Pledis makes another mess for itself with YouTube move & sasaeng response, this time angering SEVENTEEN fans

In this week’s episode of ‘Which record company can fuck up the most?’ the answer probably isn’t Pledis Entertainment, but they’re definitely in the running for most likely to have chosen a course of action via random spinning wheel.

In addition to PRISTIN fans being near rioting, and them narrowly avoiding a NU’EST fan riot, this week Pledis managed to piss off the SEVENTEEN fandom by announcing their plans to combine all their artists’ YouTube channels under one Pledis umbrella. Honestly it just sounds like Pledis are cutting costs and couldn’t keep their whole social media team, but either way this move was ill-advised.

The announcement was made just as it was announced that the song SEVENTEEN performed at MAMA over the weekend was going to be released as a special MV, and as such this has interfered with Carats’ plans to stream and buy it.

Anger about the move started off with a hashtag to boycott Pledis (“#PLEDIS_YOUTUBE_BOYCOTT #플레디스_계정통합_즉시중단”), quickly moving onto plans to dislike and report SEVENTEEN’s new MV teaser, to making sure everybody ONLY watches it on 1TheK’s channel. There’s also been talk of cancelling orders for SEVENTEEN’s ‘Season’s Greetings’ merchandise.

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All of this came to a head when Pledis released a statement (full statement here) about why they were choosing to do this, which essentially amounted to: ‘We’re really sorry you don’t like this but we’re doing it anyway.’

On the one hand, this makes total sense and will be easier for Pledis to manage. On the other hand, it makes no sense at all because SEVENTEEN’s YouTube channel has over 3 million subscribers and Pledis’ own has WAY fewer. Fans of Pledis’ other groups aren’t happy, but SEVENTEEN fans have been the most vocal so far, with Korean Carats holding an actual protest outside the Pledis building. Of course, the protest is also due to Pledis trying to gently tell sasaeng fans off for potentially endangering SEVENTEEN instead of taking stronger action.

Whatever ‘discussing it internally’ means, it seems fairly unlikely that they won’t go ahead with this, because they’re a business and this would be a potentially effective streamlining method.

Either way, Carats are pretty divided and while some are honouring the boycott, others are pointing out the absurdity of reporting and disliking SEVENTEEN’s MV, considering there’s basically nothing SEVENTEEN can do about it.

Somehow, I don’t think targeting SEVENTEEN’s MV in order to tell their company off will do much.

Either way, the one thing that everybody agrees on is that things are a mess at Pledis right now.

About Ells

Full time journalist & former boy group trash. (Not) full of bees. I like Epik High more than you do.