A Sad Picture Of A “Nugu” K-Pop Group’s Fanmeeting Goes Viral Online

As recently as a few years ago, it was rare for any K-Pop artist to make over a million album sales apart from BTS. In fact, there was a day when it was astounding for even the top artists to make 100k sales, and it wasn’t even all that long ago!

BTS as rookies | BIGHIT MUSIC

These days, though, more and more artists are surpassing not only the million-album sales mark, but the multi-million, leading to an ever-increasing expectation for K-Pop groups to reach certain milestones or else risk being called a “flop group”. Chart rankings are also used as “evidence” for how successful an artist’s comeback is or isn’t, and things can get pretty toxic between fandoms when arguing over how successful a K-Pop artist is.

With the bar being raised ever higher in the K-Pop industry, where does that leave artists debuting under small, unknown companies with barely any budget? The K-Pop world is becoming increasingly saturated with new groups debuting seemingly weekly, but there is only so much room for artists to succeed in the highly competitive market.

That’s why so many artists under small labels end up being “nugu” groups — that is, groups who the general public is unaware of and, more often than not, end up disbanding not too long after debut due to lack of funding. It’s upsetting to know just how many idols train incredibly hard for years, only to end up having their dreams crushed and, more often than not, in debt to their label.

Recently, a photo of a small K-Pop boy group drew attention online as people seem to sympathize for their situation. The photo shows the members at a fanmeeting, but rather than being surrounded by tons of adoring fans, it appears that there are only as many fans as there are members in the group, or possibly even less.

The photo in question | Pann Nate

The image became the topic of conversation on an online forum post, where the author asked if it’s really a fanmeeting, because it seems more like a “blind date” due to the small number of people that showed up.

Tons of people commented on the post, sharing their opinions on “nugu” groups and the unfortunate idols that end up in them. Many are of the opinion that they would never try to debut in a small company no matter how passionate they were about music, since the odds seem to be so against people in that kind of situation succeeding.

We hope that this group, and groups like them, start to get more recognition that they undoubtedly deserve from the general public, especially if they have great music!