Who Owns K?
—A Nonexistent Group Takes First Place for a Quarter
In the third quarter of 2025, the group that achieved the biggest global hit in K-pop history had not a single real member. In that same quarter, the most “real” members were awaiting a court ruling that they could not leave.
The K-pop scene from July to September 2025 can be summed up in one sentence: There was no single most successful group, yet the most controversial group could not disappear.
Netflix’s animated series *K-Pop Demon Hunters* featured the fictional girl group HUNTR/X, whose song “Golden” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the entire month of September—securing four consecutive weeks at No. 1 and surpassing BTS’s “Dynamite,” which held the top spot for three weeks. Its soundtrack simultaneously placed four songs in the Hot 100’s Top 10, setting an unprecedented record in the chart’s 67-year history. Meanwhile, the series became the first Netflix title ever to surpass 300 million cumulative views—outranking *Squid Game*.
Yet Huntrexx is not a person. While the songs of Lumi, Mira, and Joy were performed by real singers—EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Ray Ami—the “artists” who took the stage were fictional. In K-pop’s most monumental global triumph, there was, in fact, no real face for us to cheer.
A starkly contrasting drama unfolded at the Seoul Central District Court during the same quarter. On September 11, former ADOR CEO Min Hee-jin appeared in court for the first time since the dispute erupted and underwent questioning lasting approximately five hours, dismissing the opposing side’s narrative as “fiction.” Just days later, the final attempt at reconciliation between NewJeans and ADOR collapsed in only 18 minutes, and the ruling on the validity of the exclusive contract was deferred to October 30.
The outcome is well known: the court ruled that NEWJEANS must fulfill its exclusive contract with ADOR until 2029. The members’ central arguments—management vacuum caused by Min Hee-jin’s dismissal and the company’s breach of its duty to protect them—were deemed insufficient grounds for contract termination. If HYBE was “No. 1 even if it didn’t exist,” NEWJEANS was “inescapable even while existing.”
The two incidents may seem unrelated, but they are actually two sides of the same question: In K‑pop, is value created by people or by the system?
The success of Huntrix is not a coincidence—it’s a destination. Over the past decade, Korea’s major agencies have quietly transformed from music companies into IP companies. Group names, universes, characters, and fan‑platforms are all assets owned by the company, and the members are designed almost like “replaceable parts” that drive those assets. “K‑Pop Demon Hunters” simply pushed that logic to the extreme. When you strip away even the variable of the person, the IP can stand on stage forever—without injury, military service, or contract disputes.
This is also why the NewJeans ruling brought relief to the industry. Immediately after the ruling, HYBE’s market capitalization surged by over $600 million in a single day. The market sent a clear message: the possibility of an artist’s departure equates to asset impairment, and companies that successfully safeguard those assets will be rewarded with a premium. More value is placed on the strength of the contract binding an artist than on that artist’s freedom to perform wherever they choose.
Of course, counterarguments are possible. It is the agency that bears the enormous upfront investment and the risks of an artist’s unknown early years; without contractual stability, no one would ever be able to debut an artist in the first place—this is not merely a justification for capital, but the very engine that has actually kept this industry running.
Yet discomfort remains. The group whose member tearfully testified about workplace bullying during the 2024 National Assembly Audit and Inspection ultimately received a ruling that “the reasons cited were insufficient to justify leaving the company.” It is precisely the gap between the member’s plea of having received no protection and the court’s verdict stating that no duty to protect was violated that reveals how this industry treats people.
Huntrix has no such conflict from the outset—fiction has no burnout, no human rights concerns, and no desire to leave. Perhaps the ideal artist that the industry truly desires is precisely that.
The third quarter of 2025 was not only the peak quarter for K-pop but also the quarter that most clearly revealed what that peak was built upon. What conquered the world was the musical sophistication and systemic strength of “K-pop”—not the irreplaceability of any particular human artist.
When a genre becomes stronger than the people who create it, that genre can travel farther—leaving only the question of: for whom is it traveling?
Somewhere between the future that Huntrix has shown and the present that NewJeans is experiencing lies the K‑pop of the next decade. Who will ultimately own the “K” we cheer for has not yet been decided.