Min Hee-Jin Spills the Tea

With the Hybe/Ador situation still on-going, it’s impossible to predict what will happen so I’m not even going to try. What I want to comment on right now is the response to the drama. It feels like we’re finally seeing Hybe’s carefully constructed media facade start to crumble as K-Pop fans sift through the tea that Ador CEO Min Hee-Jin spilled in her press conference held on April 25, 2024.

K-Pop fans have been increasingly dissatisfied with Hybe. In just the last few months, poor vocal performances from Hybe artists have blown up within fan circles: 

While it’s true that K-Pop’s primary appeal isn’t the musical skill of the idols, the gap between the slickly produced vocal tracks and the reality of the idol in front of the microphone singing poorly has simply become too large to ignore. It’s embarrassing, as a K-Pop fan.

And it’s not just the sharp drop off in skills from the most heavily promoted idols. There’s also been the growing sense that K-Pop just isn’t… fun anymore—something that (fairly or not) Hybe and its associated acts have taken the blame for.

I’ve been around long enough to remember the unhinged and giddy energy of K-Pop idol performances like 2AM and 2PM joining forces to make a parody of the Brown Eyed Girls “Abracadabra.” 

Not to mention the hilarious encore stages from acts like SHINee: 

That light heartedness and fun seems to have been drained from K-Pop and replaced with a po-faced self-seriousness. K-Pop has become the one thing that pop music must not become: tedious.

Girl group NewJeans had been something of an exception in the Hybe stable of acts. The young group (14-18 years old at debut) sang simple, hooky songs that sounded good and they had a sexy, youthful image. The Japanese media described the NewJeans sound as “easy listening,” which I think captures it. NewJeans, unlike most of what K-Pop is offering in the 2020s, are easy to listen to.

Add to that “easy listening” sound, a style that leans into the jailbait look in a way that we hadn’t seen in years… (“Keep looking at my cookie”)

For all of Ador CEO Min Hee-Jin’s faults, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that NewJeans were the one K-Pop act that seems to have made a positive impression on English-language music critics since the glory days of the second generation K-Pop wave. She may be difficult to work with but she also gets the job done. NewJeans managed to break through the noise, smartly avoiding association with the tanking brand of “K-Pop.”

[Min Hee-Jin is responsible for the shocking and infamous shirtless concept photos for SHINee’s Sherlock. Youngest member Taemin was barely legal at the time.]

When Min Hee-Jin joined (then) BigHit Entertainment in 2019, Bang Shi-Hyuk had this to say [via Soompi, emphasis added]:

Bang Shi Hyuk, the CEO of Big Hit Entertainment, stated, “Min Hee Jin is a leader of leaders who brought the concept of combining ‘Visual director’ and ‘planner’ to K-pop,” and “I am very happy to have an expert who leads the industry join us as we focus on contents and fans.” He went on to say, “We believe the knowledge Min Hee Jin has about branding will help give wings to Big Hit and its related businesses as we undergo restructuring. I’m excited to see what kind of innovation this forward-thinking creator will bring to K-pop with her own label.”

I’m not a contract lawyer and I’m not going to speculate on what exactly Min Hee-Jin was promised when joining with Bang Shi-Hyuk and BigHit/Hybe nor on the fairness of non-compete clauses. What I will say is that her accusations against the company have clearly struck a nerve among K-pop fans and have highlighted some things which fans had long speculated about.

For one thing, there’s the long-suspected cozy relationship between Korean tabloid Dispatch and BigHit/Hybe. Dispatch this week has aggressively pushed Hybe’s side of the dispute with Min Hee-Jin. It’s enough to make fans speculate on what else Dispatch has or hasn’t reported on to Hybe’s benefit. For example, Dispatch was instrumental in pushing the Burning Sun scandal back in 2019, a scandal which kneecapped one of BigHit/Hybe’s primary competitors, YG Entertainment. 

Then there’s the issue of “plagiarism” or the copying of ideas. BigHit/Hybe has a long history of “borrowing” concepts from other agencies, something that Min Hee-Jin must have been aware of. The straw that seems to have broken the proverbial camel’s back is the debut of Hybe’s new girl group, ILLIT, on March 25, 2024. Min Hee-Jin alleged that ILLIT look and sound very much like a knockoff NewJeans… and who am I to argue with the CEO of Ador?

Does it make sense for a sister label of Ador to release an act that treads so closely on NewJeans heels only a year and a half later with heavy, heavy promotion behind it? Is it the K-Pop trend generator in overdrive or is something else happening? An outside observer can see how Min Hee-Jin might start worrying that the big boss was coming for her group.

Min Hee-Jin, in her press conference, expressed her frustration that promotions for NewJeans were lacking because Hybe favored the girl group Le Sserafim (under Hybe-owned label Source). One of the responses to this claim that has gone viral on English-language K-Pop social media is taken from an anonymous Hybe employee and says [translation by AllKpop]: 

- Who helped NewJeans score a spot on the Lallapalooza lineup, exclusive coverage through Billboard, a spot as a performer and an award at the BBMAs?

An outside observer may think, “Isn’t this just what companies are supposed to do for their acts?” and that outside observer is correct. However, the reason it’s picking up so much traction in K-Pop fan circles is that the PR narrative pushed by BigHit/Hybe and its fans has for years emphasized that BigHit/Hybe groups did things “organically” and without “payola.” The statement from the anonymous employee points to the “organic” narrative being just that. A narrative.

In an infamous incident, during the MAMA Awards ceremony on December 4, 2019, after having swept the entire slate of nine grand prize awards for the frothy “Boy With Luv” and the mini album Map of the Soul: Persona, BTS member Jin got up and said this [translation via Soompi, emphasis added]: 

“Many people — including the artists who are here today — many people are making good songs. I hope for a world in which all those songs are recognized and listened to. I know that there are dishonest methods, but what about making music with more honest methods? I hope for a time when everyone’s making good music and listening to good music.”

The remarks, coming in the middle of a minor scandal revolving around Block B’s Park Kyung calling out sajaegi or chart manipulation, strongly implied that BTS was making music with honest methods, unlike everybody else and that’s why they were on the winner’s stage. And fans have latched onto this narrative and clung to it, projecting a punk rock DIY ethos onto BTS despite all evidence to the contrary.

Fans now seeing Hybe employees allegedly admitting to buying awards, something K-Pop fans have strongly suspected for years, has unleashed a wave of schadenfreude. 

Was “Boy With Luv” truly the best and most popular song in 2019 or is it a coincidence that no acts from YG Entertainment (bangers from the eligibility period include Mino’s extremely good and popular song “Fiance”) or SM Entertainment (Taemin’s incredible mini-album Want) were represented among the performers or winners? 

Among other things, Min Hee-Jin’s calling out of Hybe has led to a resurfacing of old accusations of sajaegi against BigHit/Hybe in the Korean press. The incident in question arose during 2015, a blockbuster year for boy groups like BigBang (YG), EXO (SM), and SHINee (SM). Suddenly, BTS rocketed out of nowhere to join them in the upper echelons with their two part The Best Moment in Life (also known as HYYH) album cycle. While even I will admit that it’s by far the group’s best work, the sudden boom was… unusual and noteworthy. 

Again, one could say it’s a company’s job to do everything they can to push their artists to the top and I’m not going to disagree. The part that I think K-Pop fans are hung up on is that BigHit/Hybe fans have been claiming for years that their favorites’ successes have been purely fan driven and “organic” (unlike your favorite, it’s implied) when it seems very likely that there was some behind-the-scenes pushing at play for Hybe/BigHit acts as well.

Another nerve that Min Hee-Jin has struck among K-Pop fans is her calling out of the metrics obsession and numbers inflation at Hybe. Anybody paying attention has surely noticed the sudden surge in sales numbers. 

As I’ve laid out in various episodes on K-Pop history, album sales dropped off a cliff after 2000 or so, primarily because most people simply did not consume music from albums. The digital wave hit much, much earlier in Korea than it did in the United States and across the West. Album sales from that point on were primarily driven by fans. K-Pop companies developed all sorts of marketing tricks to get fans to purchase multiple copies, including special packaging, fan sign events, and giveaways included with the albums. 

In recent years, and thanks in part to BigHit/Hybe resetting the benchmark of a successful album, the sales numbers generated by K-Pop stans have lost any tie to how genuinely popular or well liked an album is. The result is thousands of albums thrown out or abandoned as waste. Min Hee-Jin claimed to be trying to avoid doing that, saying that it puts too big a burden on fans. 

And certainly the massive focus on metrics and numbers rather than songs, music, fashion, etc is absolutely something that has sucked a lot of the fun out of K-Pop.

There are other rumors floating around—such as speculation on Min Hee-Jin’s relationship with a “shaman” (something that may not come up in English media very often but isn’t unusual in Korea or in Asia, generally) or on Hybe’s ties to the Dahn World cult—but I’ll leave those rumors to the netizen detectives.

No matter what happens with Ador and Hybe, I think this press conference of Min Hee-Jin’s will be remembered as a turning point in K-Pop history. The question is now, which way will K-Pop turn?