Would SNSD have become as big as BlackPink if SM supported it better in 2011? 14
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No. The timing was not right yet (13) 93%
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No. Lee Jieun would have stopped SNSD anyways. (1) 7%
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Yes (0) 0%
SNSD's return is seen with favorable eyes among its fans, but the newer generation does not know it.
Given its complete domination of KPop 2009 - 2011, and its continued reign until around 2014, that is surprising but memories are short.
Some people might say SNSD's fate was limited because the high brass of SM always emphasized boy groups before girl groups since it was seen that boy groups brought way more revenues.
In 2011, a bunch of events occurred . For those who don't know its sequence, I will summarize it once again.
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1. The initial release date of the Boys album was September 2011. Then there was the contract deal with Interscope. The Boys is a song from Teddy Riley, a producer for Michael Jackson, and terms with USA had to be negotiated.
2. Then I believe Sooyoung was injured just before the promotion start date of Oct 5, 2011. Nowdays, if a member is injured or otherwise unavailable, the promotion will go on without the member. But at that time it was customary that if a member was unavailable everyone had to wait till the member returned.
3. That 2 week delay would completely knock off SNSD's US promotion plans. Details are not clear to this day, but it is probable that these two week delay caused a similar effect of what Psy did at the height of Gangman Style craze to waste a week performing in Korea's shitty universities because YG refused to send Big Bang or 2NE1 to these third-rate bush league institutions for Beavis and Buttheads, or outright cancel these assignments.
4. The 2 week delay eventually led SNSD staying in Korea for longer than intended, where they met Wonder Girls and beating them 3 out of 3 times.
5. Then the SNSD repackage was released . Instead of making a new song its title, SM put MR Taxi, a Japanese release which most Sones had heard before, as the title.
6. Korean SNSD fans were angry that they were being slighted, and they really got upset because they thought SM was not treating the Korean fans properly. As a protest, they voted for the person , whose "You & I" had just been released, in music shows.
7. IU defeated SNSD in Music Bank, but more importantly, her Good Day was voted ahead of SNSD's The Boys as the top song of 2011 (despite of the inconvenient fact that Good Day is a 2010 song).
The veil ofSNSD's complete dominance was lifted by a high school student.
All of these were possible because the guy who was running SM at that time, Kim Youngmin, was crazy on boy groups and did not like girl groups. He even allowed Donghae&Eunhyuk to be released when SNSD was still in town,just to spite them.
With a full support from SM,
1 The album might be delayed but SNSD is sent to USA with a big fanfare
2 A decent repackage would have silenced IU
3 SNSD has a successful US promotion.
Instead, the US venture eventually went nowhere, and now there was a singer who DID beat SNSD, and became an insoluble problem for Korean Pop , a problem which has not been resolved 11 years later
SNSD at that time was on the cusp of a worldwide explosion, and it was SM's internal politics which stopped that.
At that time the KPop industry was intoxicated of its own success and didn't know how to plan for the world yet.
People learn from experience, but for SNSD it would be bittersweet since they had a Tokyo Dome concert in in 2014 and someone who only entered there as a guest among many (SNSD was also there) in 2011 will have a concert at the Chamshil Olympic Stadium this year.
I will conclude this post with the song "Above the Time" by SNSD's archrival, who was also BTS' archrival. She released this song in 2019 to commemorate the 8th anniversary of knocking SNSD down.