Pledis Reveals Teasers For New Boy Group's Show "Seventeen 17"

[miuratenshi.livejournal.com]

Earlier this year Pledis Entertainment announced plans for a seventeen member boy group (tentatively named Seventeen). Although they previously estimated the end of this year as the group’s debut date, the agency has pushed back the plans for the group’s debut to next year. Earlier today fans learned that the group would make their debut in January 2013.

Pledis also revealed that they will not be going the standard route of debuting the group in Korea before advancing overseas, but rather debut a group that is ready to promote in Korea, China, and Japan right from the get-go.

To create anticipation for the group’s debut, Pledis has released a pair of teaser videos for a program, ‘Seventeen TV’ that is designed to introduce the group and its members to the world. The teasers are extremely vague and don’t actually show images of any of the members, however there is a clip of at least one member singing and you hear other members talking, to give potential fans an idea of the group’s vocal talents.

Watch the quirky, but amusing, teasers below. What do you think, is seventeen members too much?

Sources: allkpop, pledisartist@Youtube

Comments

[frantastic.livejournal.com]

like I said in my rejected post

...SEVENTEEN MEMBERS

[markthatcoin.livejournal.com]

+1

[yingmoon26.livejournal.com]

LOL
my face was more like

[anconeous.livejournal.com]

IKR?!

[xzombiexzombiex.livejournal.com]

seriously omg

[hipployta.livejournal.com]

Are we headed to AKB48 territory?

Didn't that group with 24 members disappear?

EXO/SuJu is the upper tier of my group member limits

[hipployta.livejournal.com]

SuJu was unreal for me...but I really hearted Heechul and thus watched their reality shows LOL

EXO would have been questionable actually but since they broke them into two groups and then snatched my heart with the mandarin "What is Love" single I didn't have a choice but to get serious.

[hipployta.livejournal.com]

LOL...unhealthy for the crazy fangirls

I feel for M living in airports because their fans STAY on them. Not to mention when K or M go anywhere together or separately.

I met M at KCON...I felt no need to stalk them. I can't decide if I'm just a lazy fan or just don't care enough. Then again my celebrity awareness meter is apparently zero here in Miami

[asnindie.livejournal.com]

Pledis need to stick with making Hello Venus and Nuest popular first.

[anconeous.livejournal.com]

THIS

[http://users.livejournal.com/___varying/]

Exactly. idgi tbh. -.-

[lobotronic.livejournal.com]

SERIOUSLY WHAT ARE THEY EVEN DOING

[prek-drugz.livejournal.com]

I'm super excited!!!!
wat pledis doin with all these debuts tho

[sweetdary.livejournal.com]

Oh well A-peace still have 21 members.

[fabledlamb.livejournal.com]

Lamest teasers ever, but it's good to know that at least one guy out of 17 can hold a tune for a bit.

Why do I feel like this is a train wreck in the making? They might disappear faster than we can say 'nugu', or an already existing Pledis group might have to because of them. (I'm looking at you, NU'EST.)

I might be a little more convinced of the concept if it was one of the Big 3 managing them. They could promote them in all sorts of ways from CFs to dramas to TV shows and whatnot, especially the members who can't sing or dance that well and lbr, there will be plenty of those in that group. But even that wouldn't be a guarantee for this group to exist longer than 4 months.

Maybe a small company could make this group happen too, if this was their only artist and they could fully focus on them. But Pledis? They already have a roster of underperforming groups because they don't have the resources to let them all promote intensively enough to make them more successful. And now a 17-member group who'll require a truckload of resources, both in terms of money and personnel? Nobody under Pledis is going to profit from that in the long run...

[lovemaple.livejournal.com]

ikr? maybe pledis will partner up with ent. companies from china and japan to make it easier on themselves...

[fabledlamb.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're right! If they're debuting them in all 3 countries right from the start then yes, they most definitely have extra money coming in from China and Japan to help them with the debut. But I'm not sure if that will help them in the long run... The market in Japan is so saturated for kpop groups, even if they get a contract with Avex (like After School and Orange Caramel) I doubt Avex would be willing to invest too much in that group.

