(Peoples like JYP who are more of a company owners than singers will be excluded from this discussion)
2017 was a very significant year in KPop as the 2nd Gen's last vestiges retreated, SM power was decisively weakened and Jonghyun died. His death was the event which cemented that the era of SM domination was now over.
The military services of DBSK and GDragon started on that year too. (GDragon was released during the service but he has not promoted too often since then.)
In the transitional period between the old and new, and SM and Big Hit (later Hybe), a surprising figure became the singer who earned the most money in 2017 - a domesticist.
Although both DBSK and GDragon had events earlier in 2017, they didn't finish the year while IU promoted twice (pun not intended, although she did defeat Twice's Knock Knock during the process) and made the most amount of money of all singers in 2017. She debuted in 2008 so her contract was revised in 2015, and since she had almost no training costs even then she collected most of her earnings for herself.
Then BTS exploded, and the rest would have been history except ....
in a very surprising move, RM was able to persuade Jeon Jungkook into enlisting, a move he will regret for the rest of his life in my opinion.
With BlackPink in a semi permanent hiatus and each member pursuing her own interests, the unthinkable seems to have occurred - IU is likely to be the singer who made the most money in KPop in 2024, despite of the inconvenient fact that she is not a KPop figure.
While it can be argued that IVE's remaining part of world tour might end up bigger than IU's, since IU's rumored concert in Australia, which would have made her tour the largest of all acts originating from Korea in 2024, did not pan out, all of IVE's income has to be split into 6 ways and it is young enough to have the company take out most of the profits. (Jang Wonyoung and Ahn Yujin's contracts are assumed to have started from the IZOne days but it will not be until 2025 that they will see serious money from Starship.)
Ditto (again, pun not intended) to virtually all acts now doing active tours.
We won't know how much the individual BlackPink members will make on their own activities but they won't be related to KPop so are not part of the discussion. They are now mostly influencers, not singers.
Lim Youngwoong has a big concert, plus whatever he will do to the older pop of Korea, but IU will have one at the same venue. Plus it is only a few years after he gained enough fame and he is still bound to his company, where he is the only artist, and its owner will skim a big portion of his earnings but IU , while no longer owning Edam Entertainment, appears to have retained the right to take the profits she had made. Sin Sekyung , which is under Edam, has her own accounting, and Woodz, the only non IU- singer in the company, is in the military, earning nothing.
IU's concert will be attended by 600k people , and assuming a ticket price of $120 (whatever the prices of expensive tickets in USA might be they are going to the resellers, not to the artist) that is $72 million, out of which Edam will see maybe 1/3 of that, or $24m, most of them flowing back to its former owner.
What did KPop do in the last 7 years to allow a domesticist to mount the title of the top earner again?
It was because everything was concentrated on BTS and BlackPink that they did not develop a successor to them fast enough, and when they went offline, there was no one powerful enough to silence the domesticist, who now will take the top position again.
A truly unthinkable event has indeed occurred, signifying further decline of KPop
