The Misinformation Group
There were two big stories in K-Pop this year:
1) The return of G-Dragon.
2) The collapse of Hybe’s public image.
G-Dragon (of BigBang) swooped in to save K-Pop with a surprise end-of-the-year hit with “Home Sweet Home” (feat. Taeyang & Daesung), after his strong solo return with “Power” and blockbuster MAMA performance. While current generation K-Pop acts encourage fans to mass stream and buy by releasing multiple remixes, multiple music videos, and physical CD versions, G-Dragon is on his fourth consecutive Melon Weekly Top Artist Award with a song that has one version, no music video, and no physical versions. The metrics may not match up to current generation artists but he managed something that they’ve struggled to—something that’s grown increasingly rare since Hybe (née BigHit Entertainment) began dominating the K-Pop field—an actual hit song.
Meanwhile Hybe has been diligently working to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, racking up L after L in their quest to take down young girl group NewJeans and the group’s creator, Min Hee Jin, ex-CEO of Hybe sublabel Ador.
For those gentle readers who haven’t been following the story all that closely, in 2023 NewJeans emerged not only as one of Hybe’s most profitable acts but was also the only Hybe act to pick up actual critical and cultural traction, especially in the lucrative and much coveted American market. Music and cultural critics were beginning to take notice of things that K-Pop fans had been troubled by for some time, including the practice of goosing album sales numbers with various tricks (including exploitative targeting of “super fans” who can end up with boxes and boxes of CDs they need to dispose of) and poor live vocal performances.
NewJeans was something of an exception to this negative news trend, getting positive attention from trusted mainstream music critics who operate well outside the K-Pop Stan Ecosystem.
The woman behind NewJeans is Min Hee Jin, formerly a creative director at S.M. Entertainment. She joined Hybe (then BigHit Entertainment) in 2019 to great fanfare, with Bang Shi-Hyuk saying (via Soompi): “I’m excited to see what kind of innovation this forward-thinking creator will bring to K-pop with her own label.”
Min Hee-Jin had worked with some of the more artistic and critically acclaimed acts of 2nd Generation K-Pop, including f(x) and SHINee. She was known for her fascination with youthful beauty and young sexuality, sometimes blowing right past the boundaries of what was considered acceptable. What she ended up doing at Hybe was injecting some of that youthful freshness (and boundary transgression) into an increasingly turgid K-Pop marketplace—which one would assume is why she was head hunted by Bang Shi-Hyuk for then-BigHit Entertainment, to generate some genuine hype.
Early signs of the trouble to come emerged on March 25, 2024, when Belift Lab, another sublabel of Hybe, debuted girl group Illit with “Magnetic.” The group’s styling as well as their sound, appeared to be heavily influenced by NewJeans—to the point where Illit being mistaken for NewJeans became a meme among fans.
As I’ve written about in the past, the “K-Pop Trend Generator” does circulate concepts through the industry, whether that’s tropical house or hip hop idols. What was different about Illit following the NewJeans playbook is that 1) they were from the same company and 2) debuted so soon after NewJeans did. This wasn’t like everyone adding a couple of rappers to their group line-ups after BigBang blew up; Illit felt like a deliberate attempt to body snatch NewJeans and hinted at bigger problems within the company. As rumblings over the alleged similarities between Illit and NewJeans broke fan containment and hit the media, the publicity wars began in earnest.
April 9, 2024: Min Hee-Jin is the second largest shareholder in Ador, after Hybe.
April 22, 2024: A surprise audit of Min Hee-Jin and Ador by Hybe is leaked to the media, alleging that she was planning a corporate takeover of Ador; Min Hee-Jin issues a statement later that day saying it’s an outrageous media play and is because she had flagged the similarities between Illit and NewJeans internally.
April 23, 2024: More internal documents are leaked to the media, including claims that Min Hee-Jin spoke disparagingly about BTS which felt like an attempt to bring the vocal BTS fandom into the media fight. Le Sserafim is also brought into the media at this point as another point of contention between Bang Shi-Hyuk and Min Hee-Jin.
