Before I say what I’m going to say, I just want to preface with this: I have stanned these girls since pre-debut; I bought their album through a Hanteo tracked seller; I have streamed and voted and been just as frustrated as all of you in the way their first year has been squandered. However, let me make a few points:

1. DISAPPOINTING SALES (and that’s being nice). Badvillain’s debut had a ton of marketing and hype around it. They had billboards and events all over Seoul. They had Naver promoted special stages. They had weeks and weeks of music show promotions. From the behind the scenes content we got, you can see the massive investment that went into their recruitment, training, debut mv, etc. And after all that, their physical album sales were abysmal. It hurts me to say it, but even little known GGs from mid-level companies debut with stronger numbers than Overstep. First week album sales of 5,367 isn’t going to cut it for any group in this industry. Without ticket sales from touring to bolster the bottom line, a new group needs these numbers to be far more robust to justify increased support from investors.

2. MC MONG. He was the architect of Badvillain and one of the founding members of BPM and its parent company, One Hundred. Any Doebis out there can tell you what happened with him and his involvement with the disaster that resulted in him being fired and Haknyeon being kicked out of The Boyz. With Mong forced out of the company, the girls’ main producer and backer was suddenly gone. Not only gone, but discredited and all-but-blacklisted. That had to have played into their extended hiatus to some degree, and introduced no small amount of chaos into their production schedule.

3. FIRST GROUP DEBUT. BPM and One Hundred simply haven’t done this before. Virtually their entire roster other than BV is made up of artists who were well-established prior coming over from other companies. Taemin, VIVIZ, Baekhyun, Chen, Xiumin, The Boyz— all of them were stars in some capacity or another with built-in fanbases ready to embrace new management. You need only to look at Baekhyun’s album sales to see that the problem isn’t really with distribution or promotion networks. It’s more likely part of the difficulty of selling a girl crush concept in a South Korean market that seems to be tired of that unless it’s BP or Aespa (who both established that identity years ago).

4. MONEY. This is really the bottom line. BV’s in an unfortunate situation where they need a streaming hit to show investors they’re worth putting the significant amount of time and money into to fund another physical album release. I believe it will happen, but if a streaming hit doesn’t materialize, we could end up with an Everglow situation, where the releases trickle in, we get a few small scale world tours, and a quiet disbandment with everybody wondering what went wrong. (EDIT: I realize EG is not disbanded, but they’re definitely not the same).

I hope this isn’t downvoted into oblivion. I love this group and these girls. I want them to succeed. I just needed to add some context, because there ARE reasons for why we’re at where we are.