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> Cody attempts to rank every K-pop entertainment company..., ...using a tier list!
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Cody Scobell
post Jul 23 2019, 06:52 PM
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Okay so after watching a few of these ranking videos on YouTube I had been wanting to do something of this caliber on the forum for a while. For this thread, I will be ranking every single K-Pop company, from the Big 3 to the smaller ones that haven’t really gotten their chance. I’m only ranking from a list of currently active companies, so ones that ended up going defunct won’t be shown bc we all know they’d end up at the bottom.

However, I’ve decided to do something a bit different. Instead of numerically ranking them which would take ages, I have decided to use this:



What is a tier list?
Tier lists have been used in the gaming community when ranking certain characters and combinations, and they typically rank them from S-tier (the best) all the way down to F-tier (the worst). And that’s basically how I’m going to be ranking them: from the top down.

Now I’m fully aware that every company is different and what some companies excel at they may lack somewhere else, so I’ve come up with this criteria:

Roster: Self-explanatory, it’s basically the size of their artist roster and how they individually have shaped the genre. It may seem that new companies may be at a disadvantage but a company can have a small roster but have a huge influence on the genre, and similarly companies may have a larger roster but it may consist solely of nugus. We just never know.

Pros & Cons: Basically what they do best and what they could be doing better. This can range from artist treatment, damage control, promotions, the whole nine yards.

Legacy: Essentially what is this company doing for the future of K-pop? What kind of precedents have the set and what could they set in the future? How much influence has this company had on the genre’s history?

There’s gonna be a lot of research involved, but i think this can be an interesting way to survey the genre from its more capitalist and business-oriented side as well it as a cultural movement. I hope this gives people a chance to not just learn more about K-pop and the culture surrounding it, but of Korean culture as a whole.
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Cody Scobell
post Jul 31 2019, 07:44 AM
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S TIER
What constitutes S-tier?


S-tier companies are among the best of the best. These are the companies that have had the hugest impact on the genre as a whole, have excelled in promoting and treating their signed acts well, and they still manage to keep churning out a reasonable following even with problematic incidences. There are no perfect companies, but one in the S-tier has made it such that the good outweighs the bad so much that the latter is completely negligible in the scale of things. And above all that, they're all-around power players in terms of influence, roster, and impending legacy.

And thus we get to our first company...

-


S-TIER: SM ENTERTAINMENT

Like I said before, there is no perfect company and SM clearly makes a point of that with the Jessica situation, the JYJ situation, and the three years f(x) has been in the dungeon, but I would be lying if I said that this entertainment company didn't play a critical role in the development and advancement of K-pop to the extent that it is at today. Sure it wasn't around during the Seo Taiji era but the company paved roads and developed a platform that helped the genre grow and evolve since the company started churning out big hitters in 1995, when it took the step from being a small studio to a full-fledged company. So then we ask the question: what makes this company so good that other companies may be failing at?

Roster
SM started off with a couple of artists of various genres, which makes sense since the Korean music landscape was making a switch from the trot style to more modern, Western-inspired sounds. However, they didn't gain their first money shot until 1996 when they formed the band H.O.T. Lee Soo-man, SM's founder and namesake, scouted for members and took polls to see what their demographic wanted in a K-pop group. Sounds like a formula for success, right? It turns out that this cheery bubblegum style (complete with a just as cheesy video) was what catapulted them to stardom and what put the company on the map. S.E.S, hailed as one of the first K-pop girl groups, and Shinhwa, who went on to create a lasting legacy and become one of the longest running groups in Korea, soon followed and solidified SM as a staple company. We later got to see the influx of similar groups from their competition, and thus the Hallyu wave was starting to form, like a newborn star.

However, like most stars, the first generation crop began to fade away, and the new millennium saw contracts end for most of their flagship groups at the time. However, SM had another trick up its sleeve. Enter a teenage BoA, who had already had a modest debut and first comeback coming into that age of expiring contracts. Little did people know that she was busy honing her skills to become a Japanese idol. Now Korea and Japan have always had pretty rocky relationship and at the time, any popular culture crossover would have been unprecedented. With the success of her first Japanese album, she began to alternate between Korean and Japanese promotions and became a powerhouse in both of their music charts. To this day, most people know her as the "mother of K-pop" and she continues to release material here and there.

