How NewJeans (almost) changed K-pop

In March 2024, when the K-pop girl group NewJeans was awarded group of the year at Billboard's Women in Music event, the crew was presented the honor by the unlikeliest of advocates: country star Lainey Wilson, who hinted at the distance between their respective worlds and this rare opportunity to bridge them. "It's a place where a gal who grew up in a small farming community in Louisiana gets to shine a light on an incredible group of K-pop performers from halfway across the globe," she said, applause roaring out before the group's name was even spoken. Indeed, the prized pony of ADOR, a sub-label of the juggernaut K-pop company HYBE, had spent the previous year affirming itself as an exciting next step in the genre's evolution. Billboard felt like the perfect American institution to recognize this leap: The 2023 EP Get Up had made NewJeans only the second K-pop girl group to top the Billboard 200, after Blackpink. But as the group performed "Super Shy" and "ETA," Get Up's hits, the distance between the two units couldn't have been more apparent. Blackpink was the final benchmark of an old K-pop model; NewJeans was a brand new one.

For one thing, there was a profound understatement to the NewJeans performance — members gliding in and out of the lead spot with uncanny precision, distinct from the flamboyant mini-showcases that had come before. The sparkling fits, flowy choreo and muted music were impressive on their own, but the rush was in how seamlessly they worked together, telling a story about style. Where many K-pop groups spend their press runs trying to be all things to all listeners, NewJeans had spent its breakout year building an aesthetic niche to live in. Where some K-pop singles are so obsessed with now-ness that they feel out of time the moment they're born, NewJeans' songs seemed to be angling for something timeless. For a moment, it looked as if the group could be K-pop's future — if not a bellwether then at least a new barometer, and a message to the industry to reconsider how it does business. Yet only a month after the Billboard ceremony, that horizon became clouded in uncertainty: A power struggle erupted within HYBE for control of NewJeans' future, benching the group for over a year and dividing its fanbase. A surprise announcement this month promises that NewJeans will be back, but the long absence leading to this unsteady return has felt, to those paying attention to the genre's scandals over the years, like the latest evidence of a lingering rot.

Even many superfans will tell you that K-pop's pageantry has often masked a troubled business model, where impressionable young trainees commit to a life run entirely by their agencies. Signing on the dotted line can come with extraordinary expectations: plastic surgery, disordered eating, heavy restrictions on socializing. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission finally capped K-pop contracts at seven years after a 2009 controversy around the boy band TVXQ, who coined the term "slave contract" to describe its own 13-year agreement. K-pop was also at ground zero for the rise of toxic stan culture, from the doxxing of journalists to the cyberbullying of artists; one such star, Sulli of the girl group f(x), died by suicide in the midst of unrelenting harassment. Concerns over these practices have been a public talking point for years, but reform efforts rarely stick: In 2019, Yang Hyun-suk, co-founder of YG Entertainment, was forced to step down from the label after threatening a whistleblower to cover up a drug allegation facing one of his artists; he has since returned to YG and is helming the girl group Babymonster.

The industry famous for its finely honed artist development method, sometimes called the "K-pop formula," has always lived with this tension: a creative philosophy with proven results, and a near-constant struggle for fairer relations between performers and the adults who oversee them. The latest and most public installment in this fight began last spring, with an outlier act suddenly at the center of the story.

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In April 2024, NewJeans found itself caught in a quarrel between two corporate masters. On one side stood the top brass at HYBE, the largest of the country's "big four" entertainment agencies since it went public in 2020. On the other was one of their deputies: Min Hee-jin, CEO and founder of ADOR, who had launched NewJeans in 2022 and served as a creative director for its music. An industry veteran by the time she joined HYBE in 2019, Min had arrived touting progressive ideas for managing talent, already positioning her next group as an alternative to K-pop's star system. HYBE had given her the keys, but now alleged that an internal audit revealed she sought to seize total control of ADOR — and took steps to fire her. Min denied such a thing was possible, and claimed the falling-out actually stemmed from her complaints that the company had sidelined NewJeans, stifling its growth in favor of other girl groups it was launching. That August, ADOR announced Min had stepped down as CEO, while the producer insisted she had been forced out.

When asked, in an interview with the English-language newspaper Korea JoongAng Daily, why she and NewJeans were so committed to working together, Min attributed the closeness to her unique style of artist development, saying:

Throughout the ordeal, the five members of NewJeans — Minji (now 21), Hanni (21), Danielle (20), Haerin (19) and Hyein (17) — publicly supported Min and called for her reinstatement, saying they would not continue without her. HYBE suggested a compromise: Min could stay on, but in a limited role as a music producer, an offer Min quickly denounced as a mockery of her mission. "It is contradictory to accuse me of breach of trust while offering me a producer role. I chose to join because HYBE claimed they wanted to create a new wave and flow in K-pop. If those aspects hadn't been guaranteed, I wouldn't have even joined the company," she said in an interview with Japan's TV Asahi/ANN News program News Station. The only tenable way forward, she argued, was for her to continue as CEO, managing business and production in tandem.

