The NewJeans Effect

Happy weekend!

Hi, it’s me again I’m back! Let me get you another story ASAP! I missed you all so much that I decided to send out another post for you all this week. I’ll give you all some highlights before we get to our story today.

Weekend Trends

• A slew of new music was released this week including Drake’s new album which has been getting mixed reviews. Guess not everyone is a fan of dogs.

• Rent is actually decreasing in many cities across the US right now. Sadly for my locals, Seattle is not one of them.

• The Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce spotlight continues as now Traivs Kelce’s mom has started getting media attention for just interacting with Taylor Swift during the Chief’s last home game

• Crocs will apparently be selling cowboy boots to celebrate Crocs Day later this month. Raise your hand if this is the first time you’ve heard of Crocs Day

Today’s Main Report

What is the NewJeans effect?

A phenomenon has been trending around the interwebs lately known as the NewJeans effect. For the uninformed NewJeans is a band based out of South Korea that has been taking the world by storm lately producing hit after hit. To put it simply this “effect” is the idea that everything NewJeans is touching right now is turning to gold. This is no small feat either given that NewJeans as a whole and individual members have been making promotional rounds like crazy advertising for countless brands. Yet no one seems to be growing tired of them or what they are advertising.

Let’s look at some of these numbers NewJeans is putting up. The group’s most recent collab by making a song with League of Legends had the most views within the first 24 hours of being up relative to any other League of Legends collab so far getting 7.4 million views in the first 24 hours. The group is also the fastest K-Pop girl group to pass 1 billion streams on Spotify reaching that number in only 219 days (less than a year). Coca-Cola Korea was also noted to have seen noticeable sales increases after releasing their collaboration song with them earlier this year as well.

The list can go on with all the successful collaborations the group has done in their short tenure. Their individual and collective popularity is certainly a feat to be reckoned with. Their own individual merch collections consistently sell out within minutes if not seconds of going live. As most recently the live stream for one of the member’s birthdays, Hanni, was averaging about 2 million viewers during the 30-minute stream almost reaching 3 million viewers at one point. Something I’m sure many others in the live-stream space could only dream of. The shirt that Hanni wore in that livestream had sold out in seconds the month prior as a merch drop, and can now be seen reselling for up to four times the original value on resale shops.

My most recent article talked about how Taylor Swift was doing similar influencing around football with her fans. However, unlike Taylor Swift and her Swifties Newjeans and their fan base, bunnies, are still fairly new to the scene only being a fully formed group for little over a year. The group’s discography couldn’t even reach an hour right now. Taylor Swift has spent years cultivating this following growing her base with each hit she pulls out. So what is NewJeans doing that allows them to be so popular with such a strong influencing power?

As I’ve said before it’s about the community and people wanting to follow people. I won’t dive into the parasocial dynamics the K-Pop industry pushes onto others today but Newjeans does a really good job of pushing out content that shows off all their personalities and really makes them seem so relatable to others. They also do a really good job of making their fans included by constantly talking about their fan base "bunnies” and acknowledging them positively. Making banger after banger of music, with catchy dances also seems to help with their popularity along with the above-mentioned scarcity in their songlist leaving people just wanting more of them. People want more NewJeans and they want to be like NewJeans so they are going to gravitate towards wherever they are whatever they may be selling.