And thus kicked off the second generation. TVXQ followed in BoA's footsteps and also took Japan by storm, and they gained the rest of the world's attention following the release of "Mirotic". CSJH The Grace also held the fort down for the girl groups with a musical influence from Destiny's Child with a mix of the more mellow K-pop scene in the early 2000's. And then came Super Junior. Arguably Korea's first supergroup, their name and the comparably huge amount of members in the group (they debuted with twelve) are two things that have become synonymous with K-pop. While they were at first planned to have a rotational lineup (something they managed to perfect with NCT), the group stayed solid and continued to strike hot throughout the 2000's. With that, SM made a point with scouting for idols who weren't Korean, recruiting several Chinese and Japanese artists.

If S.E.S. created the blueprints for a successful Korean girl group, their little sister group Girls' Generation took them and ran with it. Their meteoric rise to stardom significantly shifted eyes towards them and caused a huge evolution in the Hallyu wave. Their general slayage invented the term "the nation's girl group". By this time BoA was planning to make K-pop's first marks in the Western world with Eat You Up (a song that I'm STILL obsessed with). SM capitalized on this huge success even further with the formation of SHINee in 2008 and f(x) in 2009. And with that, the flagship second generation groups were set in stone.

Then SM had an idea to do what they kinda performed with Super Junior, promote one group in two countries simultaneously (in this case Korea and China) and debuted EXO, another powerhouse supergroup. And boy did they become huge. Their XOXO album became the best selling album by a Korean artist in the past 12 years, and they kept breaking records left and right. Over a year after that album was released, Red Velvet was born and they too took to slaying and holding the fort down for the women. Then in 2016, SM perfected what they had been doing for the past 10 years and developed NCT, a boy band with what they considered an "unlimited number of members". They had a rotational method of grouping (NCT U), numerous subgroups (127 and DREAM), and were able to promote with the same brand in different countries simultaneously (which they managed to do with WayV in its inception early this year).

To sum it up, SM's former and current roster is... HUGE. A majority of these are considered to be the biggest names in K-pop history, and they continue to uphold the company's legacy, whether it be in the music industry or not, in different countries, solo or part of a group, or if they're no longer part of the company, something links them to SM.

Pros & Cons: I think if anything, what SM has that most other companies don't at this stage is the level of experience. The company worked its way from the ground up and that's something I can respect. But what about their artists? What about the general K-pop fandom's opinion about them? That's where it's a mixed bag.

In my opinion, I think SM is great at establishing artists and idol groups and then once they're already established, they have the resources and experience to go forth on their own and become a self-sufficient machine. It's probably the reason why people don't really complain when the likes of BoA or TVXQ make periodic comebacks - at this point, they're just happy to see them continue to do what they love and grace the new generation of K-pop fans with their iconicness. Also, the SM Station concepts really give these artists (as well as artists commissioned to create songs for the separate concept) the chance to shine in a different genre, even collaborating with Western artists for a change. So we get into how well they manage their groups during their peak.

Throughout all three generations, I think SM for the most part did rather well trying to balance things out with comebacks since all of them were such power players in the market during their time. Despite there being some problematic behavior occurring within certain groups (hi Kangin), SM tried their best to keep that group's momentum alive, and for the most part it worked. SHINee went through most of their career without any major scandals, and S.E.S. back in the day managed to skate by fine. Red Velvet had a bit of a hiccup with their debut video but they managed to come out unharmed. But then there are times where... it backfired.

When H.O.T. decided not to renew their contracts because they couldn't come up with a compromise with the company, things were bad. This was probably the first time there had been a major protest against such a huge company all from a group's disbandment. Other than that, the disbandment was somewhat clean, with Kangta and Heejoon signing with the company as solo artists. (shameless plug for Kangta's comeback right here) TVXQ's split, however, was plagued with controversy, as Jaejoong, Yoochun & Junsu filed a lawsuit citing excessive contract lengths, profit disparity, and schedule changes without permission. All of this screwed up TVXQ's current tour and promotions, and later caused deviations in their Japan promotions as well. The trio ended up forming JYJ, as well as their own companies and things got even messier when both parties filed lawsuits against each other in retaliation. Luckily, the duo seems to be doing fine now.

Secondly, while SM excels at establishing their artists into firm power players, they begin to lose focus once they've reached that peak and the GP starts asking "what now?" Take Girls' Generation for example. They were at the top of their game after the release of I Got A Boy. They gathered international interest, their Japanese singles expanded their popularity and sales astronomically, and they were the go to group when people think about K-pop. Then all of a sudden Jessica disappeared from the picture. The company says she left, Sica says she was kicked out. A lot of it centered around her business and its expansion, and supposedly SM wasn't having it at all. To this day, no one really knows the truth about how she was removed, with the story flipping between something that was forced on her and something she did on her own volition, but the lack of actual communication was and still is suspicious. Nonetheless, the girls trucked on, and three years later, their 10th anniversary (a HUGE milestone given how short girl group lifespans seem to be), and there was barely any promotion for it. Like come on... a little more than a week should have sufficed.

The same became true for a good chunk of their groups. f(x) hasn't released a single in three years, and their 10th anniversary is coming up. They have an appearance as a trio coming up, but why has that been the only burst of activity the group has gotten as a group in that long of a time span? EXO had no promotion problems on the Korean side until Love Shot which got a bit of promotion towards the end of last year and then things halted while they were still nominated for music show awards. Super Junior at least had the excuse of having at least one member in the military and they managed to find another niche in the Latin American market, but now all of their current lineup has finished their military duties, and all eyes are gonna be on them when they come back. This means all eyes will be on SM to see how they take advantage of this opportunity. The groups' solo efforts seem to be doing fine, but like I said before, they've been trained to the point where they've become self sufficient. I mean Taeyeon managed to get music show wins for her latest comeback without performing in any of the music shows. That's the power that she has. Time will tell if Red Velvet and NCT will end up falling for this fate: RV has just finished up their current comeback cycle and celebrated their fifth anniversary, so it's safe to say that they'll be fine until at least 2021. NCT's case is a tad bit messier when you take into account most of the original Dream line graduating soon and the company having to scramble to find the next NCT Dream lineup, as well as 127 getting huger and the prospect of newer NCT denominations.

There in lies another issue: SM seems to have trouble committing to the rotational group concept, especially when combined with the issues they seem to have with its signed Chinese idols. Issues with Chinese idols have spurred since Super Junior, when the fans got mad at the company for adding two more members into the group, in the hopes of forming a mandopop subunit, but things were quelled when the company decided to keep this subunit and the official group separate, meaning those two supposed members never joined the actual group but became part of a subgroup called Super Junior-M. Then one of the members, Hangeng, left the group and filed a lawsuit citing unfair contract provisions. Another member of the group, Henry Lau, also left the group years later, but his split with the company was much more clean. Nonetheless, SJ-M did decently despite all the hardships, which prompted SM to repeat this same concept.

EXO also had two separate subunits for Korea and China, but the outcome was similar to the last. After two years, Chinese member Kris filed a lawsuit against SM claiming that they violated his rights as a person, disregarded health issues and restricted freedom. Luhan and Tao followed suit within the upcoming months, both citing similar issues, and in the case of the latter, family became involved. Tao's became the messiest by far, with SM even winning a countersuit against him. And now a similar story seems to be developing with NCT, as SM seems to be ignoring their Chinese subunit (particularly Winwin), even going to the point where the rest of the members weren't allowed to talk about him or any of the WayV members. Like HELLO? You did announce that the subunit was a part of NCT back at the end of the year, what is the truth now?