By then, the issue had grown bigger than Min, with the NewJeans girls voicing their own criticisms of the parent company. Last September, in an impromptu YouTube livestream that played like a hostage video, the members called HYBE inhumane, detailing mistreatment and harassment. A month later, Hanni testified, through tears, before the South Korean National Assembly's Environment and Labor Committee, as a reference witness for an audit being conducted around workplace harassment and artist protection in the entertainment industry. She spoke about discrimination she and her groupmates faced at HYBE, and the resulting distrust. The case was ultimately dismissed, with the committee ruling that members of K-pop groups are not workers, and therefore are not entitled to labor protections.

Finally, on Nov. 28, 2024, NewJeans took matters into its own hands. At a press conference, the members announced the termination of their exclusive contract with ADOR, and vowed to seek the right to continue independently under the NewJeans name. The industry moved swiftly against them, with the Korea Management Federation and Korea Entertainment Producers' Association both siding with the company, the latter calling the act childish. Attempts to freelance under a new name, NJZ, were quickly thwarted. The group performed for the last time in February 2025, headlining at ComplexCon Hong Kong.

It took a year of legal limbo, with the group's musical activities stopped cold, before a pair of decisions put an end to the suspense. On Oct. 30, 2025, Seoul Central District Court ruled in favor of ADOR, saying that NewJeans must honor its contract and stay with the label through 2029. The members initially stuck to their guns, saying in a statement, "It is impossible to return to ADOR and continue normal entertainment activities under the current situation where the trust relationship with ADOR has completely broken down." They vowed to appeal the ruling, a case legal experts estimated would not be heard until well into 2026. Then came a twist that few saw coming: On Nov. 12, ADOR announced in a press release that the group's two youngest members, Hyein and Haerin, would be returning to the label, with no word on Minji, Danielle and Hanni. A few hours later, the three holdouts announced their intention to return as well — but through a news article, saying they had contacted ADOR but had not yet heard back. The label's response was a reluctant one: "We are confirming the authenticity of their intentions."

That abrupt, staggered homecoming may be the perfect distillation of the conflicting ideologies that have swirled around the group from all sides. Local reports claimed that Hyein's father — who had so strongly opposed their leaving the label that he entered a civil dispute with his wife over legal guardianship, citing a need for an "environment where Hyein could focus on her career" — was instrumental in bringing the younger girls back to ADOR. In contrast, The Korea Herald reported that Minji's mother had been a vocal supporter of Min and her position in the fight with HYBE. Meanwhile, Min herelf had moved on, announcing the start of her own indie agency just ahead of the court verdict. But she did release a statement giving her blessing for the group's return to ADOR, with the parting wish that they remain united. "I can begin anew anywhere. But I believe that NewJeans must remain whole as five," Min said. "I hope the members grow stronger and become an even better NewJeans, and above all, I wish happiness for all five members."

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The end of Min's label experiment points to something bigger at play, a tug-of-war that has long felt inescapable within K-pop. During the peak of the dispute, HYBE and the courts asserted there would be no disruption to the NewJeans operation under the proposed changes. But Min had intentionally designed ADOR, a boutique imprint with NewJeans as its only artist, to run counter to the HYBE system, binding artists' and producers' fates together in ways frankly radical for the genre. "I wanted to have all of these come together," Min told Fast Company, describing the balance of art and commerce that made up her fantasy K-pop outfit. "My definition of cool music, with my definition of a cool picture, with my definition of a great business. Business is, of course, important because if you don't make money with art, it would be kind of useless."

Before launching ADOR, Min was one of the defining figures in K-pop aesthetics. As the creative director at SM Entertainment, she styled and designed concepts for Girls' Generation, SHINee, EXO, f(x) and Red Velvet, becoming the highest-paid woman in the industry in the process. "I accomplished a lot of things when I was at SM, and I left because I was not really satisfied with my life there," she told Fast Company. "But I'm not saying that I came here because I love this company; I needed a place where I could actualize my vision." The ADOR way — which is to say, the NewJeans blueprint — was to defy what Min called "conventional K-pop idol grammar" and create a group for non-fanatics: a smooth, iterative sound that never resolves, snappy enough to generate earworms yet compact enough to not overstay its welcome.

