Everyone knows that all idols are perfect angels who can do no wrong and should be loved at all times. Everyone also knows that every k-pop agency is mean and nasty and only exists to oppress idols and stop them from spreading their beautiful wings like a butterfly of k-pop love. So naturally, inquiring minds wish to know: how does one support their favourite k-pop idol without supporting the mean nasty agency? This post has the answers!

This post is going to break down various ways you can interact with idols into a helpful list, which shows you how much the idol and the agency benefit from each action. Read and enjoy while crying as you waste your life !

PART 1 – SHIT THAT DOESN’T BENEFIT YOUR IDOL AS MUCH AS THEIR COMPANY

BUYING PHYSICAL ALBUMS

As previously discussed on Kpopalypse blog, most of the money from buying a physical album does not go to the artist on that album. The only time when the artist sees decent money is if the album is a mega-hit (four-leaf-clover rare) AND the idols themselves wrote songs on the album (meteor-hitting-your-house rare) AND their contract allows them to actually collect a decent return on those songs that they wrote (planets-aligning-in-the-shape-of-Jimin-from-BTS’-penis rare). Companies typically see a much larger share of the profit from physical sales than the artists they employ, and they won’t let the artists see any money at all until they have recouped all the expenses involved in making the album. This includes not just the music itself but manufacture of physical materials plus photoshoots for the album jacket, studio time, and also all the expenses that come with distribution, plus all the wages for the staff required to do all of this. All of these people are standing in line before your precious idol, waiting for their paycheck, so don’t expect your bias to see a red cent until everyone else has been paid.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

BUYING DIGITAL RELEASES

Artists get the same type of ass-reaming from digital releases as they do from physical sales, as most of these arrangements are under the same contractual agreements. The one benefit here is that overheads for the company are lower which means that there’s less money for the company to have to pay out in expenses before idols could theoretically get some money, but this benefit is completely offset by the lower costs of digital releases as far as artists are concerned. Companies however do like not having to do as much stuff because it means less staff to pay, and that’s why super-ultra-nugu agencies will often go for digital-only releases now. It’s much better for the company if they don’t have to worry about shipping a bunch of large inconvenient boxes of crap.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

STREAMING ONLINE

If you want to explore the true meaning of being absolutely assraped by the music industry, just read up a bit about streaming services and how much they pay artists. This new model has been hyped as as a way forward for the business to survive, and this may be at least partially true, but it also fucks musicians of all types in the ass harder than a German Goo Girls video. Companies love streaming, which has lately been hailed as the “saviour of the music industry“. Profit share is actually pretty good for agencies that control their own product. So why don’t they give any of that cash to your bias? Because they’re cunts, that’s why. I’m sure it has nothing to do with them having a business to run which has been teetering on the edge of the abyss for over a decade. The only way your idol can get any real money this way is if they run their own recording label, and even then they have to be big enough to negotiate favourable terms with the streaming service.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

VOTING IN POLLS AND AWARDS

If your idol wins an award, guess what happens next? Absolutely fuck all, that’s what. Imagine if you all got together and voted for Kpopalypse as “most dicksucking k-pop website” and gave me a trophy for that when I won (as I surely would). Sure, I’d be honoured, but it wouldn’t actually affect anything in real terms. However awards, while meaningless, are a nice filler item to talk about when agency staff are writing press releases, so for agencies these stupid awards actually do have a function. That’s the whole reason why k-pop angecies let all this bullshit go on, it’s for their benefit when trying to push the product (i.e your idols). If a company can say someone was “most awarded” then that helps them sell the thing.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

ATTENDING CONCERTS

Idols can make money from concerts, if the company lets them, but to get anything out of it, it really does need to be a sell-out or close to it. The average k-pop show has got a fair bit of staging involved and that shit costs money. Big productions can start losing money hand-over-fist if the bums on seats don’t add up, and guess who is first in line to get their pay cut back to zero as soon as a production stops turning a profit? I’m sure you’re all starting to see a pattern forming by now. In the music business, “glamour” is often seen as compensation for lost income – the attitude of label staff is “well, the idols are getting all the shine out of this, so that means at least they get something, meanwhile we have to work real jobs so we expect to be paid!”