Legacy: At times, it seems obvious that the company has realized that it wasn't the huge juggernaut to the genre that it once was, and they're overcorrecting at this point. Had things escalated with NCT way before I decided to create this thread, they probably would have been bumped down a tier, because they just can't seem to get it together with their Chinese artists. But there's no denying this: SM helped create the foundation of K-pop and cultivated it to become the huge cultural craze that it is today. While they may not have the biggest artists internationally at the moment (though NCT 127 seems to be making a break for that Western gold), most of their artists have become legends within the subculture. From H.O.T. down to NCT, and whatever the company decides to create going into the 4th generation, SM did their best to help immortalize them, and while times seem rough for them, when it comes down to that they left for the genre and what's to come in the future, this juggernaut company is certainly one to look out for.
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Oricon
post Jul 31 2019, 11:50 AM
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The reason why SM artists that have been established ended up on releasing less frequently compared to before, is due to the fact that the more established an artist is from that company the less profitable they become. This is the reason why you see the new groups/artists releasing multiple comebacks at the start of their career and once established you'd be lucky to even get a comeback per year. SM milks the money's worth out of their groups and once they are deemed less profitable, their attention shifts towards new groups and the cycle continues.

I have read that this is because at the early periods of their artist's careers, they get marginally less share from what they earn and gradually this increases as time goes by. Another thing I've read is the threshold in which the artists have to cover due to them being trainees resulting in an accumulation of costs spent on each individual from a young age. SM milks the artists early to try and get all their money that they paid to instructors/trainers/writers/producers etc (as at the end of the day it's a business) and once the costs have been covered it's just a bonus for SM in whatever artists put out.

Another thing to consider is the fact that gradually as artists progress on their career, there lies the scenario of these said individuals that want to do something else other than doing group-related activities. This massively affects the performance of the overall group as schedule clashes. Naturally this wouldn't be the case for newbie groups as they're very much in the "I would do anything to be popular/make some money (from a musical perspective)" mind frame and once established, they can then compromise with SM as to what they want in future whether be solo activities or pursue in another field such as acting/radio hosting etc.
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Oricon
post Jul 31 2019, 12:05 PM
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Also re: the Jessica situation it was confirmed that after their pending comeback was done she would publicly announce to 'take a break' from the group due to her own solo activities. However as we all are aware this happened right just before SNSD's comeback happened. Naturally imo both sides have their rights and wrong but speaking from a 8 vs 1 scenario (which is what some paint it out to be), one has to consider the fact that the entire SNSD group was waiting for one another to release a comeback due to individual members having such great success in their own solo activities. Jessica's own fashion line however required a lot more time away and it naturally was never going to work out.

It probably went along the lines of the members supporting Jessica with her own clothing launch, however the latter did not compromise a time with these members and dragged it out. This naturally prevented SNSD from having a comeback as soon as what they originally planned. In turn this affected the schedules of other members from pursuing their own things so the best solution was just to remove Jessica from the group despite some opposition from the other 8 SNSD members (there's cams of some members tearing up just after the entire scandal broke out). Jessica was not happy about how she was 'omitted' from the group and decided to post her version of her story (which in theory isn't incorrect, it's just that whatever she said basically sums up what I said in that she dragged and dragged all of it out for her own sake), which she then bore a grudge on the rest of her own group and SM for not following through with the initial plan.
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Cody Scobell
post Jul 31 2019, 10:13 PM
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QUOTE(Oricon @ Jul 31 2019, 05:05 AM) *
Also re: the Jessica situation it was confirmed that after their pending comeback was done she would publicly announce to 'take a break' from the group due to her own solo activities. However as we all are aware this happened right just before SNSD's comeback happened. Naturally imo both sides have their rights and wrong but speaking from a 8 vs 1 scenario (which is what some paint it out to be), one has to consider the fact that the entire SNSD group was waiting for one another to release a comeback due to individual members having such great success in their own solo activities. Jessica's own fashion line however required a lot more time away and it naturally was never going to work out.

It probably went along the lines of the members supporting Jessica with her own clothing launch, however the latter did not compromise a time with these members and dragged it out. This naturally prevented SNSD from having a comeback as soon as what they originally planned. In turn this affected the schedules of other members from pursuing their own things so the best solution was just to remove Jessica from the group despite some opposition from the other 8 SNSD members (there's cams of some members tearing up just after the entire scandal broke out). Jessica was not happy about how she was 'omitted' from the group and decided to post her version of her story (which in theory isn't incorrect, it's just that whatever she said basically sums up what I said in that she dragged and dragged all of it out for her own sake), which she then bore a grudge on the rest of her own group and SM for not following through with the initial plan.
which brings us back to SM did not know how to communicate when such a problem arose in the first place. The girls were sorta in the dark, the fans moreso. That entire thing was a mess, and Sunny crying during Into The New World just about sums it up. It's come to the point where now, discussing Jessica is like opening Pandora's Box. I was watching an interview between Zach Sang and Tiffany and one of the comments section talked about how she let it slip that there were nine in the group, and there was a long drawn out thread about the whole Jessica situation.