"For most K-pop songs, there's always an intro and then the climax and the tension relieves again, because people think that having loops is boring," Min said in that interview. She was specifically referencing NewJeans' club-pop confection "Super Shy," which artfully defies this climax-release principle by converting liquid drum and bass into blissful Powerpuff pizzazz. The song was co-written and -arranged by the Danish singer-songwriter Erika de Casier, and is imbued with her soft-focused, nostalgic take on Y2K-era R&B. In it, you can hear the NewJeans model at full bore: loopy, sugar-rush songcraft accented by airbrushed vocals. But most important is its holism: It is streamlined, even graceful, where many other K-pop recordings feel like Megazord constructions of the myriad artists who work on them. (EXO-K's "History," for example, has two different bridges, one of which feels beamed in from a completely different song.)

The fragmented approach can be its own kind of endearing, but stitching together bits of tracks was not Min's way. "There is a reason why we have composers make the songs! Sometimes, we'll adjust the top line, but we never go as far as to damage the real intention of the song," she said. Min's production MO was pointed defiantly away from the tried and true way of doing things, which took some collaborators by surprise. "One of the first questions they asked me was, 'Do you listen a lot to K-pop?' " de Casier told GQ in 2023. "And I got so nervous and I had to be honest and said, 'No, I haven't yet explored that genre.' And they're like, 'Good, because we want something new. We want something fresh.' "

K-pop can often sound oddly anachronistic, even when aiming at an explicitly retro sound, but NewJeans spun a mirage of the past into a modern teenage dream. The touchstones weren't unique ('90s streetwear, early aughts American prep, teen dramas), nor were the genres at play (new jack swing, synth-pop, Jersey and Baltimore club, Miami bass, throwback R&B); it was the ways in which they were remixed, the sense of curation and harmony at work and the way it all slotted neatly into a TikTok-induced optimization. A lot has been made of NewJeans' minimalism as a refreshing counter to K-pop maximalism, but the real innovation was its sepia-toned feel: K-pop as a moodboard come alive, revitalizing the old to the point of a full revolution. Some portion of that has to be attributed to the impresario-auteur at the reins and her master plan. "These days people use the word producer kind of interchangeably as a composer. I'm a producer, but I don't make songs," Min said. "I plan strategies."

It is only through such acumen that you get the synergy of a dot-com-era obsessive like de Casier calibrating the group's filter for maximum effect. She is far from the first inspired pairing of choice Westerner and ascendant K-pop group — the late SOPHIE produced for ITZY; Carly Rae Jepsen co-wrote an f(x) song; Troye Sivan and Charli XCX worked on music for the giants BTS and TWICE, respectively — but in many of those songs you can often feel the discord of trying to force those artists to adapt to the agencies' market-tested structure. So much of the NewJeans synthesis came from those brought onto the creative team having no clue how K-pop usually works. "It's hard [for me] to say how their music differs from other K‑pop songs — I think it's better for music critics to comment on that," Ylva Dimberg, one of the group's recurring writers and producers, told The Face. The primary NewJeans producer, 250, put forth a theory of K-pop music that seemed to align with the group's mandate: He asked a Swedish friend who headed a K-pop songwriting team what K-pop was, because he didn't really know, and the friend said it could be anything. "People talk about 'the formula of K-pop.' But I don't really understand that, because K-pop is really just pop music made by Koreans," he told Nylon. "So whatever we do, we don't need to follow any specific rules because no one can tell us something we made isn't K-pop."

Not following rules seems to be precisely the strategy Min envisioned. To 250's point, the idea of a genre as omnivorous as K-pop having a central sound is ridiculous, but a unique song framework can still stand out. Most NewJeans songs don't have bridges; none have obligatory rap verses. All feel like they have been stripped to their essential parts, stringing hooks together like embroidery floss along a friendship bracelet, and all have a perfect grasp on the balance between Western and Eastern pop sensibilities. Much of that equilibrium seems to begin with the sessions themselves and the collaborators put in the room: a marriage between outsiders from the Korean industry and niche Scandinavian artists, adding up to an unfussy fusionist's phantasmagoria.

It should be said: While ADOR's anti-system stance paid off handsomely as a creative ethic, it proved less effective in remaking the industry at the administrative level. Min was never a K-pop socialist — revolutionary by industry standards, certainly, but still longed to be a CEO fronting a business — and in time she inevitably found herself playing by the house rules, subject to the same industry politicking as other K-pop executives. (Among the evidence cited in October's court ruling were unearthed Slack messages from Min ordering subordinates to dig up dirt on other HYBE artists, which the court saw as grounds to declare breach of trust, misuse of personal information, infringement of trade secrets, defamation and abuse of power.) No one person could overhaul the entire enterprise, but Min's undoing feels like an especially revealing lesson in the limits of the master's tools.

