As most of us have heard already, SM and MNet are at it again. SM’s breaking off the contracts with MNet because supposedly MNet has been distributing SM material without their consent. All that janx. I won’t go into detail because I’m sure everyones read up on it. Anyway, the main question that some fans might be asking is: what happens to SNSD? How are they affected? Since I’m no pro in this area, I decided to post up silis7noy’s comment on Soompi about the issue. Questions will be answered about how the girls could possibly be affected but its not a major issue. So read it over and share your thoughts 🙂

Essentially SM publicly declared war on Mnet and it’s pretty hot topic among Korean fans right now. It’s unclear what exactly is the real situation from the little known so far, no one is sure which side will win. We’ll need to watch for some further developments before making assessments. But I’d suspect something happened with Mnet that made SM confident enough to throw down the gauntlet. Mnet is backed by the huge congleromate CJ which made it the Goliath against SM’s David but Mnet has been incurring loss after loss and is plagued with problems of negative public images. If it becomes true that CJ is abandoning Mnet then possible scenario would be CJ selling off Mnet for cheap price and Mnet surrendering to SM. It’s just premature speculation though. At any rate, SM has the upper hand at least for now, you can probably imagine that a kpop music site with no SM music offerings won’t be popular for long.

In the worst case the feud continues and SM’s music will continue to be unavailable on Mnet. How much does this affect SNSD, the short answer is that there is bit of damage but nothing big enough to worry about. There are plenty other sites for SM to distribute their music so no problem with sales channels. Only other thing fans worry about is how it will affect the chart performances. Of main concern are the Music Bank Kchart and the year end awards. Other charts like Mcountdown, Gaon Korean fans don’t really give them any significance. For Mubank, to get an idea consider we’ll get between 5% – 10% less Kchart points now. This could affect our wins in some cases – next week’s Mubank win for example, since the competition is tight and every point will make a difference. But for most cases it won’t have much effect for SNSD. What difference does it make whether we get 20,000 or 18,000 points, it is still a dominating number. And we may get 5 Mubank wins instead of 6, no big deal. For year end awards, it’s unclear how they will tally the points with SM not being on Mnet so it’s hard to say anything right now but I would think that in the end the damage won’t be that significant as other factors will make up for it over time(eg more points from other sites). And MAMA SM won’t participate, again no big deal. So even if things continue as the worst case I don’t think we really need to worry about anything at all:)

This week’s Music Bank we are almost certain to win again and claim our 5th trophy. Oh! is in its sixth week now and it is still doing extremely well on all the charts, it’s beyond everyone’s expectations. If it weren’t for the very strong competitions right now, Oh! could easily win at least two more Mubank wins. As mentioned we will lose some points this week because of the Mnet issue, and the other teams are doing really really well so for next week’s Mubank the other teams have better chances.

—

I don’t know much about how these business things work in Korea so I place a lot of my “trust” into silis’s statement. Glad it won’t harm the girls and a few percents off won’t be a big deal. No music bank win? Eh whatever 🙂 It’s sall good.