What the Hybe-Ador conflict says…

As the Hybe-Ador battle rages on, it’s been interesting to watch the conversation that is happening (and not happening) around the conflict. (I wrote a bit on some of the initial fallout here.)

Something I find striking is that the situation has been almost completely ignored by the usual suspects in the American media. The public conflict began on April 22, 2024 with Hybe leaking their accusations against and investigation of Ador CEO Min Hee-Jin to the press. Min Hee-Jin fought back and gave an impactful press conference on April 25, 2024. The back and forth between the two sides has continued since then with the most recent volleys being the report of an “audit” of an Ador stylist that is alleged by Ador to have been excessive and coercive, which Hybe refutes. But the stylist issued a statement to the Korean media bolstering Ador’s side.

While the Korean media—and Korean financial media—have been all over this conflict the English language press has been almost completely silent. There’s been only one piece in the Financial Times (May 4, 2024, detailing how women and regular office workers identify with Ador CEO Min Hee-Jin’s battle against Hybe) and today a piece was published in the New York Times that is something of an  impartial explainer of the conflict (May 12, 2024). 

Meanwhile, in the rest of the entertainment news contentsphere:

• Billboard covered ILLIT’s debut in the Hot 100 (April 16, 2024) and then K-Pop “homer” Jeff Benjamin gave some initial pro-Hybe updates: Hybe audits Ador (April 23, 2024); Hybe reports Ador executive to the police (April 25, 2024) before their business reporter gave an update on the Hybe 2024 Q1 financials (“Revenue falls sharply,” May 2, 2024) and the nothing until we get the RM clickbait promo on May 10, 2024, rewritten from the The Hollywood Reporter interview below.

• The Hollywood Reporter had a big promo piece for BTS member RM’s new single (May 10, 2024) but nothing on the conflict with Ador. 

• Variety did publish a dry recap of Hybe’s allegations in the wake of the initial accusations back on April 24, 2024 (notably before Min Hee-Jin’s press conference) before publishing a puff piece on Hybe founder “Chairman Bang” on May 2, 2024, which didn’t mention the conflict at all. (Example sentence: “‘Chairman Bang is a visionary continuously redefining not only the K-pop industry but also the entertainment landscape as a whole,’ says HYBE CEO Jiwon Park.”) Variety has also covered Hybe making previously Weverse-only content available via streaming company KOCOWA+.

• Rolling Stone has a single promo piece on RM’s new single (May 10, 2024).

• Stereogum posted a promo piece on NewJeans’s new single (April 27, 2024).

• The universe of pop culture content mill sites around the Onion AV Club, Paste, etc. have nothing at all on any of it.

• Company town newspaper The Los Angeles Times has nothing (although it did a puff piece on the Korean acts at Coachella, including Hybe act Le Sserafim.)

The exceptions have been the online music industry-focused news websites Music Business Worldwide and Digital Music News, both of which have been regularly updating on the story.

Why is this noteworthy? 

For one thing, I think it speaks to how--as I’ve said, many, many times on here before—K-Pop is not popular in America and nobody really cares, except for the metrics. The story clearly isn’t important enough for these outlets to cover (and potentially risk hysterical fan backlash that nobody wants to deal with?) and I’m guessing that either they’re turning down pitches from K-Pop freelancers or possibly K-Pop freelancers aren’t even pitching the story—whether from an abundance of caution as fans of one or another Hybe groups or simply not understanding it enough to frame a coherent story.

To be fair, the conflict is sticky and weighed down with decades of K-Pop inside baseball. A generalist attempting to parachute in and write about it may end up making basic errors like the New York Times did, where the author wrote:

“Hybe has had success with other groups like Seventeen and Tomorrow X Together. It has also expanded in the United States with deals like the purchase of Ithaca Holdings, which manages Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. In 2022, it released NewJeans’ first single, “Attention,” without the characteristic fanfare of K-pop debuts. The following year was Hybe’s most lucrative on record, with the company posting annual profit of about 186.6 billion Korean won, or $136 million.”

This first sentence is technically correct… kind of. Seventeen and Tomorrow x Together are both currently under Hybe and if you look at the best selling albums, globally, of 2023, both Seventeen and Tomorrow X Together do make an appearance, with Seventeen ranking in at both number one and number four, while TxT is number fourteen. What this leaves out is that 1) Seventeen (2015-) was put together by Pledis Entertainment and was already doing quite well as a K-Pop group when Hybe acquired a majority share of Pledis Entertainment in 2020 (one of many Hybe acquisitions in an attempt to bolster their “successes” and divest from BTS). And 2) this metrics-based “success” is almost entirely limited to their respective fandoms and is due to fans mass streaming and mass purchasing, an unsustainable long term practice with limited growth potential that fans (and the public) are tiring of. 

Then there’s the second sentence about Hybe expanding into the United States via Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holding. Technically, yes, that is correct and it’s likely we can thank Scooter and Ithaca’s connections for the release of BTS member Jungkook’s America-facing solo album Golden. However, as the Korea Economic Daily reported: 

“HYBE had been optimistic expecting that Ithaca would generate profits of 60 billion won ($44.1 million) a year once offline concerts were resumed following the end of COVID-19 restrictions. The label also bet big as it pinned its hopes on Braun’s networks in the world’s largest US music industry.

Ithaca is now HYBE’s largest risk, however, due to increasing losses. The US label logged a net loss of 142.4 billion won last year, more than double the deficit of 70.1 billion won in 2022.”

What about that third sentence? Did NewJeans debut lack the “characteristic fanfare of K-Pop debuts”? This is something that has come up as a point of contention in the recent Hybe-Ador conflict. It’s true that NewJeans did release their debut single “Attention” on July 22, 2022 as a “surprise release” (that had been teased for weeks beforehand) but to say that it lacked fanfare is missing the point. The “surprise” was the fanfare. It was a talking point. And this wasn’t just some group that popped up out of nowhere. The entire reason the “surprise release” worked is that people had been waiting for NewJeans to debut. A Min Hee-Jin-produced girl group had been teased since she joined the company in 2019 and, in fact, something Min Hee-Jin has complained about publicly in the past few weeks was that Chairman Bang’s pet project, Le Sserafim, who debuted just before NewJeans, was falsely promoted using her name in order to drive interest.

And that last part—it’s an interesting choice to report rosy 2023 numbers but not the recently released disastrous 2024 Q1 numbers. Which numbers you look at could give you a story about a successful company trying to keep a rogue subsidiary under its umbrella and or one of an opportunist trying to flee a sinking ship with her valuable IP.

Again, the point here is not to drag the New York Times piece, which is not bad, all things considered, but to demonstrate how complex the situation is and how different context change the narrative.

That’s not even touching on some of the other strange tentacles of this Hybe-Ador conflict including the alleged connection to Ilchi Lee’s Body & Brain organization (a group that has been referred to as a cult.) And while the alleged connection has been denied by both the organization and by Hybe, that hasn’t stopped Korean teens from picking up the viral “Dahn World Challenge,” among other things.

So, while we can’t know what will happen to Hybe, NewJeans, Ador, or any of the other players, I do think it’s interesting what the lack of interest in this story from mainstream entertainment news publications says about how much interest there is in the K-Pop industry here in America (i.e. not much).