JYP Entertainment: one singer's agency that became a K-pop giant
In 1997 the singer-songwriter J.Y. Park started a small agency called Tae-Hong Planning and signed a single act. Renamed after his own stage name in 2001, it grew into one of South Korea's biggest entertainment companies, and in 2009 its girl group Wonder Girls became the first Korean act to reach the Billboard Hot 100.
Park worked as producer and mentor for the boy band g.o.d, formed with the agency SidusHQ, which debuted on 13 January 1999. His first homegrown star was Rain, signed as a trainee in December 2000 and launched in May 2002. Rain's third album, It's Raining, sold more than a million copies across seven Asian countries before he left in 2007 to set up his own agency. Not everything clicked: the company's first boy group, Noel, failed to catch on.
Wonder Girls, formed in May 2006, changed its profile. Their song Nobody charted in America, and a management deal with the Jonas Group put them on the Jonas Brothers' world tour. In 2008 a reality contest called Hot Blood Men had trainees compete to debut, and the winners were split into two boy bands, 2PM and 2AM. The company opened a Beijing branch the same year, moved into television drama, with Dream High featuring its own artists, and later formed Got7 and Twice.
Global ambitions brought setbacks as well as growth. An American subsidiary launched in 2011 lost about US$1.5 million by the end of 2012 and was closed, New York office included. Later ventures fared better: partnerships with Tencent Music in China produced the boy band Boy Story, Twice signed with Republic Records for American promotion in 2020, and the company joined rivals SM Entertainment and Big Hit in a 2018 music streaming platform called Flo. It also co-founded KMP Holdings in 2010 with other agencies to distribute their releases.
Talent rotates constantly. In January 2019 JYP announced the girl group Itzy, whose debut featured Dalla Dalla, while in January 2021 every member of Got7 left when their seven-year contracts expired. Today the company works as record label, talent agency, concert promoter and music publisher all at once.
Source: JYP Entertainment
