#Nizi project

[kpop-bbg]

[awesomeyukaillust]

[8ightisfate]

[NEWS] Bangchan, Changbin y Han (3RACHA) serán jueces especiales en la etapa final de NiziProject 2

[weaver0fwords]

Title: You were even better, babe

Pairing: Uemura Tomoya/So Ken

Rating: G

Summary:

After presenting their first stages in Korea, Ken still can't believe how good Tomoya was. Even less so that he felt the same way.

[ily1-net]

ririka with niziu's miihi & ayaka ♡

[seokmattchuus]

Wait so are the a2k and nizi pt2 groups gonna debut around the same time?

[wolfchans]

BANG CHAN ♡ NIZI PROJECT SEASON 2

[hanfocus]

HAN / 3RACHA Special Comment Nizi Project Season 2

[kpop-bbg]

[kpoptimeout]

K-Pop Debuts and Comebacks for the 4th Week of December (Dec 18 - Dec 24 2023)

Dec 18

Bakjiji - I Always

Indie soloist Bakjiji releases a wistful piece.

NEXZ - Miracle

JYP's first Japanese boy band made up of the winners of NIZI Project Season 2 drop the Korean version of their Japanese pre-debut track!

Dec 19

No releases.

Dec 20

Silica Gel - APEX

Underrated indie rock band Silica Gel is back with another experimental piece!

Dec 21

NINE.i - Back to Christmas

Underrated boy band NINE.i celebrates the holidays with fans in this festive song!

Red House - WOMAN

Indie artist Red House drops a haunting track at the end of the eyar.

Dec 22

D-HACK - What shall I do?

Rapper D-HACK shows he got vocals too in this powerful performance!

Jimin - Closer Than This

BTS' Jimin serenades fans in this sweet track.

NCT 127 - Be There For Me

The NCT Seoul unit is ready for Christmas in this cozy track!

YOUNHA - Waiting (20th Anniversary Edition)

Legendary ballad singer YOUNHA celebrates her 20th year in the industry with a new rendition of one of her most popular songs!

Dec 23

No releases.

Dec 24

KyoungSeo - Christmas Tree

Soloist KyoungSeo joins in the festivities in this jolly song!

What is your favourite song of the week?

[2k08revivalkpop]

He's just so genuine? Like he needs to debut or else I'll just adopt him

[zoey-angel]

Why are people so mean in the a2k tag? Calling never-properly-trained-before teen girls bad and saying they won't make it in the market??? Hello wtf are you on about

First of all idk what kind of training you think western superstars like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande had before debuting, but I assure you they didn't have to spend hours every day practicing dancing in formation to become successful.

If you're "worried they'll flop with the Korean crowd" they're not meant to be big in Korea. They're supposed to bring kpop concepts to the western market that's why the show is in english (not korean) + they're not just under jyp they're also signed to REPUBLIC RECORDS aka the same as all of these guys

Thirdly you know this is just the process of picking who will be trained to debut, right? Rn They're mostly testing who's got the attitude (bc idol life is brutal) and who's capable of improvement. They get more training during and after the boot camp, they're aged 13-17 like most trainees when they enter the trainee process.

Saying stuff like "they're not already perfect (⁠눈⁠‸⁠눈⁠) they suck" is like... dang do you think the trainees on normal survival shows are just born like that or something ?

They're probably not even going to debut yet. They're young. For nizi project, the survival show's filming started in September 2019 and began broadcasting shortly after the lineup was established, then the last episode was released in June 2020, but niziu only officially debuted in December 2020. And Niziu has in it some girls who were jyp trainees beforehand. AND the youngest idol to ever debut in jyp so far was 14- Gina and Kaylee are both younger (the auditions were open to ages 12-17) which leads me to believe the group will train for at least another year, and that was the plan to begin with.