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

BUYING MERCHANDISE

Buying merch will generally help an artist quite a bit, it’s one of the few ways in which bands actually make money from touring. That’s why every heavy metal band ever has a wide selection of T-shirts to choose from. Of course, that changes when one of these two things apply:

The artist has signed a “360 deal” which means that merchandise sales are included in the contract debt repayment plan

The merch is bootlegged and therefore has no connection to the artist themselves

Guess what k-pop has a lot of? Artists under disastrously-skewed lock-in contracts where they see 0% of all ancillary sales until a massive and ever-increasing debt is hypothetically paid back, plus lots and lots of bootleggers making cheap merchandise. You’ve probably got almost no way of knowing whether that f(x) coffee mug or Monsta X tea towel is the real 100% fully endorsed deal or not, if you didn’t buy it at an actual concert.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

MASS-VIEWING ON YOUTUBE

K-pop fans are full of helpful instructions regarding YouTube along the lines of “watch once every five minutes, make sure to refresh the browser each time, watch the whole thing or it doesn’t count, don’t minimise the window, also make sure you stand on your head while drinking a cup of tea”. How much do these instructions matter? The truth is that YouTube’s secret viewing algorithms are known only to them, but they’re actually pretty good at detecting view-manipulation so they are able to fuck your non-organic view campaign up quite easily. Of course, if you are going to view some idol content on YouTube in an attempt to throw a few pennies towards your bias, you can forget about the official music video – the company owns that, not your idol. Where you should be putting your views in is the idols’ personal YouTube channels, if they’re one of the three idols in all of k-pop who is actually allowed to have one.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

WATCHING IDOLS IN DRAMAS AND MOVIES

Agencies love to put idols forward for TV shows because it’s a great way to diversify their portfolio, and once again it spices up those dreary press releases, however there’s not a lot in it for your faves unfortunately. We’ve all heard those stories about IU getting paid $100,000 to do the voiceover for an animated penis in a Korean anime remake of Leisure Suit Larry, but unless your idol is at IU levels of fame, they’re probably getting paid about the same as every other actor in the damn TV show, which is generally not a lot. The stories of actors getting shafted by Korean TV stations are many and legendary, with most thespians finding out that they would have made more money actually working in retail than pretending to work in retail on a TV show over the same time period.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

CROWDFUNDING

Have you ever noticed that the reward tiers for different levels of participation on sites like Makestar seem like they would cost the company almost as much to give the fans per-person as the money that you’re actually putting into each tier? That’s because the companies don’t give the idols any cut of the profits from Makestar, so they can afford to make those rewards nice and lavish. Crowdfunding sites like Makestar won’t even deal with you in the first place unless you’re a corporate entity, you can bet that your faves aren’t even at the negotiating table. That’s why Stellar, the most successful girl group on Makestar so far, didn’t give any fucks about throwing Makestar under a bus when they started feeling mistreated by their agency. They weren’t getting a penny.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

SAESANGING

Will your idol’s life be enhanced by the used menstrual pad that you slid under his dormitory door? Will following your idol crush in a taxi make them feel more loved and needed? Will poisoning oppar’s coffee with a mix of cyanide and your urine lull him into a deep coma of love for you, his number one fan? Unlikely. However what it might do is really annoy the company who will then have to spend money upping your faves’ security level – money which then gets charged to the idol’s ever-increasing debt. Or, maybe they won’t bother, just because.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

ANTIFAN ACTIVITY

In one of his eternally-wise moments, the righteous CEO of MBK Entertanment Mr. Kim Kwang Soo said “I consider all anti-fans of T-ara to be fans of T-ara”. Of course he’s right, as always – hating a group actively requires at least as much energy and commitment as liking a group actively. Antifans benefit companies greatly, as antifans trend search terms for the idol higher, and give the company and their artists an increased aura of cultural relevance, who then can exploit the situation for even more money by adding “controversial” to every single paid-for news article ever and attaching ads to it. Antifan content however does also make the poor idols miserable, but not as much as yourself as you gradually waste your life.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

ONLINE PETITIONS

As my own online petitions have proved, online petitions are very effective at changing idol behaviour. However they are less effective at changing company behaviour. As far as I know, KeyEast Entertainment still hasn’t sprung the required funds for new coffee tables in Kim Hyung Joong’s loungeroom so poor women who visit him will stop having accidents. It’s all the stingy k-pop agency’s fault, and we are all poorer for this.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