K-pop is a copycat league. Not just in the musical sense — as when Girls' Generation ripped Duffy's "Mercy" for its own "Dancing Queen," or when myriad K-pop groups followed the success of "Despacito" down the reggaeton rabbit hole — but also in its efforts to recreate the tactics of anything that brings in audiences (hence "the K-pop formula," which is about replicating the paces of idol assembly down to the members' roles). The space vacated by NewJeans has been tough to fill, but that doesn't mean there haven't been one-off attempts to take a few laps in its lane. In Illit, a HYBE sister group whom Min accused of ripping off NewJeans wholesale, you can hear the same collage-like principle on songs like "Magnetic" and "jellyous." Olivia Marsh, the literal sister of NewJeans' Danielle, tunes her "Strategy" to a similar turn-of-the-millenium frequency. Several songs, from ifeye's "IRL" and HITGS' "SOURPATCH" to VIVIZ's "Full Moon" and izna's "BEEP," have tried to recreate the bubblegum bass vibe of skipping rhythms and lush, light vocals; even TWICE got in on the fun last year. Others, like Hearts2Hearts' "Blue Moon" and RESCENE's "Deja Vu," conjure the dreamy, rosy-eyed R&B-lite. All of these attempts are serviceable; many are even pleasant. But none quite recreate the mojo.

The contrast is, at least partly, in the roadmap. Min made an organizational practice of stockpiling good, complete songs and figuring out what to do with them later, whereas the traditional K-pop process involves building an elaborate concept around a plug-and-play single and treating it as a peg for months of extended rollout activities. NewJeans didn't do isolated campaigns or tossed-off B-sides; everything served the broader group architecture, something not to be taken for granted in K-pop's LARPing ecosystem, where artists transform between promo cycles. (Just look at the jarring transition from LE SSERAFIM's posed, subtle, disco-inflected "Hot" to the campy, lurid, rap-forward "Spaghetti.") Min once said that the music itself was the concept with NewJeans, and simple as that seems, it's a key part of the group's appeal: There was an identifiable and qualifiable NewJeans sound, one that was singular and exclusive. It was clear what a New Jeans song was, and — just as crucially — what it wasn't, to the point of feeling intuitive. The group did all of the things inherent to K-pop groups, but it did so with a sense of taste top of mind.

The worst K-pop can feel like bad product placement: odious in its lack of subtlety, putting the commerce front and center and pretending otherwise, treating its "idols" like collectible dolls to generate shareholder value. It would be disingenuous to suggest that NewJeans was in any way immune to the genre's hazards of investment opportunity or marketing front — the video for "ETA" is an ad for the iPhone 14 Pro — but the group's promotion was far less gauche; it was purposeful, even, and shrewd in its movements. It was the influencer ideal: the mere presence doing much of the selling, of a vibe more than a commodity. There was a naturalness, at odds with the usual K-pop posturing, and the styling and choreography were in complete alignment with the music, which was clearly the main attraction. That is, perhaps, why this battle feels particularly distressing in an industry that is no stranger to scandal and corporate malpractice. It is disorienting for K-pop's most actualized act to become the face of its dysfunction.

It's impossible to say whether this is the beginning of the end for NewJeans. Perhaps, years from now, Min Hee-jin's dismissal will feel like the official death knell — or maybe it will be a blip in an otherwise successful career at ADOR. But it's also tempting to think of the what-ifs — the artistic and workplace breakthroughs that could have been made at the key turning points of this saga. What might the NewJeans arc have been had it continued uninterrupted, and could it have ushered in a new K-pop paradigm, or at least an alternative to the norm? What might the business look like had the Environment and Labor Committee heard Hanni's testimony as an elegy, a plea to bury the old ways? Min once mused, "It can be scary to suggest something different. But once the suggestion is accepted, I think that's what writes new history." Before us now is the other side of that coin: the suggestion rejected, the door closed on renewal, and a group once defined by its counterculture ethos headed back to the assembly line, to resume performing as though nothing has changed. K-pop is reliant on a blissful suspension of disbelief, the stage as a whimsical little pocket world — but it's hard to imagine the many layers of strained relationships here won't taint the NewJeans fantasy in ways that cannot be ignored.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man — Min's former boss and a key player in K-pop's global expansion — was asked his thoughts on the genre's darker controversies, from which his own company had scarcely been immune. (Recall TVXQ's "slave contract" controversy and Sulli's suicide — both SM artists.) Lee responded with another question: "Should we always weigh the dark side equally with the bright side, the future?" he asked. "Media should consider whether K-pop represents more future or more past that holds us back. Rather than just discussing the dark side and dragging us down by clinging to the past, shouldn't we talk more about the future?" I've been thinking about that a lot since I read it. It's a question premised on the idea that the past and future are partitioned from each other, and that the darkness is all in the rearview mirror. Yet if the NewJeans gauntlet is any indication, those tribulations are still far closer to us than they appear.

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