Also and this shall be my final point, who tf are we netizens to say someone's gonna flop? I can't even walk into a 7/11 without getting the anxiety tingles and needing a 12 hour nap, and I'm 23. Can you imagine being one of these girls? These young stars who train every day for hours until their voice strains, in a foreign country with some girls they only just met that same year, filmed for the whole world to see as they perform in front of some super corp head in hopes he'll tell them to comere. Seriously fuck off

[mjohnso]

Quarterly Debut Review: Q4 2023

Quarterly Debut Reviews are a supplementary series to my biannual Periodic Rookie Group Reports, which are published quarterly. Each installment covers three rookie groups that debuted over the past three months. For this third installment, I covered NiziU (October), Peony (November), and Golden Girls (December).

As always, a full list of rookie groups that have debuted thus far in 2023 is available here: 2023 Rookie Groups Debuts

October / NiziU Debut: October 30, 2023 Debut Song: “HEARTRIS”

NiziU made history when their Korean debut song, “HEARTRIS” won the Champion Song title on the November 8, 2023, episode of MBC M’s Show Champion. With their win, the group not only became the first foreign group to do so but also tied their labelmate ITZY’s record, becoming the fourth fastest girl group to win first place on a music show following their debut.

They may or may not have also been the first j-pop group to accomplish this feat. Whether or not they qualify will vary from person to person, depending on their classification of NiziU as there is no consensus. This is not due to any lack of spirited debate on the issue, as both the j-pop and k-pop camps have made their cases. The former points to their focus on the Japanese market, their debut in Korea notwithstanding, their songs sung only in Japanese, and the fact that they have, again until recently, never widely promoted within the k-pop system. As for the latter, they highlight the group’s connections to JYP Entertainment, including their hand in the group’s origin through the survival show Nizi Project, and that the group’s lineup features several former trainees from the label. Then there is the fact that the group, like many produced through survival shows with ties to Korean agencies, sometimes pulls both visually and sonically from k-pop.

Treating this issue as a matter of either/or maybe the wrong answer to the question of what NiziU "is". Instead, a better approach may be to treat the group as fitting into both. That is like the k-pop girl groups that over a decade ago promoted in both Korea and Japan they fall into what San Jung and Yukie Hiarata in their 2011 paper “Conflicting Desires: K-pop Girl Group Flows in Japan in the Era of Web 2.0” described as “an ambivalent third space between the domestic and the foreign.” Writing about SNSD and KARA who like NiziU muddled categories whose borders once seemed so firm, they wrote: 

Another aspect of the new way of embracing K-pop in Japan is demonstrated through how K-pop is now placed in an ambivalent third space between the domestic and the foreign within the Japanese pop music scene. At the 2011 Japan Gold Disc Awards, SNSD was awarded the New Artist of the Year Award in the Japanese music division (hougaku bumon), while KARA was awarded the New Artist of the Year in the foreign music division (yougaku bumon).1 It was a significant result considering the fact that both of the groups are from Korea: in Japan, yougaku usually refers to ‘Western’ music. BoA and TVXQ, who are overwhelmingly popular in Japan, are perceived as K-pop idols as they are from Korea, yet at the same time are treated as J-pop idols within the paradigm of Western vs. Japanese. The article “Is K-pop Japanese music (hougaku)? Or foreign music (yougaku)?” in Asahi Shinbun suggests that K-pop girl groups such as KARA and SNSD cannot be categorised as either Western or Japanese pop because they are extremely successful even when they sing in Korean (Miyamoto 2011).

NiziU's place in this third space is evident in the mouthful of words that are used to introduce the group. Never referred to as a k-pop or j-pop group, they are often called JYP Entertainment's Japanese girl group. The 'JYP' part emphasizes their link and history to the Korean market hailing from one of the Big 4 agencies, while describing them as Japanese highlights their difference from other JYP groups and their connection to the j-pop industry. Neither side cancels out the other but exists together, each side a part of the group's identity.