SENDING GIFTS

There’s three types of k-pop idol:

The type of k-pop idol who is not very successful. When this person gets fan gifts, they have to throw them out because they only have 30 centimetres squared of floor space in their crowded dorms that the agency lets them call “their own” and they don’t want to fill it with all your fucking shit. The type of k-pop idol who is successful. People who are successful get given heaps of crap all the time from everywhere but they don’t want it because their mansions still aren’t big enough for all of it. That’s why they throw out fan gifts all the time or just give them to the guy who cleans the dorms each week. T-ara’s Soyeon.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

WRITING LETTERS

Stop wasting your precious idol’s life, they get like 20 minutes of leisure time per day, they don’t want to waste it reading your essay about how you were a lost little lamb until you discovered their abdominal crunches. Also every single letter that an idol reads gets opened and read by their company first (just like the letters you send me).

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

INTERACTING ON SNS

At least with SNS you are forced to keep it short (and don’t be one of those cunts who posts an image with text in it instead of text to get around the character limit). However most idol accounts are closely monitored by their agency and you can’t hope for more than the most tame white-listed interactions at best. Even if your idol and their company start going to war against each other, the company probably still wants to claim ownership over the social media presence to some degree, and there’s still things that your idol can’t say. If you want to hear an idol tell the whole truth and nothing but, skip all that noise and go straight to Kpopalypse Intervew.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

PART 2 – SHIT THAT DOESN’T BENEFIT YOUR COMPANY AS MUCH AS THEIR IDOL

FOOD SUPPORT PROGRAMS

Companies fucking hate “food support”, they spend all that time and money trying to get your idols on the “boiled chicken breast and two bananas” diet just for you to fuck it up with your slovenly greasy yummy high-carb high-sugar western food support programs. They hate it even more because if they complain about it, they look like the biggest cunts ever. Send your idol a pizza and the company manager will look like a true fucking cuntosaurus if he doesn’t let the poor, starved idols enjoy it for the cameras. Sure, the cunty managers will try and snatch it away as soon as the promo shots are over but hungry idols learn to eat fast and hide the rest like Private Pyle.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

BUYING PRODUCTS THAT IDOLS ENDORSE

Buying the trash that idols promote does benefit the company in the short term (which is the whole idea) but a powerful idol with so much brand-selling value that they can call the shots is another level of caonima as far as their agency are concerned, especially when they start insisting on “special conditions”. The idols that really bring home the bacon and turn into megastars in Korea who can then do things like kick their agencies down the stairs and negotiate better contract terms, are the ones who line up large amounts of endorsements. Idols are more likely to get those endorsements if the people who are doing the endorsing notice a spike in their profit margins once said idols start getting involved. You can help here by buying the fuck out of the stupid shit that they’re selling to you. Do it in an organised conscious way, and bring (literal) receipts. Message the companies and say “I bought this caonima plushie because of Sulli” with a picture of the receipt itself for maximum impact.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

START A STUPID SNARKY BLOGGING SITE THAT EVERYBODY HATES

K-pop companies don’t like Kpopalypse, no they do not. The cone of silence that I’m met with whenever I approach anyone in the industry on the management side with the details of what I do is as severe as it is deliberate, and confirms this beyond a doubt. They don’t like this blog because I’m actually honest about the shitty nature of the music business and what idols go through. Some idols would like to talk to me but they can’t because their contracts and legal agreements say they can’t. That’s why it takes courageous people like ChoColat’s Melanie and Tahiti’s Sarah who have completely extracted themselves from the industry to give you the truths that you won’t read on crappy k-pop “news” sites that have both no news, and no good news.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over, but Kpopalypse is here to help

PART 3 – SHIT THAT HELPS NOBODY BUT YOURSELF

NOT BEING A FUCKING RETARDED CUNT

K-pop companies make money in a lot of ways, but it mainly boils down to making money out of your stupidity. If you can avoid getting sucked into the silliness of idol infatuation, you can avoid a lot of crap. Imagine being into music because of the actual music itself, instead of the way that music is sold to you. It’s easy if you try.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over

FAPPING

You might as well. Here, let me help with some premium fapping content.

Conclusion: your idol is getting fucked over, and there is no hope, but you can still fap