I've read the words "IVE never sings live" so many times everywhere during the last 7 months. Ever since they got 'big enough' with Love Dive people started hating on them for this. It escalated a lot when they had one subpar encore stage during After Like era, although the other 13 encores were fine and some were even great:
After the infamous Strawberry Moon stage it's escalated to completely absurd levels where you can find comments like 'lipsync queens' all over the place on every single IVE video on every platform - even the ones with actual live vocals. It's quite frustrating as a fan to see them get this absurd amount of hate. I would never defend lipsyncing a ballad at end year shows, it's inexcusable and the company needs to never make a similar mistake again.
But the hate they get for this specific reason is completely unwarranted - they are actually having MORE live vocal performances than their peers:
Sure, these stages aren't perfect and they have a lot of improve still but they are certainly trying to sing live. There are groups that have never performed live even once or just a handful of times in their entire career. IVE having 23+ in their first year is respectable for rookies. For the end year period IVE's live vocal % has been nearing 50% which is higher than most groups.
IVE is one of the few 4th gen groups to have done a 'pure' live performance with a low backtrack - don't need a MR removed for this one to hear what they are singing:
On this video you can also find tons of comments about how the vocals are terrible and they should stick to lipsyncing 
. These are NOT bad vocals - K-pop fans just have no idea what singing while dancing sounds like anymore. Whatever they *think* it sounds like is likely LAR being confused for live vocals except for the few rare expectional groups.
I see most of the hate coming from stans of groups who very rarely perform live or just sing 10-20% of the lines over a very loud LAR track. It's like K-pop fans have been listening to so much lipsync/LAR stages in the recent years that they have no idea what an actual live performance sounds like anymore. I don't want to call out any group but it's absurd that groups that have truly performed properly live 1-2 times in their entire career are praised for their live vocals while IVE gets to bathe in endless hate.
Meanwhile we have some SM groups (not all) not doing a single live performance for 2 years straight and getting a free pass.
I hope these recent controversies will spark a new wave of live vocal appreciation in K-pop, if nothing else. It would be nice to see real live vocals becoming the norm again. A lot of (especially younger) K-pop fans would be in for a rude awakening if their favorite groups had to do a live performance with low AR backtrack and got to experience what singing while dancing actually sounds like.
I just wanted to get this frustrating thing off my chest you may drag my faves now - I'm certainly used to it.
