The K-Pop world has been a buzz over the recent boycott against YG Entertainment and fans refusing to purchase any of iKON's albums or merchandize. While Korean fans are in an uproar, international fans are left wondering why?
It appears that fans in Korea are boycotting YG Entertainment until he stops mistreating iKON. iKONICS (the group fandom) have been angered by the lack of promotions in Korea and being kept locked away in YG's infamous artist basement. Angered fans left a rather long post on a fan page and have since circulated the following message across the internet.
"We are iKONIC, the fandom to YG Entertainment's artist iKON. After iKON debuted on September 15, 2015, YG Entertainment's treatment of iKON has been continuously problematic.
Among many other issues, the members had intense schedules that did not consider their well-being; they had an incredible amount of overseas schedules compared to their incredibly few Korean schedules; their promotional plans were continuously canceled; their image management was non-existent, and their styling was not improved. We spent a lot of time and effort from June 17 to July 20 to prepare an 18-page protest, and we sent this to YG Entertainment through fax, email, physical mail, and SNS.We requested feedback until August 11, and we have been waiting for a sincere answer to our protest."
The letter continued saying, "However, on July 30, YG Entertainment's CEO Yang Hyun Suk uploaded a shocking three-line post on his SNS. He wrote, 'Concerns about IKON are the most useless concerns! Just wait for September and October... The days we will laugh happily will come'.When we iKONICs saw his post, we couldn't help but laugh emptily. A sincere protest that we spent about a month on was dismissed as 'useless concerns', and he talked about September and October, where iKON are scheduled for back-to-back performances for their Japanese tour. We couldn't help but be angry at calling those days, ones 'we would laugh happily'."
"Not only so, he made the most basic mistake of stylizing iKON into IKON, and nothing about the answer was proper. The post was deleted two hours later, and we did not get feedback on August 11.We iKONICs tried to think of the artist and the label's image and tried to solve things in a friendly way, but the label denied us that. We have decided to boycott all YG goods, including the 'iKON SUMMERTIME SEASON 2 in BALI' DVD that will be released on August 23.
We will continue this boycott until we get a proper feedback from YG."
Both YG Entertainment and by group iKON were shocked to hear the news. However, YG himself came forward and responded to the sudden protest saying the following: "iKON released an album this past May, and we're continuously preparing their new album as well as solo albums. This happened because of a misunderstanding with the fans."
What do you think of YG's response? Was it adequate enough to satisfied angered fans and netizens or will this boycott continue to go on? Stay tuned for more updates regarding this crucial matter.
