Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
In a less surprising company change/disbandment, and contributing to an amusingly (for me, personally) busy day, Pledis Entertainment revealed that Fromis 9 would be leaving the company after their contracts expired at the end of the year.
The exclusive contract with fromis_9 (Lee Sae Rom, Song Ha Young, Park Ji Won, Roh Ji Sun, Lee Seo Yeon, Lee Chae Young, Lee Na Gyung, Baek Ji Heon) will expire this coming December 31. We discussed at length and in depth with the members of fromis_9 regarding each member’s future and direction and have come to an amicable conclusion to end the exclusive artist contract.
Before they go, their fans will get a fansong on December 23.
fromis_9 will release their fan song, which is their expression of their gratitude for their fandom flover, on December 23 and attend their final engagements, drawing a close to their official activities as PLEDIS Entertainment artists. We wholeheartedly support the future endeavors of fromis_9.
Born from controversy due to being formed by the reality program Idol School, Fromis 9 debuted in January of 2018, which makes it about exactly the seven-year “curse” period of a standard contract. They started out being co-managed by Off The Record and Stone Music, but were transferred to Pledis Entertainment (and thus HYBE) in August of 2021 as part of a label reorganization. One of their more popular member, Jang Gyuri, left the group in July of 2022, and earlier this year members had lamented being put on the backburner and alluded to not getting paid*.
*That comment, in addition to the album pushing thing that recently came out, made me wonder about their sales tripling the moment they went to Pledis (thought it was a HYBE bump or something).
Needless to say it’s been a rather tumultuous run for the group, yet in the midst of that, they’ve managed to put together quite an impressive discography considering they appeared to lack company backing/confidence at times.
With older groups trending towards staying together after their initial contracts, I guess we’ll see if Fromis 9 move on somewhere as a group (especially since they seemed to have peaked in popularity with “Supersonic“), though the fansong does make it seem like a potential goodbye. Personally, I hope at least most of them continue their careers in some form and we get to see what that looks like.
