BRANDNEW MUSIC

BRANDNEW MUSIC is one of the cleaner examples of a Korean company that never fully separated idol management from producer culture. Founded in 2011 by Rhymer after the Brand New Stardom split, the Seoul label built its identity across hip-hop, R&B, and vocal records before extending that logic into idol development. The result is a company that has usually felt more music-first than scale-first.

That approach became clearest with AB6IX, the group BRANDNEW MUSIC launched in 2019 after Lee Daehwi and Park Woojin brought post-Produce 101 heat into the rollout. Instead of chasing generic mid-size-agency formulas, the label framed AB6IX around self-production, individual color, and a tighter artist-to-fandom relationship. That helped the company carve out a lane that felt more deliberate than flashy.

BRANDNEW MUSIC matters because it sits at an interesting intersection inside the Korean business. It is not one of the giant agency empires, but it has enough catalog depth and enough producer DNA to keep punching above its size. In 2026, that mattered again as the company entered public renewal talks with AB6IX ahead of the group's May contract expiry, putting the label back into the center of a real market conversation rather than a purely historical one.