Fans’ Money Will Decide Group’s Lineup? HYBE’s Survival Show “R U Next” Raises Concerns With New Voting Method

HYBE Label and BeLift Lab‘s new girl group survival program, R U Next?, has announced that it will use a unique voting method to reflect viewers’ choices among the participants.

The poster for HYBE Label and BeLift Lab’s new girl group survival program, “R U Next?”

Specifically, the show will use two different platforms to register votes. Fans can show their support through Weverse or an internet-only banking service called Toss Bank.

Toss Bank and “R U Next?” will collaborate for a special savings account scheme.

On June 23, Toss Bank unveiled a new savings account scheme in collaboration with R U Next? where fans can simultaneously manage their finances and cast their votes for their favorite participant. Anyone over the age of 17 will be eligible to open an account and select a particular contestant of their choice to be associated with the account. Toss Bank will show the total amount saved under each contestant through these savings accounts, and the ranking will be decided accordingly.

All 22 participants of “R U Next?” | HYBE Labels

Toss Bank is promoting this new service as a two-birds-one-stone situation, where young fans can save money and support their favorite contestant at the same time. But there are some valid concerns regarding this voting method. Many pointed out how this basically enables fans with more money to decide the fate of the show’s contestants, criticizing it as a hyper-capitalistic way of evaluating talent.

Though this might be the first time a survival show has paired up with a financial service to evaluate contestants, the concept of tying K-Pop fan culture to banking has already been done by Kakao. In April of this year, Kakao Bank introduced a service called “Favorite Savings” that would allow fans to save money each time their favorite star did a particular activity.

Kakao Bank’s “Favorite Savings” service announcement 

The concept is that fans can pre-determine how much money they want to deposit into the account when their favorite celebrity does a certain activity. For example, ₩2,000 KRW (about $1.53 USD) is deposited every time they post a photo on social media or ₩5,000 KRW (about $3.82 USD) for every time they hold a concert, and so on. Users can set up to 20 such deposit patterns.

A conceptual graphic explaining how fans can set up different deposit patterns corresponding to various activities their favorite stars might do | Kakao Bank

Kakao Bank launched its service with a 2% annual interest rate, which has been matched by Toss Bank’s new savings scheme. Given the similarity of these services’ patterns, it seems that despite criticism,  companies are ready to give this new concept a go, of course, with their own twist. Could K-Pop become the next generation’s source of financial literacy? Or would it end up promoting a money-centric fan culture?