Couldn’t Escape, Even After Changing Names
Q1 2025: K-pop Confronts Its “Trust Ledger”
A group changed its name and stepped onto the stage—but the court halted its next step. In the first three months of 2025, K-pop was forced to confront head-on what has held people together all along.
March 23, 2025, at AsiaWorld-Expo in Hong Kong: Five members took the headlining stage on the final day of ComplexCon under the unfamiliar name NJZ and debuted their new song “Pit Stop.” On the surface, it appeared to be a declaration of a fresh start. Yet that stage effectively served as their farewell. Immediately after the performance, Seoul Central District Court granted the injunction request filed by their agency, Ador, prohibiting the members from pursuing independent activities—and they promptly announced the suspension of all activities.
This incident is not merely a scandal involving a single group. In the first quarter of 2025, it served as the clearest cross-section of a structural fissure that shook the very foundations of the entire K-pop industry. While artists retained the freedom to change their names, the courts halted their freedom to leave the company. The problem lies precisely in that gap.
The original model for K-pop contract disputes was the 2009 TVXQ incident. The legacy it left behind was clear: the Fair Trade Commission’s standardized exclusive contract template and a contractual term cap of seven years. Unfair royalty settlements, excessive penalty fees, and endless contract extensions—past disputes almost always centered on “economic exploitation,” and the industry responded with a system designed to “make the numbers transparent.”
Yet the 2025 dispute was fundamentally different. What the members brought to the forefront were not settlement payments or contract durations, but rather the dismissal of their long-standing CEO, conflicts among labels under the parent company, and—crucially—the trust relationship, which they claimed had collapsed during this process. In other words, they were not asking, “How much was withheld?” but rather, “With whom, and how, do we have the right to work?”
This is a domain that the industry’s system—refined over 16 years—cannot measure. While standard contracts can record the flow of money in accounting ledgers, they cannot record the collapse of trust. The real story of Q1 2025 is that K-pop has finally appeared in court over that “unrecordable item.”
Another factor fueling this dispute is the multi-label structure fully implemented since 2021 by Korea’s largest entertainment agency. Under this model, each label independently handles A&R and production, while the parent company jointly provides shared infrastructure—such as platforms, live performances, and merchandise (MD). For a time, this structure was hailed as the textbook example of “risk diversification”: the logic being that if one team takes a break, another can fill the gap with performance revenue, keeping the empire stable.
Yet what Q1 2025 revealed was the exact opposite truth. A label’s independence—while normally a wellspring of creativity—becomes, during conflict, a fault line where the parent company, the label, and the artist collide in a three-way standoff. The fact that a power struggle centered on a single CEO can halt an entire group’s activities demonstrates that “distributed risk” can, in reality, converge at a single point. Distribution does not eliminate risk—it merely shifts the point at which risk erupts.
Of course, counterarguments are possible. The industry’s massive initial investment must be recoverable by someone for the system to function—it is already difficult enough for companies to recoup the capital invested—from trainee recruitment through debut—within seven years; allowing contracts to be terminated for non-economic reasons would mean no company would dare bet on new talent. This practical reality underpins the court’s decision in the preliminary injunction ruling in favor of the company.
Yet even this counterargument sidesteps the core issue. The fact that artists are now saying, “Money is no longer the issue—it’s about people,” signals that seven years—a span long enough to exhaust a single identity amid rapidly shifting trends. Indeed, more and more idols are leaving their agencies to launch solo management companies in order to preserve their desired musical direction and working style. While the system has caught up with the “justice” of money, it has yet to catch up with the definition of creative agency.
The first quarter of 2025 can be summed up in one sentence: K-pop publicly learned for the first time that what it had believed was a “contract” binding it together was, in fact, “trust”—and how powerless a contract becomes when that trust breaks down.
The name NJZ shone brightly on stage just once—only to be halted before a court’s ruling. Yet the question left behind by that brief flash refuses to fade: When a production company invests capital, it claims ownership of the output; when an artist contributes their face and voice, they claim ownership of themselves. When these two forms of ownership collide, whose ledger does the industry consult first? Spring 2025 offered no answer—only the stark realization that this question can no longer be postponed.