Still can't believe it's gonna be five years since that happened. K-pop took such a dark turn in 2014.

(Yu, I cant WAIT until we get to YG bc I wanna hear your thoughts on Burning Sun)
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Oricon
post Aug 2 2019, 09:09 PM
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QUOTE(ITz Cody @ Jul 31 2019, 11:13 PM) *
which brings us back to SM did not know how to communicate when such a problem arose in the first place. The girls were sorta in the dark, the fans moreso. That entire thing was a mess, and Sunny crying during Into The New World just about sums it up. It's come to the point where now, discussing Jessica is like opening Pandora's Box. I was watching an interview between Zach Sang and Tiffany and one of the comments section talked about how she let it slip that there were nine in the group, and there was a long drawn out thread about the whole Jessica situation.

Still can't believe it's gonna be five years since that happened. K-pop took such a dark turn in 2014.

(Yu, I cant WAIT until we get to YG bc I wanna hear your thoughts on Burning Sun)


I strongly believe that SM were notified and initially supported Jessica throughout the thing, until they realised that it affected the rest of the 8 members schedules too much that they had to subsequently cut her from the group. Both parties have openly admitted about the initial support of the entire thing so does bring back to my theory that it probably was out of Jessica's selfishness that caused the entire scandal in the first place (and her being stubborn and not seeing that, thus holding a grudge on the rest of the 8 members when it's quite clear that some of the members were incredibly upset after her departure whereas her emotion towards any of the 8 is rather flat).

Also YG is shit. I never gave into the hype about that company and the artists that are from the catalog are incredibly 'western' sounding hence the massive international fan base. For me the only time I preferred YG was the following:

Big Bang > Super Junior
Girls Generation > 2NE1
EXO > WINNER
Red Velvet > BLACKPINK

Period.
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Cody Scobell
post Aug 2 2019, 09:23 PM
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tbh SHINee > SJ > BB

I would have put BB over SJ during the beginning of last year but SJ’s latest two comebacks edged them over a bit. Lo Siento was fantastic.
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Oricon
post Aug 2 2019, 09:25 PM
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Omg I completely forgot about SHINee! ohmy.gif

Although they don't fit into any of the categories since BIG BANG were first active just after TVXQ and that's also when Super Junior started to debut too.
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Cody Scobell
post Aug 17 2019, 06:54 AM
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S-TIER: JYP ENTERTAINMENT

*silently whispering* JYP...

Okay but this company has really had a wild ride. It started off with a pretty legendary musician from the first generation and has now evolved into a company that has produced some of the biggest names in K-pop, and that's just the members of TWICE. But how exactly did they get here and why are they so high up on this ranking? Does being in the Big 3 have its perks?

Roster
Unlike SM, JYP had a more silent first generation outing. While SM and other huge companies from back in the day were developing some of the most legendary groups that in some fans' opinions, every K-pop fan should know, the company had Park Jinyoung himself and, in the tail end of the first generation, g.o.d, who officially signed with the company after their side contract with SidusHQ ended. Several other small groups and solo artists were also signed to the label throughout the tail end of the first generation and into the second. During the early second generation, Rain brought forth some dough as a solo artist before moving on to acting in the US (apparently he was in Speed Racer, a bit of a random credit there), but everything changed once the company introduced the Wonder Girls. Ten years ago, if you were to ask an American about K-pop they would probably think about the Wonder Girls. Sure BoA had a brief stint in the US, but WG managed to stick around longer and cement themselves within the current American tween pop culture scene. I mean come on, Nickelodeon created a whole ass movie around them. They went through numerous lineup changes, previous members including HyunA from 4Minute and Sohee (who apparently was in Train To Busan). And let's not leave out Sunmi. So yeah, a lot of recognizable names from the ten years they were together.

Of course the company didn't stop there when it came to the second generation. Their two flagship boy groups, 2PM and 2AM, were actually derived from a reality competition before they were in vogue (wow, ahead of its time), and both did extremely well. miss A also managed to deliver and their whole schtick with being a mandopop/K-pop crossover really helped them. Later on, 15& would debut and show a less idol-focused side of JYP (and that was... a mess, but we'll talk about that later). But while Gen 2 helped solidify them as a K-pop superpower, Gen 3 is where JYP really got the chance to shine.

Let's face it, nowadays most K-pop fans can't talk about the genre without bringing up arguably the biggest girl group in Korea at the moment... TWICE. While Blackpink rules the Western world, TWICE dominates domestically, and their sales records speak volumes. The two groups are basically two kingdoms in an alliance that their fans don't really know about and are secretly planning world domination together... just in their respective spheres. Early 3rd Gen also saw the rise of GOT7, another extremely popular group domestically. Those two groups alone repped the company fabulously throughout the end of 2015 until Q2 2018, when Stray Kids entered the picture. Time will tell if they will reach the levels of their seniors, similarly with ITZY who debuted earlier this year. Some people think they might be poised to pull a Wonder Girls in the future with their English skills. And finally, we have Day6. Idol bands are like a diamond in the rough in an industry that's very pop-dominated, and seeing idol music that is more alternative-focused is a breath of fresh air. Sure they're not reaching CNBLUE's sales yet but they might in the future, who knows?

This leads to what plans JYP might have in expanding their roster in the future. While an expansion might have been a little overzealous back during the beginning of the decade, things have changed since then. K-pop is now a huge phenomenon, and with this international wave comes new rules, as JYP may have realized with their Chinese subsidiary and subsequent boy group Boy Story. They're still fairly young but that could develop into huger things in the future. This year alone saw the company take new strides into developing an international hold. The Nizi project was announced a few months ago with the intention of building a Japanese girl group, and one of their trainees in China took part in the country's edition of Produce 101 and is now in the project group R1SE.

So yeah. I always got the feeling that JYP tended to try things that were ahead of the times. Some examples are the reality survival show that produced 2PM and 2AM (let alone working with pre-BTS BigHit) and Wonder Girls breaking into the US pop culture circuit before K-pop was even seen as a commodity there, and it seems like perfecting the full-on Asian market invasion that SM has been trying to do for over two decades is their next step. Roster-wise, they seem to be setting themselves up well for the impending fourth generation.

Pros & Cons: Similar to SM, JYP is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to what they're good at and what they aren't, as is the case with all companies. Similarly, they've managed to overcome the obstacles and self-inflicted mistakes and grew to the point where they're now dominating the genre to the best of their ability. Sure they don't have as huge of a roster but the names are still synonymous to the genre today.

JYP has had no trouble with developing a image for a group and then running with it. Think Wonder Girls and their retro-influenced classy look, 2PM and their quintessential boy band R&B style, or TWICE's bubblegum pop image. It was about creating a narrative and then adjusting the sound as they matured and furthered their careers. Visually there might not be as much of a change between, say, Like Ooh-Ahh and Fancy or Irony and Why So Lonely (English singles aside but they're super dated already), but the sound deviated enough to make it work. The audience will get tired of stagnation but will probably detract if the groups they loved did such a fast concept change that it looked unnatural, but if the changes were more minute and gradual, then it gives the audience a chance to digest them. It's like a TV show going into new seasons - there has to be something fresh. This may spread into the new groups soon; Stray Kids are more of an experimental dance-pop group and only just tried a psy trance-esque drop for Side Effects, what could be next on their agenda? And ITZY are only just creating their image and the roads will diverge later on.