[asnindie.livejournal.com]

Idol groups are struggling big time as it is, unless they're all hot and amazingly fresh then they might have a chance but at the current rate of Idol decline, they have no chance tbh. Pledis isn't exactly the best ent company as it is, look at AS's dropping popularity. I'm surprised they even have the money for a new debut, Nuest and HV haven't done well, and Dambi flopped from what I gathered.

[fabledlamb.livejournal.com]

I thought they were on the right track with Nu'est but now they're taking things way too slow with them when they should be promoting the hell out of them BAP style :( I just don't get why they have to put that new group out now, this seems like the worst timing imaginable.

[http://users.livejournal.com/___varying/]

I was watching the Kpop segment of that Discovery Channel documentary, and they interviewed a TS Ent higher-up who was talking about how they actually decide on a group concept BEFORE selecting trainees to match, to avoid wasting time/resources? I don't really know how Pledis or other smaller agencies work (and not that TS actually sticks to its group concepts anyway, lol), but I wonder if adopting a similar strategy would be helpful since the size of the group makes it seem like they're debuting trainees simply for the sake of debuting them.

[frantastic.livejournal.com]

did you watch the documentary online? :O

[http://users.livejournal.com/___varying/]

Yup :) Here (not sure if there's more, though it doesn't seem like it):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MRCRztPn_Q

[frantastic.livejournal.com]

thank you!! <3

It was pretty interesting, wished the segment on TS Ent was longer...

[fabledlamb.livejournal.com]

IA, I think they're just letting them debut for the sake of it. I hope their concept isn't just "17-member group" because that novelty factor alone won't help them sell anything once everyone's found out that 14 out of 17 members are completely free of any talent XD

But let's say all of them have been thoroughly selected and are super talented and overwhelmingly handsome. I'm really wondering how Pledis is going to be able to support them. Even just getting them on one weekend music show is going to be a financial and logistic nightmare - 17 people plus managers/staff. They need cars, stylists, outfits, food. All of that would be more than 3 times as expensive as maintaining a 5-member group. And they'd have to make more than 3 times as much money as the average 5-member group by selling more than 3 times as many singles/albums/goods/tickets. Even with a solid fanbase the chances of that happening are very very slim. This is pretty much doomed to fail imo.

[0nlymemories.livejournal.com]

It definitely looks like "Hey guys, we have all of these trainees. If we release them, we have to eat all the money we put into training them, but if we debut them, maybe we can get a little of the money back before they disappear forever. Good? Good." to me.

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

It's not a 17-member group the way you seem to be thinking. It's 3 groups with 17 members. Like exo is 2 groups with 12 members. And they get to promote the same songs in different languages/countries at the same time so they won't lose time shuttling them back and forth between countries and not promoting them in korea while they try to tackle the japanese/chinese market.

But I'm betting they will still flop. XD AS doesn't seem nearly as popular as it "should" be, considering AS's longevity, and it's not like Pledis has a stellar track record. But I guess it's a better idea to debut 17 than tempest, since 17 has potentially greater payoff if they pull it off.

[fabledlamb.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks for clearing that up! If that's really what they're going to do then they'll totally lose their "omg, we're 17 gorgeous boys in one group, look at us" bonus.

Also, after that mysterious Pledisboss tweet earlier this year there's still a chance that Tempest are actually part of 17, right?

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Well, it was my original impression of what they were doing, at least. I dunno what tweet you are talking about, but if tempest and nuest are both part of 17 (and if I'm right), that would make nuest by default the korean sub-group, wouldn't it? And they already have songs in just korean, are they going to play catchup with that or what?

But I don't really know that much about the situation. ^^;;

[fabledlamb.livejournal.com]

I couldn't find an omona post for that twitter thing so here's the post from a Nu'est tumblr (http://nuestbabyren.tumblr.com/post/21900565227/yesterday-a-fan-tweeted-pledisboss-saying). It also says Nu'est might not be part of 17, so my guess it will be the 5 confirmed members of Tempest plus 12 other trainees.

And with the 3rd trailer posted earlier I'm kind of sure now they're going to be promoting as a full 17-member group (i.e. they won't be split into 3 groups for country-specific promotions). But I might be wrong, of course ^^; I suppose we'll have to wait for Pledis to release a full member list until we know for sure who made it into the group!

