HYBE: The Anatomy of a PR Disaster

K-Pop Business Controversies can be Wild

In the eyes of many outsiders and fans, the K-pop industry is best known for its colorful outfits, complex choreographies, and youth-oriented concepts. However, if one has spent any time analyzing the industry’s practices and history, one will find K-Pop agencies treating their boy bands and girl groups as assembly line products, crafting and pushing personalities on their stars meant to appeal to wide demographics willing to spend quite a lot of money, and contracts rather grimly known as “slave contracts,” with some stars and average employees of most major companies at least subtly hinting at their treatment.

As a result of this, K-pop agencies find themselves in a tricky balance between maintaining a vibe of casualness, spontaneity, creativity, and fan community (with the last oftentimes dedicated to an agency ‘family’ of artists), with the reality of crafting everything into a brew that satisfies all, oftentimes working through extremes to do so, pushing the principle of the invisible hand close to a breaking point.

This article is not on the moral questions that come up within the K-Pop industry but on how agencies handle this balance and how K-Pop’s biggest agency completely failed to maintain this balance in the public eye, leading to a rather impressive explosion of controversies.

HYBE:

You, the reader, may not have heard of HYBE, but you certainly have felt some of their impact in the music industry. Starting out as a K-pop agency, they blew up with their boy band BTS in 2015 and soon, through clever branding and some strong albums, came to dominate the music industry.

However, HYBE had to diversify its assets quicker than one might expect. Korea’s mandatory military service and the fickleness of the K-pop industry meant that HYBE needed to garner as many musical acts as quickly as possible to ensure they would not fail when BTS’ band members left for military service.

A rapid period of expansion followed as HYBE purchased as many former allies and competitors as quickly as possible. These included K-pop agencies, such as Pledis, Source, and Koz Entertainments, and foreign agencies, such as Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. These acquisitions added artists such as Seventeen, Gfriend, Justin Bieber, and Ariana Grande, as well as the rights to the original recordings of Taylor Swift’s albums, to the HYBE roster, even if a few of them stayed only for a while. Using this extra push, HYBE also acquired a lot of talent for behind-the-scenes planning and production, most notably Min Hee-Jin, from their rival, SM Entertainment. She would prove important later on.

They also sought to debut as many new acts as possible, including Tomorrow X Together, Le Sserafim, Enhypen, and of course, NewJeans, who blew up and largely became one of Korea’s most popular groups. Of course, this was all just in time, as BTS’ military hiatus meant all these new efforts needed to pay off soon enough.

The Controversies Begin:

Despite being the biggest K-Pop agency, HYBE was considered the newest and least reputed of the “big 4”, of which the most reputed was SM Entertainment. As a result, when SM entered a civil war in February 2023, HYBE saw an opportunity to expand even further, collaborating with former CEO and company founder Lee Soo-Man to attempt to do a hostile takeover of the old company. Its new leaders chose to ally themselves with conglomerate Kakao, starting a messy and public bidding war between these two giants. In the end, Kakao won, even with some legal controversy. However, the public mudslinging between these two conglomerates and the rise of anti-corporate anger in South Korea made both companies seem greedy and out of touch.

However, HYBE faced a deluge of controversies earlier this year, most notably a split with Min Hee-Jin. The famed K-Pop director was the partial owner of a subsidiary, Ador, which managed the most successful of HYBE’s post-BTS groups, NewJeans. In April 2024, HYBE announced an audit of Ador due to rumors that Min Hee-Jin was trying to break it away from HYBE. Min Hee-Jin announced that she did indeed intend to split the company from HYBE. She stated this was due to HYBE ignoring NewJeans’ creation by diverting trainees to another subsidiary and debuting a new girl group called ILLIT, which Min Hee-Jin accused of plagiarizing both the concept and styling from NewJeans.

This should have been a quick and easy legal and PR victory for HYBE. Min Hee-Jin was already immensely unpopular due to allegations of sexualizing minors (including the members of NewJeans), and allegations of workplace abuse under her leadership. HYBE also had a largely friendly media presence on their side, and loads of fans were willing to back their every move. However, as evidenced throughout the rest of the article, they soon bumbled the PR bag quite miserably.

The Ador PR Disaster

Rather than attacking Min Hee-Jin, a company lead, they chose to make personal attacks on Min Hee-Jin, alleging she used a shaman (a spiritual medium) to make corporate decisions and that she was a corrupt leader.

Later that month, however, Min Hee-Jin released a press conference where she went on an emotional tirade against HYBE. Compared to the prim and proper PR statements that dot the K-Pop landscape, this messy and personal conference should have backfired (her lawyers most definitely panicked on stage because of it), but somehow won her appreciation within the public’s eye. Rather than the battle being between two corporate giants, HYBE vs. Min Hee-Jin now became a woman against a broken system in the eyes of many. Her conference rant was turned into an online meme, and she began to garner support.

Here is where a clever PR team would dial down the personal attacks by associated actors to keep their attacks straight on Min Hee-Jin and try their best not to involve other groups and artists in this mess.

So naturally, Belift Lab (the subsidiary that was accused of copying NewJeans) released a 27-minute long video on their official channel basically talking about how every group draws inspiration from others and how, despite that, their group ILLIT was quite unique. From a PR perspective, this video was a disaster, dragging in other popular groups like Blackpink into this rather impressive mess. Later, it was found that some evidence was photoshopped. Combined with ill-timed texts revealing that HYBE’s founder Bang Si-Hyuk told Min Hee-Jin to crush a rival K-Pop group, Aespa, and HYBE was losing the PR battle.

Additionally, members of NewJeans and their parents sided with Min Hee-Jin, making HYBE seem greedy. Additionally, HYBE rushed out a PR statement for a BTS member’s DUI and ended up apologizing for misinformation. Additionally, they found Bang Si-Hyuk was caught with several young female streamers in LA, and then came up with a bizarre strategy that he was just being a friendly tour guide for a coincidental meeting (denied by some of the streamers), when a “no comment” would have likely done less harm to the brand.

Where we are now:

After many legal challenges, Min Hee-Jin was removed from the CEO position at Ador but is still with the company. Given HYBE’s size, it's likely they will escape from these controversies mostly unscathed legally, but they have dealt a massive blow to their public image, which had helped differentiate them from their competition. How this plays out in the future is unknown, but there are several lessons the music industry giant should learn from this. Plan your PR statements ahead of time and carefully, don’t try to drag in information beyond the scope of the issues, and don’t try to play the perfect victim when you clearly aren’t.  There is still an opportunity for HYBE to succeed in the public’s eye partially.