But what happens when JYP gets overzealous? Wonder Girls were among the first Korean acts to have made it big (comparatively speaking) in the US and were on the verge of releasing an English album They supported the Jonas Brothers and had a Nickelodeon movie dedicated to them and still managed to have yearly comebacks back home. However, none of these really helped them take off like how the company envisioned them, and the long waits back room eventually made way for their competition such as Girls' Generation, 2NE1 and KARA to overtake them in popularity. And as the lineups kept changing I found myself asking, "was it really worth it to cross over to the US at the time?" But then it hit me: this tactic was ahead of its time now that K-Pop is huge in the US. Back when Like Money came out, the only other Korean act that did cross over was PSY... and he went viral. From this issue to where they are now, it seems like JYP has learned from their mistake on that front.

But then there comes the issue of scandals and damage control. I'm still unsure of how JYP deals with drama and scandals, a lot of them having to do with rather problematic behavior from their groups. One of the biggest scandals of the early second generation came from the whole Jay Park drama and how he didn't like the industry or Korea and that it was trying to turn him into something he wasn't, and the resulting fallout was... a mess. While JYP assured people that he wasn't gonna leave the group despite numerous protests, he left Korea anyway to "reflect" on his actions. Here's the kicker: not only were those Myspace messages from 2005 (so years after he debuted), but they were also misinterpreted by Korean netizens. Essentially all this got lost in translation (although tbf he did use rhetoric that could be seen as homophobic but surprisingly that's not what they were mad about! I keep forgetting that Korea wasn't nearly paying attention to LGBT+ awareness as they are now). They seemed to have forgotten about it rather quickly but all of a sudden Jay Park didn't return to 2PM, JYP gave a vague af answer as to why, and all hell broke loose on both ends. Thankfully, he seems to have bounced back stronger and now owns his own company (which will be featured on here soon). But his Myspace pages being uncovered and still talked about to this day has uncovered a problematic past for JYP and subsequently developed a pattern to which these red flags pop up.

JYP idols being problematic seems to be more common than people may think. From Nichkhun's DUI, to numerous racism and cultural appropriation scandals (most of which I can't really say much about in terms of opinions bc, for one, I'm not black) and whatever beef Korean netizens seem to have on TWICE's international members, this just seems to be the topic of choice when discussing problematic behavior in JYP Entertainment. For one, BamBam saying the n-word was pretty f*cked up. This also brings up the discussion topic: how big is Korea into cultural sensitivity and warning their idols if it seems to infringe on such, and will this expand further now that the Western world is a hot market for K-pop?

Most of the time, it seems that JYP has done well with dealing with these scandals but other times it's like the company has left them out to slaughter. Both of TWICE's culture-related scandals were all stuff that got lost in translation and the company and management didn't really know what to do with them. Tzuyu reading out an apology in front of the camera was especially heartbreaking, and Sana's post from a couple months ago wasn't even supposed to be interpreted as xenophobia but it somehow was anyway. Luckily for these two scandals, international fans had their backs. The same can't be said for when Bang Chan supposedly wore cornrows to a performance and the ensuing backlash was not pretty, most of which (such as the fans cyberbullying him when he got a nosebleed during a VLive and attacking other members thrown into the crossfire) came from the international fans rather than Knetz. And then there's the OneChina thing that affects every group and company with mainland Chinese idols or Chinese idols working in China but that's a whole other can of worms. All I'm saying is that something fishy is going on in terms of how those idols are discussing the issue especially if Jackson had to cancel a late night show appearance bc of this.

What this basically comes down to is that JYP wants to cultivate an image and build a narrative around it, but this narrative happens to be family friendly and they pride themselves on it. If anything were to come to distort this image, JYP would essentially be caught with their pants down.

Legacy: A lot of people take pride in stanning JYP groups because they're seen as the least problematic company of the Big 3, but at this point every company has had problematic skeletons in their closets so that moral high horse would start retreating. However, there's one thing that's certain and it's that JYP knows how to start a narrative and keep it running for the unforseeable future. Even with miss A and 2AM fizzling out to everyone's surprise and not starting off with as big of a bang as SM, the company still has a wide array of artists that pulled together a large amount of revenue and fame. And with the success of TWICE despite them not crossing over to the western world (although they might, who knows?), I guess the old saying is true: slow and steady wins the race.

Oh, and ONCEs are just as toxic as Blinks. PERIODT.
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Lo-Fi Version Time is now: 28th March 2024 - 06:08 PM