Do Other K-Pop Companies Create Similar Reports? Industry Insiders Comment On HYBE’s “Internal Documents”
On October 24, 2024 (KST), at the comprehensive government audit by the South Korean National Assembly’s Culture, Sports, and Tourism Committee, HYBE was questioned about an “internal document” that contained shocking criticism of other entertainment agencies and their idols.
National Assembly member Min Hyung Bae obtained and revealed the said document: a “weekly music industry report” featuring crude and low-quality online community reactions about K-Pop idols from other entertainment agencies, said to have been collected by HYBE employees.
While Min Hyung Bae refused to reveal the full document, claiming its contents to be “too disgusting” for sharing, some portions were made public. The report included explicit and blunt criticisms of other artists, including underaged idols.
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Kim Tae Ho, COO of HYBE and CEO of Belift Lab, who attended the audit on behalf of Bang Si Hyuk stated the opinions in the document are “not HYBE’s opinion or an official evaluation” and that they were “collected and compiled for online monitoring.”
This then raised questions from K-Pop fans. Do all management companies create such reports about the industry? If so, what information about competing companies is included in the reports submitted to higher-ups? Do other companies also scrape disrespectful internet comments as “data?”
Korean press Joy News 24 asked several entertainment business insiders with over 15 years of experience for answers to such questions.
An anonymous industry personnel, Insider A, told Joy News 24 that they “have never seen monitoring material like [HYBE’s]” before.
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Having worked in the entertainment industry for a long time, I’ve never seen monitoring material like that. To monitor effectively, you would typically analyze successful teams, reporting something along the lines of ‘Here are the reasons this group is doing well, so we need to improve in that area,’ or, ‘Let’s review how this group responded to a crisis and learn what we should be more aware of.’ That would be what you could call an industry trend report. The documents revealed during the government audit seem more like a collection of community comments, just something to gossip about for some cheap laughs.
— Insider A
Insider A added that monitoring competing business is “natural.” That said, Insider A had a hard time believing that the internal document was something “sent to a C-level executive.”
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Another personnel, Insider B, also claimed that compiling criticism is a practice unheard of.
In all of my time at various entertainment companies, I have never compiled data that criticize artists from other companies. While it is true that I have checked articles and community reactions when our artists debut, making note of negative expressions or ratios, I have never reported on those individual netizens’ opinions.
HYBE insists that the publicized material shows only the provocative parts pieced together. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the content was still included in the document. In most of the industry, reports like this are ‘cut’ or ‘killed.’ If there are explicit criticisms of other artists in a report, internal guidelines typically advise against recording or sharing them. Besides, I think information collected from online communities is a very ambiguous data set to work with anyway.
— Insider B
A third personnel, Insider C, told Joy News 24 that most entertainment businesses recognize one another as competition, but also partners. For HYBE to have created such a document “that belittle and disparage fellow K-Pop artists,” said Insider C, is “very dangerous.
There are instances when we share verbal evaluations of different artists and their companies after watching their newly released content. But this is the first time I’ve encountered a case where such evaluations—negative ones at that—have been turned into official reports for business material. This is very dangerous. We may all be competitors in the same industry, but we are also partners in driving this industry forward. We should not be creating documents that belittle and disparage fellow K-Pop artists and companies.
— Insider C
HYBE tried issuing an official statement regarding the document, though it was deleted after Kim Tae Ho was berated at the audit. HYBE has since issued a second statement, though not about the document itself.
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