One Roof, Eleven Families,
What That Crack Revealed
In the spring of 2024, the dispute that erupted inside the biggest K‑POP corporation was not just a single executive’s problem—it was a bill the entire industry had been ignoring. The Adore scandal marks a critical turning point in the K‑POP growth model.
On April 22, 2024—the day HYBE announced it had launched an audit of its subsidiary ADOR—the market reacted immediately. The parent company’s stock price, which stood in the 310,000-won range on April 23, plummeted to the 200,000-won range by April 26 as the conflict surfaced, wiping out over 1 trillion won in market capitalization within just a few days. It was a brutally stark reminder that a company’s most valuable asset is people’s trust and its narrative.
On April 25, Min Hee-jin, then CEO of ADOR, held a press conference lasting over two hours. While her primary aim was to refute allegations of a management rights seizure, what ultimately resonated longer within the industry were the phrases she casually dropped during the event: album dumping, photocards, and “ESG in name only.” Regardless of the dispute’s factual validity, these terms constituted a list of long-known—but rarely acknowledged—commercial secrets of K-pop.
HYBE’s multi-label system was once hailed as the smartest solution. After its 2020 IPO, the company aggressively pursued mergers and acquisitions to build a structure housing eleven labels under its umbrella—a setup often likened to a “decentralized administrative system” designed to disperse the chronic K-pop risk of revenue being tied to a single group or producer. It was an attempt by a company previously dependent on a single asset—BTS—to deliberately engineer its way out of that dependency.
The problem was that the line between autonomy and control was drawn not in a contract but in human relationships. The moment Audor became a core label responsible for roughly 14% of the parent company’s operating profit estimate, that label’s “independence” ceased to be an abstract value for the parent and became a financial variable that had to be controlled. After promising autonomy and achieving success, the very magnitude of that success made the parent want to take away the autonomy—this structural contradiction was the true spark of the dispute.
Min Hee-jin’s complaint—labeled “treatment as a stepchild,” meaning that the chairman personally oversees and prioritizes a specific label—is an accurate diagnosis of the Achilles’ heel of multi-label operations, regardless of factual accuracy. The promise to raise multiple “children” (i.e., labels) fairly, and the existence of a single authority deciding which one to push forward, are difficult to reconcile under one roof.
The reason this incident has become a social talking point—not merely a corporate control dispute—is that it has exposed, before the public eye, the shadow side of the K-POP business model itself. As “first-week sales” (chodong) became a certificate of popularity, fans entered a market deliberately engineered not for music appreciation but for collection and chart ranking—prompting them to buy multiple copies of the same album. Random photo cards and fan-sign event raffle tickets are precisely calibrated components of that design.
That cost also came back as an environmental bill. Estimates suggest that the total amount of plastic used by major agencies in album production surged from approximately 56 tons in 2017 to roughly 800 tons in 2022—a more than fourteen-fold increase in just six years. And in 2024, K-POP album sales fell by over 19% year-on-year to about 93 million units, marking the first decline in a decade. A curve inflated by aggressive push strategies inevitably peaks—and the Adele incident erupted precisely in that peak year.
Of course, counterarguments are possible. Multilabel is not seen as a failure but rather as a still-functioning model that successfully diversified revenue—enough to sustain the company even amid the most severe external shocks. Indeed, in that same year, its parent company recorded its highest quarterly revenue ever, and its stock price recovered a significant portion of its losses within several months after the crisis. There is clear evidence supporting the view that the system did not collapse—it merely experienced growing pains.
However, a rebound in sales does not automatically restore the questions that were exposed. How far should creators’ autonomy be guaranteed, and to what extent should fans’ affection be converted into consumption—these two questions existed even before the second quarter of 2024, but it was only in the spring of that year that they were translated into language outside the industry and brought into the public discourse.
Reducing the Adore scandal to a single individual’s ambition or a single company’s misstep is the easiest interpretation. Yet the moment we read it that way, we miss the coordinates this dispute has revealed: it is the fissure that erupts when an industry—having grown on autonomy—seeks to reclaim that autonomy at the peak of its scale, and it is the price paid by a business that treats trust and narrative as assets yet handles them recklessly.
The next decade of K-POP will be determined not by the ability to churn out more albums, but by how well diverse voices can coexist under one roof. The fissures revealed in spring 2024 won’t be resolved by patching them up—they’ll only spark the next design when confronted head-on.