Swing Entertainment

» see swingent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Produce 101 was a Mnet survival show in which trainees from many different Korean agencies competed while the audience voted, week by week, until a final lineup was left standing. Season 2 ended on 16 June 2017 with eleven men chosen, and those eleven became Wanna One. The contract was written to run out. The group had a fixed term and a public disband date from the first day.

Wanna One debuted under YMC Entertainment. When that arrangement ended, CJ ENM's music arm set up a new company to take the group over, and Swing Entertainment was incorporated on 8 June 2018 with the executive producer Shin Dong-gil at the top and CJ ENM holding 51 percent. Its entire portfolio at that moment was one band with about six months left on the clock.

Wanna One finished its run at the end of 2018 and played farewell concerts that January. Swing kept going. It signed Kim Jae-hwan out of the group as a soloist and picked up the management of the next two Produce acts, IZ*ONE from Produce 48 and X1 from Produce X 101. For about a year that looked like a viable specialty, an agency built to administer the temporary groups a television format kept manufacturing. Then the vote counts turned out to be fake. The scandal took X1 apart in January 2020 and left IZ*ONE badly damaged, and the format that had been Swing's supply line stopped producing. The company spent its last four years co-managing other labels' acts before CJ ENM merged it into WakeOne.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a group assembled by public vote ~

The Produce format ran on the idea that the audience owned the outcome. You voted, and the lineup that debuted was the one you had picked, which made viewers feel like shareholders in a way an ordinary idol debut never could. The cost of that was the expiry date. A group drawn from eleven different agencies cannot stay together, because ten of those agencies want their trainee back, so the term ran about eighteen months and everybody knew it going in.

Swing existed to administer exactly that. It was a holding company for a countdown, and it went on operating for years after the countdown reached zero, on the assumption that Mnet would keep making more of them.

~ the count was fake ~

Prosecutors opened an investigation into vote manipulation across the Produce series in 2019. The producer Ahn Joon-young admitted he had altered the final rankings, and in November 2020 he was sentenced to two years in prison, with the chief producer Kim Yong-bum given eight months. Rankings on more than one season had been adjusted to favor trainees from particular agencies.

X1 disbanded on 6 January 2020, five months after debuting, because the vote that created it had been rigged. IZ*ONE was allowed to serve out its term and ended in April 2021. Those were Swing's two assets after Wanna One, and a criminal court ended both.

What was left was a management company with a famous name attached to groups that no longer existed, and a parent that owned the majority of it. CJ ENM announced the WakeOne merger on 3 April 2024 and closed it eight weeks later. The agency survived its own clients by four years, which in the Korean industry is a long time to spend as a shell waiting for a parent company to decide what to do with you.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »