Katseye will never be as profitable as the popular Kpop ggs, do you agree?

    • New

    They may not sell as good as k-pop ggs, but I think they earn quite a lot with festivals, brand deals and yes, sns. In the end everything brings money, not just one thing or another.

    Will they last long? Idk, but they are bringing money to the company.

    • New

    I don't think the main purpose of this group is to be as profitable as a K-pop group, believe it or not. I think HYBE already has enough groups to fulfill that role of bringing in money.


    I believe the main purpose is to expand the conglomerate's name globally in a way that reaches audiences that K-pop groups don't reach due to the language barrier. So that they continue launching successful artists in the future.

  • AllKill VIP
    • New

    Katseye is a meme group trying to get hate-watched and radio-played into western success. They're not serious contenders for western stardom as a group. One will need to break away from the group to take the risk as actual stardom.

    • New

    Why are people ignoring the fact that they’re touring?


    Physical album sales is not the only thing that makes money. In fact they’re probably making more than many mid tier group because even small venue shows in the US make a lot of money.


    Are people not aware that they sold out their tour or something. As long as they do that they’re probably making money comparable to any kpop group.


    They way kpop fans behave they probably think even mid tier groups are more profitable than some of the biggest stars in the US because they don’t sell and they use radio play 😭 while most of the money is in concerts.

    • New

    It's an absolutely miniscule tour in tiny venues across two countries.


    Mid tier groups are touring better than that. Aren't they?

    • New




    I did some Googling after making this post out of curiosity.


    In short, I agree with you. Since they’re under Hybe they’re obviously going to make tons of money, and that alone makes it unfair to compare them to mid tier groups from non–big 4 companies.


    They sold out over 50k seats across 16 dates on their first tour, which is a similar number to Itzy’s 2024 world tour. Hybe doesn’t release their tour gross numbers, so I can’t say exactly how much they made, but it was probably around the same as Itzy’s, which was over 6m usd. The difference is that Itzy had 32 dates across the world, while Katseye only had 16, just in North America.


    Commercial wise, Katseye also has more cf deals than Illit. Album sales wise, they’re doing well too. Beautiful Chaos sold 186k CDs in the US alone and 122k on Korea’s Circle Chart, putting their total at over 300k now, about the same as Illit’s latest album.


    For now, I think Illit still makes more profit than Katseye for their Asia activities and album sales. But if Katseye keeps this up, they could pass them sooner or later. The problem is that Hybe America is still in the red, so it’s hard to tell how much the girls actually making.

    • New
    Quote from blossom9990

    They sold out over 50k seats across 16 dates on their first tour, which is a similar number to Itzy’s 2024 world tour.

    Do you have a source for those Itzy numbers?

    Seemed low to me, I've seen this thread claiming that they sold >55k tickets in Japan alone, across four dates:

    From the kpopthoughts community on Reddit
    Explore this post and more from the kpopthoughts community
    www.reddit.com


    Reliable?

    I don't know.

    But more plausible than the suggestion that the Beautiful Chaos tour came close to the Born to Be tour in attendance given the relative scope of both tours and the fact that they had similar sized venues (well, Itzy's were bigger in Asia).

    • New

    Katseye are a (totally inappropriate) meme group for children who don't know they're a meme group for children. Their audience will grow out of their current phase where they're willing to listen to such a dreadful racket fairly quickly, assuming their parents don't catch them following such an age-inappropriate act long before then, and then it'll be exit stage left. They'll last a few more years at most.


    Although they want to have their cake and eat it too, being unable to decide just how "Kpop" they are, they still move more like a western group overall and will ultimately fail to last as long as the more successful Kpop girl groups, which would be highly unusual for a western group. For a Kpop fan's point of reference, Katseye are much more akin to a reality show "project" group in that sense, where they'll be gone the moment they outlive their usefulness, regardless of how high they manage to chart. If Hybe is lucky they'll make a quick buck, but no one is chasing a legacy here. In fact, the members most likely receive no further work in the entertaintment industry once they disband. In other words, whatever success they manage to achieve as Katseye will ultimately be empty calories.


    Quote from ISaidISaid

    Are people not aware that they sold out their tour or something. As long as they do that they’re probably making money comparable to any kpop group.

    The way you actually believe this tripe, although I can't say I'm actually surprised.

    • New

    Lets expand on this.

    Touring:

    Well, we don't believe that Itzy averaged only 1,562 attendees per venue, do we? That their sell-through was like 25% for the venues they played? No, of course not, so its reasonable to assume that their tour had twice as many attendees as Beautiful Chaos at a minimum (and it truly is a minimum, because they played larger venues in some countries).


    But remember, this comparison is against the other HYBE groups, or "the popular groups". Katseye is a flagship group. In JYPE, for girlgroups, this not Itzy, this is Twice, whose last tour sold 1.5m tickets and drew in revenue of $170m. For their current tour, their Japanese dates alone will exceed half a million tickets, and they have already have played single nights that exceed 50,000 in attendance (Kaohsiung National Stadium, Philippine Arena). And that is the standard for Blackpink, YGE's flagship, where most venues had a capacity >40,000 per night.


    But maybe that comparison is unfair.

    The other HYBE group that can be used is Le Sserafim. Le Sserafim played two nights at the Tokyo Dome and drew an audience of 80,000. More than Katseye's entire tour.


    So it isn't remotely close. Further, there are considerable fixed costs (transport, accommodation, food) which result in proportionally lower profit margins for smaller tours. So, ~$3m revenue before expenses isn't a lot. Throw in the marketing budget of Katseye and... No, nobody is getting rich off this tour.


    Can Katseye catch up? Well, absent greater success in Asia, they would need to tour the west on the scale of Blackpink's western legs. That's a tall order, because we're now talking "best performing girlgroup of all time" level of performance. Traditional k-pop groups, that have a base of popularity in Asia, don't need to pass such a high bar to achieve the same level of income.


    Sales:

    Comparison against a single doesn't really work. Illit's last EP sold >500,000. 700,000 is the lower bound for a Le Sserafim album. It's also not clear that Circle and Luminate numbers are entirely independent. Many of the sales within the US will have come from distributers tracked by Circle, right? If not, then, uh, all discussion of k-pop album sales is happening under faulty assumptions (IE, that for example, the 3,697,778 copies of SKZ Karma sold on Circle includes the 524,000 reported as sold in the US by Luminate). Given the difference in consumption culture in Katseye's target audience... I don't see them rivalling the other HYBE groups in sales anytime soon. Or ever.



    But really all of that is moot, we're talking about the downstream when we know about the source:

    We know HYBE America loses money (a lot of it), and SouMu and BeLift turn a profit. "But HYBE America are inves-" and SouMu and BeLift aren't? They're not debuting new groups this year even? SouMu didn't put up auditions for male trainees earlier this month? Both labels don't run an entire training division that is expensive as hell?

    But Le Sserafim and Illit make enough bank to offset all that. K-pop groups - popular ones, as per thread title - make an awful lot of money. That's why we have Ive members dropping near $10m in cash on property, despite the fact that they only take 50% of the proceeds after expenses. I won't even factor in the purchasing power differential between South Korea and the USA. By comparison, Fifth Harmony members had nowhere near that much money at the point when Camila left. Not even close. Reportedly, most still don't. imo Katseye will make Fifth Harmony-type money, because they are a Fifth Harmony-type group, with a Fifth Harmony-type audience.

    The problem is, the industry expectation is for them to not to be that. Or at least, that is my perception. Mina above convincingly suggests otherwise.


    And maybe I'm wrong about the future anyway, and they end up being absolutely gigantic, the next Supremes. I do think that they will be putting up a good fight against Blackpink this year in terms of streams, which is insane for such a young group.

    • New

    Kateyes may run on a different income model than our average K-pop groups. Possibly, they are more of "influencer" earning mainly from appearance/performance gigs and product placements.


    So, to use their concert tour scale and music sale for comparison may be not right.


    Kateyes definitely is meant to make profit, very good of it. I assume it is more of testing-the-water group. It is a partnership project between HYBE and a local American label. The American partner unlikely will keep the partnership going for future groups if Kateyes cannot make satiable profit.

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login