The doubts about Seventeen and MBC have come true.
On May 25, Big Hit confirmed to become Pledis Entertainment’s largest shareholder. As such, Pledis’ current artists, including Seventeen, NU’EST, Nana, Bumzu, Kyulkyung, Yehana and Sungyeon, have officially become artists under Big Hit Labels. Notably, Big Hit currently has in hand 4 popular boy groups and tends to gain huge achievements of Kpop namely BTS, NU’EST, Seventeen and TXT.
Similar to when merging with Source Music, Big Hit said that Pledis will continue to operate independently. The difference is that Pledis artists will receive additional financial support and resources from Big Hit. However, what happened lately proves that ‘becoming a shareholder’ is just a form of business and in fact, Big Hit has completely taken control of Pledis.
Accordingly, on June 19, Pledis confirmed that Seventeen will not be promoting on MBC’s ‘Music Core’ during this comeback. Seventeen is known to be making a comeback on June 22 with the 7th mini album ‘Heng: garæ’ with the title track ‘Left & Right’. Although the group not appearing at ‘Music Core’ is not positive news but it is something that many people already expect.
Ever since Pledis came under Big Hit Labels, netizens predicted that there is a high possibility that NU’EST and Seventeen would be unable to promote on ‘Music Core’. This is because of the ongoing conflict between Big Hit and MBC. From the end of last year until now, all the artists under Big Hit including BTS, TXT and GFriend were completely ‘absent’ at the music shows and TV shows of MBC. The fact that Seventeen and NU’EST are now in the same situation is not too surprising.
According to Korean media, the conflict between Big Hit and MBC stems from BTS not attending the ‘MBC Gayo Daejejeon 2019‘. At the same time as the event of MBC, seven members were in the US to perform at the Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin ‘Eve’ event. Although the group had a good reason to miss the schedule, MBC was said to still feel dissatisfied because BTS had previously attended both KBS and SBS year-end music festivals. On the other hand, there is a source saying that Big Hit was angry and decided to boycott MBC because BTS had been unfairly treated at ‘MBC Gayo Daejun 2018’.
On December 26, 2019, the site OSEN reported shocking news ‘Because BTS did not attend, MBC Gayo Daejejeon 2019 is banning artists from the group’s agency to get back at them’. MBC then commented that there was no conflict between them and Big Hit, but the fact that TXT and GFriend in turn could not promote on ‘Music Core’ or attend ‘ISAC’ proved the opposite. This ‘cold war’ is indeed happening.
More than 6 months have passed but the conflict between Big Hit and MBC has not ended. This has led to Seventeen, who had been performing at every weekly music shows, now has to say goodbye to ‘Music Core’, while proving that Pledis is completely under Big Hit’s control.
Currently, netizens are still stirring up discussion about this. One side said that doing this is unfair to Seventeen because they had lost an opportunity to promote even though they did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, many netizens criticized MBC for being “childish” and would suffer a lot if the groups BTS, TXT, GFriend, Nu’est, and Seventeen could not attend promotions at this broadcast station.
