How NewJeans (almost) changed K-pop The girl group had a vision for how to rewire its troubled industry. The industry had other plans

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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.

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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-su