April 25, 2024: Min Jee-Jin gives her now infamous press conference taking the story from He-Said She-Said in the press, directly to the public. (My post on the situation at the time.)
The story absolutely exploded from here, taking us from the K-Pop ghetto of clickbait entertainment news into the Korean National Assembly.
Hybe’s battle against Min Hee-Jin is not yet over and the full story probably won’t be known for another few years. As of right now, she has been forced out of Ador, the sublabel she created, and the fate of NewJeans—Hybe’s most promising act—is still unknown.
What I wanted to discuss in this post isn’t the blow-by-blow legal drama but rather something that was revealed in the proceedings: Hybe’s media strategy.
Something that I flagged early on, was that while Hybe (née BigHit Entertainment) were not innovators in music, performance, artistic concepts, etc. etc., where they absolutely shone was in their media strategy. I translated an article with Saito Eisuke, a Japanese music executive who worked with BTS in their Japanese debut, and the thing he highlighted that epitomized the Hybe strategy was this:
Present a bog standard K-Pop act to the mainstream (non-expert) media as exceptional and they’ll report it as exceptional because they don’t know any better.
It’s a genius PR strategy and it worked in America far better than anybody could have predicted. An entire generation of K-Pop knowledge in English was lost as oldhead fans were bullied offline in the wake of an influx of new fans who cried “organic success” and shared a single thought-terminating cliche: “BTS PAVED THE WAY.”
Try posting anything even mildly critical about Hybe on Reddit and you’ll be downvoted to negative infinity.
Why is this PR strategy important? Two reasons.
1) One of the things revealed in Hybe legal proceedings was an internal document that purported to be a “music industry report” but the text of which read like a K-Pop burn book with cruel comments towards young idols and hinted at covert social media campaigns or behind-the-scenes dealing that K-Pop fans had long suspected Hybe (née BigHit Entertainment) had had a hand in, including the dissolution of boy group X1 (a group that I can confirm was playing on shop radios everywhere in Seoul.)
Hybe’s cozy relationship with Korean tabloid Dispatch only added fuel to the fire. Min Hee-Jin is currently suing reporters for the tabloid for defamation.
2) In June 2024, the Hollywood Reporter reported that “communications strategist” Melissa Nathan was starting a new company called The Agency Group (TAG) and along with Johnny Depp and Drake, one of her big name clients was Hybe America.
In September 2024, it was announced that Hybe had purchased a 51% stake in TAG.
Then just a few days ago, The New York Times published a big expose on TAG’s practices regarding the Justin Baldoni/Blake Lively conflict [emphasis added]:
It is unclear exactly how Mr. Wallace operated. There are references in emails to “social manipulation” and “proactive fan posting,” and text messages cite efforts to “boost” and “amplify” online content that was favorable to Mr. Baldoni or critical of Ms. Lively.
“We are crushing it on Reddit,” Mr. Wallace told Ms. Nathan, according to a text she sent Ms. Abel on Aug. 9.
The parallels between Blake Lively and Min Hee-Jin are impossible not to draw. I’ve been following the situation on Reddit for months, where pro-Hybe comments and posts are heavily over-represented and criticism is heavily policed with talking points that appear coordinated.
Meanwhile, in the English-language media, uncritical stories on Bang Shi-Hyuk verging on the hagiographic were posted in allegedly “serious” outlets like the New Yorker, Variety, and Billboard.
In the grand scheme of things, a Korean entertainment feud isn’t anywhere near as important as something like the developing political situation with Yoon Suk-Yeol but as someone who cares about K-Pop as an art form, as well as truthful and accurate music reporting and music history, the big reveals of Hybe’s media manipulation strategy have felt very vindicating.
Unfortunately, coordinated and toxic fan pushback along with difficulty facing English speaking journalists in sorting through fake and real news coming out of Korea has meant that there is almost zero actual reporting done in English, outside of a couple of dedicated music business outlets who can be trusted to accurately report on earnings, etc.
Stans will often weaponize the terms “racism” and “xenophobia” against anyone who says they have trouble figuring out the K-Pop industry but what this year has revealed is that the confused narrative around what’s happening in “K-Pop” has been deliberately seeded. It’s a feature, not a bug.