Can Factories Tolerate Artists?
The Question K-POP Faced in Q3 2024
Min Hee-jin’s dismissal and the members’ late-night livestreams. In the summer of 2024, K-pop began, for the first time, to question the very blueprint of its own success.
The event that defined Q3 2024 was neither a new song nor a world tour—it was a management rights dispute. The conflict, which surfaced in April during HYBE’s audit of ADOR, rattled the entire industry as summer progressed. On August 27, HYBE removed CEO Min Hee-jin from her position at an extraordinary general meeting and appointed human resources expert Kim Ju-young as the new CEO. Then, on September 11, the NewJeans members spoke out directly during a private YouTube Live stream. That night—when they demanded the company “reinstate CEO Min”—marked a rare moment in K-pop history: artists publicly rejecting the very system that created them.
The reason this incident was so contentious was that it was not merely a personnel dispute. It was, in fact, an interrogation of the production system itself—one that K-POP has perfected over the past 30 years.
The roughly eleven multi‑label structure operated by HYBE was certainly the pinnacle of Korean efficiency. While Universal, Sony, and Warner painstakingly evolved their models over decades, a Korean company compressed and transplanted that model within a single generation. The problem is that compression does not equate to maturity.
The experts' main point was not the multi‑label structure itself, but that each label was designed to compete rather than collaborate under one roof. The exclusive independence of the content created partitions, and the parent company's vertical integration promised autonomy while simultaneously reclaiming it. When Min Hee‑jin said that “the company wasn’t adequately prepared for multi‑label,” she was diagnosing an industry-wide incompleteness, not just making a personal defense.
ADOR was an intentional exception: a boutique label that bound together the fates of a single artist and a single producer. It was an experiment in auteurism—a direct challenge to the industrialized grammar of K-POP. Thus, this clash was, at its core, interpreted as a confrontation between the auteur and the factory.
K-pop was a triumph of the system. The industry prided itself on having ended an era reliant on individual genius and instead built a standardized, self-sustaining production line—one that keeps running no matter who steps away. Yet one of the brightest outcomes produced by precisely that line testified that it had emerged not from the line itself, but from human hands. It is valid, as one critic countered, that “we must not underestimate the benefits enjoyed under HYBE’s roof.” ADORE’s freedom was ultimately made possible only atop its parent company’s capital. Yet even that rebuttal could not sidestep the far thornier question: Who will settle—and how—capital’s and creativity’s debts and claims?
The most significant shift was a change in the language of discourse. At some point, this dispute began to be reframed—not as a management issue, but as a labor issue. The phrase “workers outside the scope of the Labor Standards Act” entered public discourse, and the working conditions and treatment described by members brought into sharp focus the labor conditions behind the glamorous stage.
For a long time, K-POP has referred to artists as works, assets, and intellectual property. The fact that they are also workers laboring in their workplaces has rarely been voiced. The third quarter of 2024 was the quarter when that silence broke. A demand has arrived: for the industry to advance to its next stage, it must endure not only *what* is produced—but equally *how* it is produced.
Regardless of which side wins the legal battle, the true legacy of the summer of 2024 is something else: K‑POP can no longer rely unconditionally on its own formula for success. The model that conquered the world through efficiency and scale is now being questioned by the very people who executed it best.
Can the factory tolerate the artist? Can the system accommodate the individual striving to transcend it? Industrialized K-POP has just passed a critical juncture—its first moment demanding a re-examination of its own blueprint. And an industry beginning to question itself may signal not crisis, but rather the first condition of maturity.