Recently, there have been many stories of conflict between people in the ARMY fandom and the management company Big Hit Music or HYBE. It is mainly directly related to the members' interests as well as HYBE's responsibility in promoting their image while they are in the military.
In particular, in recent days, fans have been very upset to see Big Hit Music even "promoting" a YouTube account impersonating V while the promotional campaign for his new single has not ended. When Big Hit Music was caught red-handed by fans, they faced a strong wave of criticism.
Below is the evolution of the incident as well as the current situation after the company received countless complaints from fans:
As everyone knows that V released the digital single “FRI(END)S” about a week ago on music platforms. He brought interesting content in the plan to promote the single with fans, along with promoting the song on online music platforms, typically Youtube.
At the same time V released his new single, fans called on YouTube, BIGHIT MUSIC, and Geffen Records to restore BTS V‘s deleted YouTube topic channel. While this wasn’t an “official” YouTube account and the members of BTS don’t have individual accounts on the platform, YouTube does have auto-generated individual “topic” channels for each BTS member. At the time that it was deleted, V’s topic channel had around two million subscribers.
It’s unclear why the topic channel was deleted, and in its place, a new channel was created that had drastically fewer subscribers, leading fans to ask YouTube and V’s labels to restore the original account. Fortunately, thanks to the effort of ARMYs, the topic account was restored and has once again been listed as the official topic on the BANGTANTV YouTube channel.
But now, yet another problem has resurfaced regarding V that has fans once again upset and frustrated with how the BTS member appears to be neglected by his label. When the original topic account for V was deleted, an impersonation account had been created that wasn’t run by BIGHIT MUSIC. It started to become a highly searched topic when fans were looking for V’s content.
However, not only was the impostor not immediately condemned or prevented by Big Hit Music, but the record label, perhaps unintentionally, promoted the channel through its own official account. While the account originally only had a couple hundred subscribers, the promotion of the channel led to it reaching over 200,000 subscribers.
The promotion was even in effect for nearly 24 hours on Big Hit Music's social network accounts, despite fans' requests to remove it. Thanks to that, the impersonated account is said to have enjoyed a 'windfall' when the number of followers increased rapidly in just 1 day. By the morning of the 22nd, the impersonated account was reported to not be visible on the SNS.
Although Big Hit Music has resolved the above incident, according to many fans, they feel that V was treated negligently by the company. Not only that, Big Hit Music also received criticism for poor promotion for a while and this is just the latest in a series of incidents that negatively affected the careers of BTS members.
On a forum post on the subject, some comments got quite harsh and criticized the brand and their latest mistake:
- Is there anyone left with a minimum of professionalism in hybe??? Put the right fυ¢кing link
- How disgusting that you even post the WRONG link that we’ve been requesting you to remove. YouTube have confirmed that all these problems are fully in your hands to fix! I hope V sues you f out of you when he gets out!!!
- they always hav their nugu mode on when tae is releasing soмєтнing
- isn't linking the fake channel that's impersonating him a little too much? see what happens when you don't give a fck about your artist and you do everything on your behalf to ruin every project
- Is his company his own anti?
- What's wrong with that company?
- I'm sooooooooo curious who's managing these accounts. Already for years they've been мιѕѕιиg members left and right, but now they're promoting a fake account and getting away with it, and the fans are protesting so much, but nothing is changing, and it's getting worse and worse, and they're doing this to Bangtan just to make things worse, ew
- HYBE's BigHit is doing such a poor job, this is active sabotage. Please part ways with this нσяяιвℓє company.
- Do they not do their work or are they not allowed to work properly?
- They are f*cking bad at doing their work
- Are they causing trouble like this even when the members are in the army? How on earth did such a group of people come into existence?
- They didn't even give any feedback. This is just too much
- Seriously, this infuriates me. How many times has it been? Are they advertising the fact that they are f*ckers?
- I bet that one of the staff members is a V anti
Regarding this, an official in the music industry explained: “Because “topic” channels are automatically set up according to YouTube's algorithm, each company cannot request their own creation or modification,” and added: “It is a structure that is generated by an algorithm and then periodically updated."
This is an issue with YouTube's automation system and it is known that many other idols suffer similar errors several times. Many agencies request YouTube to fix the problem, but it has been reported that it takes a significant amount of time for that to actually be reflected in the system. An agency repeatedly asked YouTube but received feedback that "fixing takes a long time".
