Rookie Girl Group BADVILLAIN Surpasses NewJeans Records, But Fails To Impress K-Pop Fans

A week ago on June 3, BPM Entertainment — home to VIVIZ and now Taemin — debuted their new rookie girl group, BADVILLAIN.

Though little was known about the group at first, anticipation built as the members were revealed over time. The line-up includes names like Emma, a former participant on Street Woman Fighter; Chloe Young, a dancer from 1Million Dance Studio; and HU’E and Yunseo, who competed on My Teenage Girl. The remaining three members — INA, Vin, and Kelly — also had promising skills shown leading up to their debut.

BADVILLAIN-s-Teasers-Receive-Explosive-Global-Response-openingPicture — | *BPM Entertainment*

They debuted with the song “BADVILLAIN”, which was accompanied by a seemingly high-budget music video and impressive choreography.

And though they did have an anticipated debut, many have found their resulting “success” to be suspicious. For example, the music video got 8.45 million views in the first 12 hours after its release. To compare it to NewJeans, who are arguably one of the most popular girl groups right now, their music video for “Bubble Gum” earned 5 million views in the first 12 hours.

To continue the comparison, in the 7 days since “BADVILLAIN” was released, it has now earned over 40 million views. It has nearly caught up to the views of “Bubble Gum”, which was released over a month ago and has 44 million views at this time.

When compared to some of their other statistics, these numbers do seem quite unusual. For example, their debut album has barely surpassed 2,000 sales. Additionally, the “BADVILLAIN” music video only has 167k likes despite the 40 million views; in comparison, “Bubble Gum” has 1.4 million likes.

[HT] BADVILLAIN (@BADVILLAIN_BPM) 1st Single Album <OVERSTEP>

DAY 1: 1,115
DAY 2: 0,081
DAY 3: 0,113
DAY 4: 0,001
DAY 5: 0,223
DAY 6: 0,010
DAY 7: 0,841

TOTAL: 2,384 #BADVILLAIN #배드빌런 pic.twitter.com/9cE7bUWFB0

— KOREAN SALES (@koreansales_twt) June 9, 2024

Netizens think that the use of ads has been really boosting the music video views number, and that the group is being set up for disappointment with these inflated numbers so soon after their debut. Many K-Pop fans don’t even seem to have heard of BADVILLAIN before a forum post was made regarding these numbers, which also seems to contradict their high view count.

Here’s what people are saying about the situation.