SEOUL – Two K-pop acts have been making headlines in Korea this summer, and their stories are both triumphs of tenacity. Girl group Rescene finally topped a music chart with Love Attack, a song that had gone largely unnoticed for two years. Ateez, a group long celebrated abroad but overlooked at home, cracked South Korea’s own charts for the first time with its new single Bad – eight years into their career. Such reversals of fortune look glamorous from the outside. But they remain the exception, not the rule.
The Harsh Realities of K-Pop’s Ladder
Even what the K-pop industry calls a “small-label miracle” surfaces only occasionally. Kiss of Life, launched in 2023 by the little-known S2 Entertainment, broke into a Billboard sub-chart and won their first South Korean music show trophy the following year with Sticky. Yet for every such story, the odds of just being able to debut are shrinking. The number of trainees at South Korean entertainment agencies fell 38.3 per cent in just two years, from 1,895 in 2020 to 1,170 by the end of 2022, with the decline particularly acute among male trainees.
When Even Major Label Backing Isn’t Enough
Even debuting under a major label no longer guarantees success. Only a handful of recent rookies from Hybe, SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment have made their mark. Illit, under Hybe’s Source Music, sold 200,000 copies of their debut album in two days; SM’s Hearts2Hearts topped a music show just 16 days after debut and won a rookie award within four months; and Big Hit Music’s Cortis debuted at No. 15 on the Billboard 200, the second-highest debut album ranking for a K-pop act excluding project groups. Meanwhile, JYP Entertainment’s Kick Flip and Hybe-affiliated Pledis Entertainment’s TWS are struggling to find a foothold despite their major label backing. The difference is that big agencies can afford to give a struggling act a second album; small ones rarely can.
The Astronomical Cost of Chasing a Dream
Behind these numbers lies an unforgiving financial structure. Debuting a single group can cost 3 billion won (S$2.7 million) to 5 billion won, with fourth- and fifth-generation groups often requiring more than 10 billion won to turn a profit when ongoing costs after debut are factored in. Recouping that investment can take three years or more, meaning agencies often have just two to three years to make a profit within a standard seven-year exclusive contract. In practice, a company’s “investment” becomes the idols’ debt. Earnings first go toward paying that back, and after members are “settled”, profits are typically split evenly, with the agency taking 50 per cent. If that settlement never comes, idols can end up performing without pay for years. In March, boy group The Boyz filed an injunction against their agency One Hundred Label to suspend their exclusive contract over unpaid settlements; singers Lee Mu-jin, Exo-CBX, Bibi and Lee Seung-gi followed with contract termination notices, all citing billions of won in unpaid dues.
Shifting Sands: Support and Survival Rates
Aware of this widening gap, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in July selected 10 small and mid-sized agencies, including Rescene’s label, for a new programme supporting overseas expansion – offering up to 300 million won per group annually for up to three years. The scale of this risk is backed by data. A paper by Sungshin Women’s University professor Kim Jung-sub, released on July 30, analysed all 1,182 idol groups that have debuted in the 30 years since H.O.T. in 1996. It found the average group survives just 4.12 years – barely 59 per cent of a standard seven-year contract – and that roughly 45 per cent of all groups leave the market within their first three years. Just 1.61 per cent ever became million-sellers. Yet, Kim notes that idol groups’ three-year survival rate of 55.03 per cent actually exceeds the 41.5 per cent survival rate of ordinary South Korean small businesses over the same period – suggesting the industry’s reputation for risk may be somewhat overstated.
Rescene’s comeback, Ateez’s belated domestic breakthrough and Kiss of Life’s rare rise are not simply strokes of luck. They are also what a shrinking handful manage to pull off in an industry where neither a big label’s backing nor a strong debut guarantees survival. Behind the sparkle of a comeback stage, every idol’s ordinary day is still a fight to stay in the game. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK
