K-Pop Killed the Seven-Year Curse. Now It Has a Different Problem.
On April 5, S.Coups walked to the front of the stage at Incheon Asiad Main Stadium - four of his thirteen bandmates absent, serving mandatory military service - and announced that all of them had signed again. "After deep conversations among ourselves," he told the crowd, "all 13 of us decided to renew our contracts." Seventeen's second full-group renewal with Pledis Entertainment was, by the standards of K-pop's history, close to impossible. It happened anyway.
Three weeks later, BLACKPINK's group contract with YG Entertainment - renewed in December 2023 for what the industry believes was a three-year term - is approaching the window where renegotiation typically begins, and no one outside those talks knows what happens next. Each of BLACKPINK's four members now runs her own label: Jennie through Odd Atelier and Alta Music Group; Lisa through LLOUD; Jisoo through Blissoo; Rosé through The Black Label. The group contract that kept YG's stock from collapsing in 2023 is the only document connecting four independent businesses that have spent two years proving they don't need each other to function.
These two situations sit three weeks and one industry apart. Together, they describe K-pop's actual contract problem in 2026 - which is not the one that dominated headlines for the past decade.
The seven-year curse was K-pop's signature anxiety for so long that it became genre shorthand. Under the Fair Trade Commission's standard entertainment contract, initial exclusive deals run seven years. The pattern, starting with DBSK's 2009 lawsuit against SM Entertainment and repeating through nearly every generation since, was: group forms, spends years building a fanbase, reaches its commercial peak around year five or six, and then fractures at renewal because the members have outgrown the original terms. Fans learned to count. Year seven meant instability.
By 2026, the industry has largely engineered around it. Second renewals are shorter - typically three years - and split into group and individual tracks. Members sign for group activities through the agency while managing solo work through personal companies. TXT renewed early; Seventeen renewed twice without losing a member. BTS, the category's extreme case, never formally solved the question - they completed military service and resumed work, which bought the conversation several more years. The seven-year structure remains in the law, but the contracts built around it have become flexible enough that most major groups no longer arrive at year seven with a binary choice.
The new structure works, mostly. The Seventeen renewal is its clearest success. All 13 members - including two Chinese nationals not subject to military service, one Canadian citizen, and nine South Korean men navigating staggered enlistment schedules - found terms that held. "We'll row forward together in the same ship," S.Coups said. Eleven years in, that line landed as something other than performance.
But the flexible structure comes with a cost that the BLACKPINK situation makes explicit: it can hold a group together on paper while the actual business of being a group quietly dissolves. An industry insider told the Korea Herald in February that BLACKPINK's recent world tour "at times felt more like individual performances than a cohesive group show." The Deadline EP, released February 27 with five tracks, had no confirmed full-group promotional schedule - a first for any major BLACKPINK release. YG's 2026 activity presentation, shared in March, mentioned BLACKPINK primarily in connection with the label's own 30th anniversary. The group's 10th anniversary arrives in August 2016. As of this writing, YG has announced nothing for it.
The comparison to Western acts runs in a different direction than K-pop observers usually draw it. The standard reference is the Beatles or One Direction - groups that broke up because the members outgrew the format. BLACKPINK's situation is closer to a band whose members have all signed solo deals with different managers, different labels, and different management philosophies, while technically still being a band. The Eagles spent 14 years in exactly that arrangement. It worked commercially and produced almost nothing musically. Whether BLACKPINK's group output under the current structure constitutes a continuation or a brand extension is a question the Deadline EP didn't resolve.
The third data point that doesn't fit neatly into either story is ENHYPEN. Heeseung's departure on March 10 - rebranding as EVAN, remaining under Belift Lab as a soloist - was framed by the label as a creative direction split rather than a contract dispute. His group contract reportedly doesn't expire until November 2027. That framing may be accurate. It may also reflect how the split-track structure creates new leverage points: if solo activities operate on separate terms, a member can effectively renegotiate their place in the ecosystem without waiting for a group renewal date. The separation happened inside the contract window. The mechanism that was designed to give members more freedom also gave them a cleaner exit route.
NCT's Mark Lee departed SM Entertainment on April 8, one day after Heeseung's announcement landed. His contract ended by mutual agreement; as a Canadian citizen, he faces no military service delay. Two major group exits in 48 hours, both framed as mutual, both following years of solo development that made the pivot plausible.
Seventeen's S.Coups said, that night in Incheon, "thinking about how there won't be group concerts for a while made me look back on the past 11 years." Several more members are scheduled to enlist in the coming months. The renewal guarantees the group exists in law. It does not guarantee what the group sounds like when it reassembles. BLACKPINK's contract situation will clarify, or not, before the end of this year. What clarifies with it is whether the flexible renewal model that fixed the seven-year curse actually preserved groups - or just extended the window before the same question returns in a different shape.