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Hm... I wonder if they changed plans or if this was the plan all along. Tempest doesn't really have anything to do with nuest if tempest is in 17, so either they scrapped something or they were just trying to build additional hype. Well, the CEO was a manager for SME back in the day, so maybe he imagines he can pull off a SuJu. >.>;;

[okadarei.livejournal.com]

actually, most of the boys have been recruited after they had the concept. Only TEMPEST members where previously there, before they re-did the whole thing.

[http://users.livejournal.com/___varying/]

Oh? That's better, then - it speaks of planning - though it's still going to be tough to manage imo. It'll be interesting to see the promo tactics: we're all sort of disbelieving about the number of members but the 48-family managed to make it work (and work well), so it's clearly not impossible if you have a good business model.

Ofc resources are a whole other issue, though if they had planned this from the start they would presumably have set aside the nec capital.

[okadarei.livejournal.com]

There are other good examples, less idolesque such LDH's family E-Girls, or EXILE themselves.

By the way it's all been planned, I guess this comes from long ago, and it's the way they ended up re-developing for the third or fourth time their previous Pledis Boyz project (previous to AS Boys and the pre-debut Pledis Boys). Kind of a way to get closer to the idea of get a real male version from the main concept of After School, which is meant for enrollments and graduations, but since people are that much cry-babies about this whole concept, they dropped it for NU'EST (originally meant to debut as 5 to 7 and grow until 10-11 members) and decided first to split it into NU'EST/TEMPEST and later to evolve TEMPEST into 17. Pledis does study a lot how the Japanese agencies work, so that is why their doings are different.

Also their current groups might not be super-popular, but AS still has done good this year. If they were that bad of an agency, their groups would just disband.

[seung-is-my-ho.livejournal.com]

17 members!!?? well dang that will be a new record, right? edit: whoops, forgot to check the comments!

[pepper.livejournal.com]

Why though? 17 members is too much. Imagine the boys splitting their (scarce) earnings into 17... yeah, I feel bad for them.

[in-noctem.livejournal.com]

I can't believe they're actually going through with this. Why would anyone think this is a good idea? More expenses, little pay off.

[purekpopology.livejournal.com]

I actually thought the teasers were really funny/cute, buuuuut I doubt this group will succeed. Unfortunate =(.

[erisinia.livejournal.com]

I've said it before--it seems like they're casually going 'hey guise big groups have worked before, let's do one!!1' without realizing what a fluke those big groups were. SuJu surviving was some kind of bizarre miracle, mostly based on them having variety prowess and a 'FUCK IMAGE OR WHATEVER, THAT SCREEN TIME IS *MINE* DAMMIT' approach. And a company that could support that many people until they started making a buck.

Starting off with a variety show is smart, but I have no expectations. Too tiring to stan a group that big. (they need to use the gateway drug method like suju, have a member or two here and there in different areas so you get into one first and then slowly get sucked into the group)

[0nlymemories.livejournal.com]

What do you think, is seventeen members too much?

Yes.

Seven is stretching my patience, I don't even think I can comprehend the idiocy of seventeen. Are they a boy band or a burlesque troupe, ffs.

[frantastic.livejournal.com]

I don't think they are even trying tbh

[the-erotomanic.livejournal.com]

i'm excited for this. cause i like big groups. i'm interested to see how the 17 boys will perform. i'll probably won't remember their names and faces, but if they're songs are good enough, i'll probably like them.

i hope nu'est will be part of seventeen.

[falling-empress.livejournal.com]

that girls eyes are humongous (second vid)

also, how did they video tape me...

[exo-cath.livejournal.com]

OMFG FINALLY YES!

Been waiting /ages/ for at least some teasers to come out!! Seriously though, it feels like ages I've been waiting for Seventeen's debut! There are a few tumblr/twitters dedicated to the trainees of the group and omg I'm so excited!!

Also I think Seventeen members is definitely alot but I'll get used to it. If the trainees on those blogs are really in the group then I only need to worry about learning the other half of the members that Pledis haven't confirmed yet lol.