hits, boy bands typically rely on fandoms, while girl groups typically rely on the general public of listeners. Although that's changed in recent years and girl group fandoms are very strong nowadays, we still see a difference on gender lines: for example, even unpopular boy bands will tour internationally, often in the US or Europe, whereas even popular girl groups will often be more hesitant to tour. Again, that's changed in recent years, but the gender divide amid K-pop is very real. I think being a girl group used as the rope in a corporate tug of war is probably a very scary place to be. And, of course, even beyond NewJeans this has also impacted the careers of other girl groups negatively, including ILLIT and Le Sserafim, because the internal politics weren't kept internal. These entertainment companies have obligations to their talents, and from where I'm sitting they appear to have done a rather poor job lately.

And I think things are even more upsetting regarding NewJeans is that we've seen this before, recently. A popular girl group, caught between producers and creatives, throwing support with one side or another? This is Fifty Fifty all over again: they were rising stars who chased after what they thought was right, and now there's an entirely new Fifty Fifty, with only one original member. The other three original members? They're attempting to continue their careers, but are bogged down by major debt, and see replacements set to continue their legacy.

While this is an extreme situation, I think the parallels between Fifty Fifty and NewJeans' situations are immense, and quite uncomfortable to think about: if one hitmaking girl group can be swapped out to go along with the company line, why not another? Do the stars matter when corporate needs aren't being met? Of course artists are rallying around NewJeans: we have all just witnessed with Fifty Fifty what happens when a prominent, young girl group speaks out.

While Fifty Fifty and NewJeans are far from the only K-pop group to go through legal disputes, and even farther from other K-pop groups to go through lineup changes and replacements, it does feel like the situations are showing just how precarious it is to be a popular girl group, especially the most popular, right now.

I'm really not sure what's going to happen before the year ends for NewJeans, Min Hee-jin, Hybe, and ADOR, but hopefully we won't be witnessing the deepdive towards demise for any artists in real time.

What I'm reading

"A Musician Vs. The Music Industry: A Conversation" and "How The Music Industry Is Killing Music And Blaming The Fans" (The Quietus)

"After NewJeans’ ultimatum, no party can come out of agency dispute unscathed" (Hankyoreh)

"Fifty Fifty's agency Attrakt to take legal action over Warner Music's poaching attempt" (Korea JoongAng Daily)

Kirsten Han's "How much fan is too much fan?: when i really love something am also a bit embarrassed about looking like i love it too much"

"Kakao Founder’s Trial Melds Kpop, Billionaires and Markets" (Bloomberg, paywall free via Yahoo)

"K-pop's popularity grows, but faltering album sales dampen stock prices" (Chosun Daily)

"K-Pop Has Figured Out a Solution to the Worst Thing About Concerts "(Slate) - Sadly not about barking.

What I'm listening to

I think I must need a massage or something, because lately my go-to thing to turn on is Apple Music's K-pop Chill playlist.