How ALLDAY PROJECT’s Daesang win exposed the industry’s visibility problem

By Dhaeshna Booma, Felicity He & Kayla Li

The 2025 Korea Grand Music Awards (KGMA) unfolded with all the familiar grandeur of a year-end K-pop award ceremony. The stage glowed under layers of lights, and idols sat shoulder to shoulder in long rows of chairs, waiting for the first of three winners of the Daesang, or Grand Prize, “Grand Honor’s Choice.” When the host announced ALLDAY PROJECT as the winner, clips highlighting subdued reactions from other idols began circulating online and were closely parsed by fans. Within minutes, questions formed about the unseen forces that shaped such early recognition.

Scrutiny focused mainly on ALLDAY PROJECT member Annie’s chaebol, or South Korean conglomerate, background. Her great-grandfather founded the Samsung Group, and her immediate family remains deeply embedded in South Korea’s corporate elite. That level of inherited influence inevitably shaped how the win was interpreted, particularly given how early in ALLDAY PROJECT’s career the recognition arrived. Shortly following the Daesang announcement, the group was dubbed with nicknames like “All Paid Project” and “Annie’s Dad Paid,” reflecting frustration  — less with Annie herself  — but more so with an industry that validates success before it has been sustained over time. These snarky sobriquets functioned as shorthand for a broader concern: that access, rather than achievement, increasingly determines who is rewarded at the highest level. 

Awards are often treated as the cleanest verdicts an industry can offer: impartial, earned, and untouched by the messier forces of money and access. In reality, they are shaped by visibility economies that reward sustained exposure as much as artistic achievement. Nowhere is this more openly acknowledged in Hollywood, where, according to Variety and Ireland’s RTE, industry-wide Oscar campaigning now exceeds $100 million annually. This funds private screenings, industry events, and targeted advertising, changing awards seasons into competitions for attention as much as merited recognition. The dynamics have been quietly reshaping media for years, with the 2025 Korea Grand Music Awards standing as a prominent example of how dramatically the system has shifted. 

The Daesang’s historical role was marking the culmination of an artist’s success industry-wide consensus around sustained cultural impact, not of a starting point, but the recent switch contrasts this role. For years, the highest prizes at Korean award ceremonies have tended to follow long careers of influence, rewarding artists only after their work had demonstrably reshaped the industry, such as SHINEE’s 2013 Melon Music Awards Artist of the Year Daesang five years after debut; however, quick ascents are common in K-pop and not inherently undeserved, shown by NewJeans’ Daesang haul during the 2023 awards season. Yet, despite how often fast-rising groups appear, the Daesang still tends to go to artists whose influence is already proven. ALLDAY PROJECT, by contrast, had yet to establish a comparable moment at the time of their win and had only been in the industry for five months, making it especially jarring.

 This tension between artistic merit and audience reach extends beyond K-pop. How recognition functions across media industries, where visibility often precedes, and even substitutes for, lasting influence has long shaped similar debates. At the Grammy Awards, Macklemore’s mainstream visible The Heist winning Best Rap Album over Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed, but more niche good kid, m.A.A.d city due to its chart success highlighted how commercial palatability is often prioritized over cultural impact. 

At the Academy Awards, this dynamic has been most clearly demonstrated through aggressive studio-led campaigning. A widely cited example is Green Book’s Best Picture win at the 2019 Oscars. Backed by Universal Pictures, the film benefited from an extensive awards campaign that emphasized its broad appeal to older and more traditional Academy voters, despite widespread criticism of its reductive portrayal of race. Its victory came at the expense of films like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which many critics argued offered a more challenging and culturally resonant examination of racism. This strategy echoed earlier campaigns pioneered by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax in the 1990s, where relentless lobbying and targeted messaging reshaped Oscar outcomes. These campaigns revealed how sustained promotion could determine which was ultimately chosen.

K-pop functions under a similar logic. Weekly music shows such as “KBS Music Bank” and “SBS Inkigayo” serve as the engine in an idol’s promotional cycle, driving fan engagement, media coverage, and chart performance. Each appearance generates clips, fancams, and viral moments that extend far beyond the broadcast itself. That exposure comes at a steep cost borne entirely by agencies. Debuting a group under a major label can exceed $7.5 million, factoring in talent scouting, years of training, housing, food, facilities, and instructor salaries. According to Koreaboo, a single promotional cycle, including music videos, award show marketing, and comeback production, can cost over $1 million per group. Visibility, in this system, is not organic. It is purchased. ALLDAY PROJECT reflects this pattern, having a nearly three week long promotional schedulce for their debut song “FAMOUS,” appearing on several music shows in addition to high quality music and performance videos.

As these costs rise, the K-pop industry’s long-held “rags to riches” narrative becomes increasingly untenable. Training now resembles private tutoring, accessible primarily to those with existing wealth or elite networks. Scholars such as Professor Lee Dong-joon of Sungkyunkwan University have noted that idol preparation has shifted toward high-cost investments tied to agency access, normalizing privilege within debut pipelines rather than treating it as an exception to The Korea Times.

Supporters of the current system — including major entertainment agencies, award show organizers, and some industry analysts — argue that awarding based on artistic merit alone is unfeasible. Each year produces far more deserving work than any institution can reasonably recognize, which makes influence an unavoidable filter. Cultural impact requires visibility, and visibility is generally shaped by the resources of major companies. From this perspective, awards do not distort merit, but elevate what audiences have already encountered the most. 

Yet, influence cannot be treated as neutral when it grows out of capital instead of reception. When exposure is uneven from the start, awards reflect financial power more than cultural resonance.

The ALLDAY PROJECT controversy reveals a truth that extends beyond K-pop. It exposes how decisively the industry has already moved toward capital driven recognition, and how much is lost in the process. What disappears are the slow build artists, regional scenes, and experimental voices that cannot afford prolonged exposure or awards campaigns, regardless of talent. As awards continue to reward visibility over endurance, those voices remain unheard, not because they lack merit, but because they were never given the time or access required to be seen. 

If awards are to retain any credibility, reform has to begin at the nomination stage. Artists should have ways to nominate themselves regardless of agency backing. Voting bodies should ground their decisions in transparent criteria that separate exposure from artistic merit. Panels should include independent critics and regional voices outside industry promotion systems. Audiences have a part in this as well: people can choose to pay attention to smaller releases, follow independent creators, and share the work that moves them instead of only engaging with whatever is already dominating charts and algorithms. None of these changes will remove inequality entirely, but they will make recognition less dependent on which institutions can afford to manufacture attention. Until industry institutions confront this reality, money and power will continue to masquerade as merit, with awards lending their credibility to outcomes that were never truly about the art at all.