The Quarter When Systems Began Speaking K-pop, Confessing Its Inner Workings in Its Own Voice

This autumn, K-pop’s biggest scandal erupted not on stage—but behind the scenes. On October 24, during the National Assembly’s Culture, Sports, and Tourism Committee’s annual audit, internal documents from a major entertainment agency—titled the “Weekly Music Industry Report”—were made public. Though presented as an industry trends report, the document contained appraisals of rival idols’ appearances, sexually suggestive language directed at underage members, and vitriolic slurs against competing agencies’ CEOs. It was revealed that such evaluations had been circulated to the company’s top executives.

A month later, on November 28, a popular group held an emergency press conference and announced that they would terminate their exclusive contract with their agency the next day. “The company has neither the will nor the ability to protect us.” Although the two incidents occurred separately, they pointed to the same issue. The sophisticated K‑pop industry had finally reached a turning point where it confessed its own internal problems.

The simplest interpretation is “the wayward behavior of a few executives.” The author of the document was promptly stripped of their position, and the company’s CEO posted an official apology within five days. But if this incident were merely a matter of personal character, there would have been no reason to label the document a “report” in the first place. The fact that language that itemizes appearance and “sex appeal” to evaluate competitors was seamlessly embedded within a business reporting format—that is the real revelation.

K‑pop has spent the past decade or so building its identity around a “system.” From trainee selection and concept design to simultaneous global releases and data‑driven monitoring, every process has become standardized. The problem arises when that standardization turns its gaze toward people. Reducing fellow artists to “targeted products” and grading their looks exposes, without a second thought, how the industry treats humans as mere units. It wasn’t a single person’s taste—it was the grammar of an entire industry written right there.

The contract‑termination press conference at the end of November struck the same truth from the opposite direction. The moment artists themselves took the microphone and said they “weren’t protected,” a long‑standing premise of K‑pop was shaken. Until now, idols had been entities designed and launched by their agencies— not the decision‑makers, but carefully crafted products.

Coincidentally, around the same time, a National Assembly-level discussion raised the view that idol group members do not qualify as “workers” under labor laws—and thus are difficult to include within the scope of labor protections. The position in which they are treated as commodities yet denied recognition as workers—this is the stark reality facing K-pop industry professionals. As one member put it, the structural problem lies in “the company viewing artists not as real human beings but as commodities.” The two scenes from the fourth quarter were the two sides of that very statement.

Of course, counterarguments can be made. It was precisely that system that propelled K‑pop onto the global stage, and without standardization an industry of this magnitude would have been impossible—we can’t deny that fact. However, the 2024 figures crack the myth of the system’s infallibility. Cumulative sales of the top 400 albums fell 19.5% from the previous year, and the number of releases selling over a million copies dropped from 33 to 20, marking the first decline in physical album growth in about a decade. The “album push” driven by efficiency, along with the ensuing controversy over plastic waste, made 2024 the year the virtues and costs of the system arrived together on the balance sheet.

The fourth quarter of 2024 was not the beginning of a new crisis, but rather the quarter in which long-simmering structural problems surfaced. Internal documents that ranked members by appearance and contract termination announcements declaring “I was not protected” spoke the same truth from opposite ends of the spectrum. K-pop has become exceptionally adept at treating people as products—but it still hasn’t learned how to handle the fact that those products are, in fact, human beings.

Industrialization is a K-pop achievement—not an excuse. The competitiveness of the next generation will stem not from faster production processes or more meticulous monitoring, but from a minimum level of self-awareness—the ability to ask, “How are we treating this person within our own system?” If the system has finally begun to speak, it is now time for the industry to listen.