NewJeans vs ILLIT: The HYBE Family Civil War, Explained
If you've been following K-pop news at all over the past year, you've probably seen headlines about "the HYBE conflict" or "the NewJeans dispute." The reality is messier and more interesting than any single headline captures, but the rough shape of it is this: two HYBE-affiliated girl groups — NewJeans (from sub-label ADOR) and ILLIT (from sub-label BELIFT LAB) — became the center of an industry-wide argument about concept ownership, internal label politics, and who gets to claim what aesthetic.
Here's a non-biased look at what actually happened, what's at stake, and why it matters for K-pop as a whole.
The setup: HYBE's "multi-label" model
HYBE operates differently from older K-pop conglomerates. Instead of running every group under one corporate umbrella (like SM does), HYBE owns multiple semi-independent sub-labels, each with its own creative leadership. ADOR (founded by producer Min Hee-jin to debut NewJeans) is one. BELIFT LAB (which debuted ILLIT) is another.
This structure was designed to allow creative diversity. Each sub-label runs its own artists, develops its own concepts, makes its own decisions. In theory, this prevents the homogenization that happened to some older labels' rosters.
In practice, when two sub-labels under the same parent company develop visually and sonically similar groups — that's when conflict starts.
The actual dispute
Min Hee-jin, ADOR's CEO and the primary creative architect behind NewJeans, publicly accused BELIFT LAB of copying NewJeans' aesthetic, music direction, and overall creative concept when debuting ILLIT in 2024. Her specific claims included the visual styling, the song production style, the music video direction, and choreography sensibility.
BELIFT LAB and HYBE leadership rejected those accusations, framing the dispute as either a misunderstanding or a power play by Min Hee-jin. The dispute escalated through legal threats, executive shake-ups, and an extended period of public negotiation. Through 2024-2025, the situation involved multiple statements, leaked emails, and ongoing legal proceedings.
The result has been one of the most public internal-label conflicts in K-pop history — and one that fans are still arguing about.
What's actually at stake
Strip away the personalities and the lawsuits, and three real industry questions sit underneath this:
- Who owns a concept? If a sub-label develops a distinct aesthetic, can a sister sub-label use similar elements? The legal answer is "probably yes — concepts aren't copyrightable." The cultural answer is much more complicated.
- How independent are sub-labels? If HYBE controls the parent company and is willing to step in, are sub-labels really independent? This dispute revealed how much power the parent corporation actually has over its sub-label leadership.
- What does this mean for fans? Fans who fell in love with NewJeans specifically because of their distinct aesthetic now watch a similar-looking group from the same corporate family. The fandom reaction has been intense — sometimes uglier than necessary.
The fan dimension
NewJeans' fanbase, BUNNIES, has been unusually protective. They argue ILLIT's existence specifically undermines NewJeans' positioning. ILLIT's fans, GLLIT, push back that ILLIT is a separate group developing its own identity and shouldn't be reduced to a "copycat" narrative.
Both fandoms have valid points. Both have also produced toxic behavior toward the other. The K-pop fan ecosystem doesn't handle internal-label disputes well — fandoms organize around clear villains, and when the "villain" is another act under the same parent, neither side gets the cathartic resolution they're used to.
Why it matters beyond HYBE
The NewJeans / ILLIT situation is the most public example of a broader question: as K-pop conglomerates grow, how do they manage internal creative competition? SM Entertainment will face similar questions if it ever has two sister groups operating in the same lane. YG has historically avoided this by sequencing groups carefully. JYP has its "department" structure to address it.
HYBE's multi-label model is still relatively new. The NewJeans / ILLIT case is essentially the first stress test of whether the structure can handle creative overlap. So far the verdict is: imperfectly.
The hardest part of K-pop label politics isn't the lawsuits. It's that every dispute happens in front of fandoms who already feel personally invested in the outcome.
What probably happens next
Most likely, HYBE will continue refining the boundaries between sub-labels — clearer creative territories, sharper visual differentiation, possibly internal review processes for concept overlap. Min Hee-jin's role within or outside of HYBE will continue to evolve. NewJeans and ILLIT will both continue activities and develop in different directions, simply through the natural drift of releasing more music.
The underlying tension — how to scale a creative organization while maintaining distinct identities — won't be solved here. But the industry got a real-world case study in what happens when it isn't addressed early.