Is a group still nugu when selling 100k albums or more?

I think the definition of "nugu" term itself are kinda convoluted.

many sticks to the original "who" definition, other take it as an "underdog" or even "non-succesful"?

For me, it's more a mid-tier group in particular for girl groups because they have a well-defined fandom.

that's not nugu. my faves most selled album is 27k and 26k respectively, and newest release with first week (can't find full) 869ish sales (and that was just people masss buying albums) and 4k sales (no mass buying, it shows. the photocards don't come up for sale).

Nugu is a purely western fanbase slang term.

Like sure the word Nugu is korean, but the way kpop fandoms use it is completely an international slang term of a borrowed korean word.

Quote from screamingbanshee

If you think someone selling anything more than 50K albums is a "nugu" group you're delusional. Just because a group isn't popular and selling millions or hundreds of thousands of albums doesn't mean they are nugu.

I think a lot of newer K-Pop fans (post 2015) are used to really high sales due to bulk-buying and people buying multiple copies of the same album (which you shouldn't do & idc about your opinion on it) which have inflated the true number of albums sold. A lot of 'nugu' K-Pop acts in 2010-2014 that I stanned like Tahiti sold maybe 30k units total while they were active. I would find it quite insulting if I'm a member of an idol group that sold at least 10K copies of an album and someone online would call me a 'nugu'. Even just 10K albums sold at ~$25 is a revenue of $250K and assuming a 20% profit margin that is $50K for physical album sales alone excluding profits incurred from other gigs across Korea, Japan, etc.

A lot of K-pop legends like KARA, T-Ara, SHINee, 2PM, etc. regularly were under 100K sales in the early 2010s/ late 2000s. I see people saying things sometimes like "Everglow is going to fall into nugudom". I'm sorry, but you're genuinely delusional. There are a plethora of groups that have under 10k monthly listeners on Spotify and are really talented who are at real risk of disbanding due to abysmal album sales and are likely being kept afloat by wealthy CEOs who have enough capital to sink into non-profitable groups. Imagine being in a group like that and being thrown in the same category with an idol group that is selling like 87K albums that might even have music show wins.

industry has changed, back then everybody which sold over 100k were top groups so comparation to 2nd gen make no sense, now you can easily sell 100k and almost nobody know who they are, that was impossible in 2nd gen

back then nugu was for general public, like when you talk to a random about X group and they went "who?", nugu means "who?" so by then definition even groups with a bigger fanbase can be called nugus because they aren't know to a lot of people, nowadays everybody gets called nugu lol so the word lost its meaning but at the end of the day depends of your definition of unknown, is somebody with 100k bulk sales known and popular? if you talk to a random kpop stan (let alone gp) do they know who are you speaking about? if the answer for both is NO, then they are nugus