Controversy over NewJeans’ popularity has erupted since the group earned high achievements on the charts.
As one of the most popular 4th gen girl groups at the moment, 5 months into their debut, NewJeans has recorded countless impressive achievements, most notably on digital charts. Not only topping the charts in Korea, NewJeans’ music is also well-received internationally. Their numbers on Spotify is the dream of many artists. However, recently on Korean online communities, doubts have been raised by netizens over the authenticity of NewJeans’ results and whether or not they actually have a big fandom.
Specifically, netizens suggest that NewJeans’ current high digital results are all thanks to CEO Min Hee Jin, NewJeans’ “mother”. Min Hee Jin is accused of spending money for NewJeans’ songs to be added into Spotify’s big playlists. Accordingly, NewJeans’ songs appear in 500 playlists, bringing the group’s total stream count to a huge number.
Netizens wrote: “All NewJeans’ streams come from playlisting. Min Hee Jin bought all these playlists for the group to have over 500 playlists and reach 76 million streams in just 15 days for a song that doesn’t go viral anywhere.”
“Playlist Reach is the total number of followers of all playlists containing that artist’s song. For example: An artist is added to 10 playlists and each playlist has 100,000 followers, the total playlist reach will be 1 million”.
In addition, NewJeans’ Music Bank score recently had fewer votes than ASTRO’s Moonbin & Sanha, which is confusing when their album pre-orders surpassed 700 thousand, more than 6 times higher than Moonbin & Sanha. Although they still won 1st place on Music Bank, this inconsistency makes netizens skeptical about NewJeans’ popularity.
Read more: Fans grew “obsessed” with NewJeans’ iconic bunny image
This skepticism made the NewJeans fan community angry and sparked controversy. According to many netizens, NewJeans is a rookie group and they have not-a-big fandom but the group definitely has a high recognition. The group’s songs are all extremely viral hits on SNS, especially TikTok. However, rookie groups that quickly become successful like NewJeans are somehow always caught up in controversies. Before that, IVE and After LIKE had similar problems.
Netizens’ comments:
- It is undeniable that NewJeans is the public’s pick.
- A lot of people talk about this group manipulating the Melon chart.
- Sure, it was strange. Album sales are good but digital rankings are weird… And this group doesn’t even have international fans.
- When IVE’s After Like was successful, the group was criticized.. This time it’s NewJeans’ turn. All successful groups will be accused of cheating.
- To be honest, NewJeans’ achievement is thanks to Min Heejin. All this team has is concept marketing. Looking at each individual’s skills, they are just like small and medium company idols.
Source: k14.
