Everything in kpop is so fake and manipulated now I miss the good old 2nd gen where groups selling 100k or an Mv hitting 10 million was a big deal now kpop's popularity is so inflated fans and companies use so many strategies to inflate a groups' popularity enpipen just came out with an album they sold more than 700k units but the songs are not charting on any k-chart besides bugs which fans manipulate by mass streaming by making korean accounts everything is so fake now
MV views= 70-80% views are due to fans doing mass streaming plus ads bought by companies FAKE!!
Album sales= fans bulk buying, multiple versions to boost sales, fansigns by companies where you have to buy 100s of albums to even get a chance to talk with your fav, Chinese bars of idols popular in Chinese markets bulk buy albums from anywhere to 50000 to even 500-600k for more popular artists thus even if you are only popular in a certain niche you can sell million albums due to dedicated fandoms
Personalities: FAKE!!!!
Live singing: most idols don't sing live these days either it's prerecorded vocals, loud backtrack or some combination of pitch correction+autotune and now they are using live recorded vocals where they even record mistakes which makes it sound so realistic most fans don't realize that their favs are lip singing but its a fraud, it's manipulative as hell Aespa haven't sung live even once and they already have one PAK the standards are becoming so low now back in the early 2000s artists like britney, jlo and mj use to get so much flak for lip synching but their concerts were so high energy it made sense for them to not sing everything live but now groups with more than 5-7 members aren't expected to sing live because HARD CHOREOS when most of these idols sing max 40-50 seconds per song they are even lip singing in concerts these days like what do these idols do all these years for training???