November / Peony Debut: November 23, 2023 Debut Song: “Checkmate”

I did not expect to be writing about the Future Idol Asia project again this year but then they debuted their ninth girl group of the year, Peony. In retrospect though, I should have known better. Three years into the project and with a total of 40 groups under their belt, Rainbow E&M is an old hand at this thanks to their system (See: 2023 Q1 and 2023 Q2). Under it they scaled their project from three groups in 2021 to 19 new groups in 2022, which accounted for 25% of all groups that debuted that year. Now, this year has seen the debut of 12 new groups, accounting for 13% of the new groups that debuted. No other agency debuting new groups today has yet to match their number for this year or last year.

Rainbow E&M appears to have every intention of matching this same pace, or at least trying to in 2024. In June and July, they began posting on their official Instagram audition advertisements to recruit new participants, between the ages of 12 and 18 for their group that would debut in January 2024. By August, they were recruiting for their groups that are to debut in February and March, while their September and October posts mention a May group. Their posts from November and December are for those interested in joining their June group. If they manage to pull off this schedule, they will have debuted a group in at least five of the six months in the first half of the year.

According to the timetable deduced from these posts, Rainbow E&M will start looking for groups to fill out their roster for the second half of the year between January and February 2024, even as they are debuting their first group. Trainees, after all, are the lifeblood of this project. Their system only runs if there are trainees to feed through it to create groups to market to agencies at their showcases, which need new groups. The more trainees they can fit into their showcase, the better the chances that one will be asked to audition for other agencies. Then, to connect it to a point I made in my 2023 Q3 post regarding their showcase, they can use their trainees' association with these agencies to market their program and its success to recruit even more participants to their project, allowing them to produce even more groups, and continue the cycle.

December / Golden Girls Debut: December 1, 2023 Debut Song: “One Last Time”

Most entertainment agencies know not to debut new groups in December. Between the end of the year, award shows and festivals, holiday performances, and winter releases, audience's attention is anywhere but new groups. It is better to wait until the first quarter of the new year when a group’s debut has a better chance of finding fans.

Of course, not all agencies heed this advice. Most years, a few groups risk their future on an end-of-the-year debut, albeit with varying results. For some, their December release will mark both the beginning and end of a career, while for others, it will have no discernible effect. For example, the band Xdinary Heroes suffered little for the timing of their year-end debut in 2021, likely due to their association with JYP Entertainment. Similarly, JYP Entertainment’s super girl group Golden Girls, created from the KBS show with the same name and composed of bona fide legends Insooni, Park Mi-kyung, Shin Hyo-beom, and Lee Eun-mi, has proven immune to any of the downsides of a December 1st debut. The group won the Rookie Award in the ‘Show and Variety’ category at the 2023 KBS Entertainment Awards and recently announced their intention to tour in 2024.

Yet despite the show's association with a top entertainment agency, airing on one of Korea's three major networks, and the individual members' storied careers, it was not treated as a guarantee that Golden Girls would not meet the fate of so many other December debuts. Or at least that was the narrative surrounding the show early on. A promotional trailer released in October showed JYP meeting with each of the future members who initially dismissed the idea, with Hyo Bum calling it crazy and Insooni dubbing his then-dream group a “grandma group." Although all four singers eventually agreed to participate, that was not the end of the trouble surrounding production. As JYP explained on a November episode of MBC FM4U’s Kim Shin Young’s Noon Song of Hope, while KBS had approved the show, they required additional outside investment. And much like with the members, JYP found most companies were skeptical that his idea would work, although—as evidenced by the show's existence past episode two—some came around.

Perhaps they heard an early version of the group's debut song "One Last Time," which opens with the members singing about stagnation and their fear of the unknown. Then it builds to a chorus that provides a blueprint for breaking out of that rut, instructing listeners to, “Pour it all out Shout/Scream together/Go crazy like this is the time/Wake up and fight.” Take a chance on the unknown since as Eunmi sings, "Any challenge you haven't tried is a failure/Any chance you hesitate is a waste." So back that reality show with the eyebrow-raising, but not entirely new, idea to create a group of older women promoting a youth-centric industry. Debut a rookie group in December. Don’t, as Insooni sings, let any regrets remain.