The Girl Group Kpocalypse
The past week has been a difficult one for girl group stans. Both Loossemble and fromis_9 have announced that they will not be renewing their contracts, cignature have announced their disbandment, and NewJeans have terminated their contract.
Each one of these groups disbanding feels quite unique from one another so let’s have a look at each one and see why it happened and what my personal thoughts are. NewJeans will have to come last, just because it is so much more complicated, what they are doing is not quite disbanding.
Loossemble
On the 29th of November, CTDENM announced that Loossemble’s exclusive contract with the agency would be coming to an end. This came as quite a surprise to many fans as Loossemble had only signed with the agency in June 2023. In addition, what looked to be a fairly successful US tour and their recently released hit TTYL only add to the confusion. Since the announcement there have been no further official communications, with only wild speculation to go on (as much as we want it, the chances of LOONA fully reforming feel slim). With so little to go on I don’t have much to add myself, though I am finding this one quite sad as I did believe that there was a decent chance of them coming to perform in Australia considering the popularity of the ARTMS concerts here in November.
EDIT: Shortly after writing this it was announced that Hyunjin would be releasing a single “Thank You” on the 16th of December so although it is bittersweet it will be nice to have one last breath of Loossemble before it ends.
fromis_9
On the 29th of November (starting to see a pattern here), PLEDIS Entertainment announced that exclusive contract with fromis9 will be expiring on the 31st of December. Now I think to most, this one came as somewhat less of a surprise. Several online discussions from earlier this year have criticized HYBE and PLEDIS for mismanaging fromis_9, noting a drought of releases and participation in variety shows. One reddit post from a few years ago even predicted the disbandment at the contract’s end, though based on their reasoning its likely they just got lucky.
If we take a more serious look, the “7-year curse” is a real phenomenon, so it’s not a huge surprise that another group is letting their contract expire. It will continue to happen unfortunately and especially so with these sort of mid-tier groups such as fromis_9.
cignature
The most recent of the disbandment announcements C9 Entertainment announced on December 3rd that “it was mutually agreed that disbandment of the group was necessary”. I don’t know exactly how true that statement is, but this one probably comes as less of a shock. It’s certainly not easy to run even a successful group so smaller groups like cignature are victims to disbandment far more often. They fall into a similar category as some groups that disbanded earlier in the year like Cherry Bullet and NATURE; groups with a small but dedicated who will be wondering how this could happen. I certainly feel for them because it happens to all of us at one point or another.
I hadn’t listened to cignature prior to the announcement but on listening to some of their most popular songs while I am writing this I would say that their sound is something I could definitely enjoy. They remind me a bit of Oh My Girl, a sound that is more familiar to some of the Kpop from the early 2010s. It is a shame that they couldn’t break through but fans sadness should at lease slightly be eased by each of the members opening personal instagram accounts. Maybe they have something cooking up in the background.
NewJeans
On the 29th of November (What a day!), the members of NewJeans announced, “the five of us have terminated our exclusive contract with ADOR and will continue our activities independently, free from HYBE and ADOR”.
Personally, I am very sad to see it get to this point. I have no strong love for HYBE and can certainly see a world where they aren’t the best to work under. I mean, what mega-corporation is super friendly? On the other hand though we have Min Hee-jin though and to be perfectly honest I just don’t know what the NewJeans girls see in her that they would willingly throw themselves off a cliff to follow her. Now I can appreciate that Min Hee-jin has done a lot of good work on the creative concept side of NewJeans and also for her long term work as creative director at SM Entertainment, but getting into what looks to be a personal feud with your bosses and putting a group of 16 to 20 year old girls in front of you and convincing them and their families that what you are doing is best for them seems at least a little villainous.
I don’t think Min Hee-jin cares about NewJeans, or at least I don’t think she cares about the members of the group. For her it’s all about her own personal success, that’s why she had to drag NewJeans out of HYBE. Her focus espcecially this year also seemed to be less about working on NewJeans and more on trying to drag down the rest of HYBE. Her disparaging comments towards LE SSERAFIM and ILLIT were extremely unnecessary and frankly the claims of ILLIT plagiarising were delusional. I have had a look at plenty of the comparisons that show ILLIT “copying” NewJeans and I feel that at most the closest you could get is saying they are both share some inspirations which could be said about almost any two music groups that exist.
What’s next for NewJeans? I assume at the moment lawyers on both sides are trying very hard to try and figure this out. I see three technically possible outcomes here and probably only one that is realistic.
Evidence is actually found of actual and severe mistreatment of the NewJeans members and somehow part of the compensation for this allows NewJeans to leave HYBE and ADOR with the group’s name and rights to their music. This seems doubtful, I don’t think this would be able to stay hidden for this long.
HYBE wins the legal battle and NewJeans stay with them as they were before with no Min-Hee-jin. Somehow this feels less likely than the previous option, I just can’t see NewJeans and HYBE working together after what has happened.
NewJeans are able to escape HYBE with maybe some sort of monetary penalty, with HYBE keeping all rights to NewJeans Intellectual property and songs. Min Hee-jin forms a new company with and restarts NewJeans under a new name. This seems to be most likely and if I had to make a prediction I would guess that a very NewJeans-like group may be debuting some time in the middle of 2025.
I don’t know if I can fully support a group that is run by Min Hee-jin at this point so I hope that somehow NewJeans all come to their senses and get saved from all this. I know that I certainly wouldn’t have known how to deal with all this at that age so it’s hard to put the blame on them.