After the big legal dispute between NewJeans and HYBE agency Ador put K-pop artist contracts in the spotlight earlier this year, the founder of Ador - Min Hee-jin - has said that she plans to develop an alternative artist management model through her new company Ooak.
Min spoke about her ongoing legal battle with former business partner HYBE and her plans for new K-pop agency Ooak in an interview with Korean broadcaster JTBC. According to the Korea Times, she said, “I want to propose a new management model, I want shorter contract terms”, adding, “there are still too many loopholes in the standard contract”.
NewJeans had a very public falling out with Ador after Min was pushed out of the top job at the HYBE-owned agency. They announced that they were quitting Ador late last year, prompting the agency to go legal in a bid to enforce its contract with the girl group.
A Korean court ultimately sided with the agency and last month the five members of NewJeans confirmed they would start working together again on new Ador-managed projects.
The way K-pop management agencies work with artists is quite different to the artist/manager relationship elsewhere in the world, with the agency generally having much more power and control.
While the K-pop model has clearly proven successful in recent years, some aspects of the artist deals behind that model have been criticised, and the very public dispute between NewJeans and Ador put that criticism back in the spotlight.
So much so, earlier this year various trade organisations representing K-pop agencies, including the Korea Music Content Association and Korea Management Federation, put out a statement insisting that K-pop companies should be able to enforce contracts with their artists to justify the investments they make when launching new acts.
They also cautioned against Korean politicians seeking to regulate K-pop deals, though they did express support for new rules that would stop individuals or companies from seeking to “tamper” with existing agency/artist partnerships.
In her new interview, Min said that she now wonders if her “absurd fight” with HYBE - which led to the NewJeans v Ador dispute - is “actually part of a paradigm shift”. And with her new business, she added, “I want to take on that kind of new challenge”.
That new business was announced in October, while it emerged last week that Min was now staging closed-doors auditions for her next project, which she has since confirmed will be a boy band.
According to Korea JoongAng Daily, she told JTBC that there are “a lot of people who say they want to invest in me”, and that since she formally announced the launch of Ooak, “I’ve been getting calls from inside and outside of Korea”.