After Coming Up Next Season 2 Episode 4 aired, the internet was naturally flooded with talk about Separate sung by Koo Taehwan and Lee Ion.
It was only natural.
The buzz of a variety show aiming for a 20% viewership rating, the nationalistic sentiment triggered from the Apple ad contract and schooling the white band BOTY, and the expectations for Sedalbaekil’s music as its own brand.
All of these combined together.
Even though the song hadn’t officially been released yet, loop videos on YouTube had already reached millions of views within hours.
But that was the external reaction; the internal response was a bit more complicated.
-Why are only Taehwan and Ion singing?
-The captions listed the artists as Koo Taehwan – Lee Ion???
-Is it because Masked Robber got popular that they’re doing a unit?
-But they said they’re preparing for the second album. When do they even have time for unit activities?
-Probably just a leftover track while preparing the album. Released for variety show content haha.
-No. In the show’s flow, this came up while showing the album work.
-It would be such a waste if this track isn’t included on the album.
-What is it what is it what is it. I’m so curious.
-I asked them on the official site but they just said it’s a secret.
-The fact that it’s a secret means it’s not some leftover track.
This was the response from all-fans, almost-all-fans, and individual fans who weren’t hostile toward the other members — the moderate T.Ts…
-Why does Han Sion always favor Taehwan and Ion?
-Lee Ion can’t even sing for shit, he’s just riding on his looks, but he hogs so much screen time.
-Am I the only one who feels like Han Sion is gaslighting the others?
Onsaemiro and Choi Jaesung’s personal fans were in uproar.
They tweaked the names to avoid search detection, but anyone in the fandom knew what they meant.
Back when T.T recruited its second generation, Sedalbaekil didn’t have many individual fans.
The show’s start with Coming Up Next was a team competition that rallied them together against external enemies like Take Scene.
Then they banded together again after Ryan Entertainment’s shady attacks.
But after the massive success of The First Day, personal fans started to increase rapidly.
And naturally, noise and issues related to personal fans, which hadn’t existed before, began to multiply.
Knowing all this, K-pop fans (even those who weren’t Sedalbaekil fans) assumed Separate wouldn’t actually be released.
Even if it did release, they thought it wouldn’t be at this timing.
But they were wrong.
[Unit Masked Robber – Separate Official M/V]
Incredibly, the music video dropped the very next day.
Originally, the unit name for Koo Taehwan and Lee Ion wasn’t Masked Robber.
But they’d been using that name for months, grew attached to it, and changed it at the last minute.
Han Sion voiced some reluctance about the name being odd.
‘Still better than Sedalbaekil…’
‘Sedalbaekil or Masked Robber…’
Knowing their own lack of naming sense, the members of Sedalbaekil had long abandoned the desire to come up with better names.
Besides, considering the popularity of the name Masked Robber from Self Made, it might not be a bad choice.
The problem wasn’t the name but the music video.
Seeing the surprise release, the public assumed it would just be a clip-stitched MV using scenes from Self Made.
But it wasn’t.
If you didn’t need it anymore
Why did you give it to me
The thing you had
Why did you share it
It was a drama-type music video, often used in R&B.
The story was simple: both Koo Taehwan and Lee Ion courting the same bad girl in their own ways.
The plot was cliché, but the cinematography and scale were no joke.
And visually, the contrast between Lee Ion’s absurd good looks and Koo Taehwan’s dangerously edgy vibe worked perfectly.
Especially for teenage girls.
Sedalbaekil had a stronger following among twenty-somethings, and compared to other boy groups, it had an unusually large male fanbase.
This was all thanks to Han Sion’s musical color, but no content pleases everyone.
Han Sion’s pursuit of higher musical completeness and uniqueness didn’t always appeal to the idol fandom’s core teenage demographic.
So Masked Robber’s vibe clicked unexpectedly well with that younger audience.
More precisely, it was the vibe Koo Taehwan and Lee Ion gave off.
Moreover, Han Sion made all of Masked Robber’s R&B tracks into extreme easy listening.
Immediately catchy, pleasant to listen to, hard to get tired of.
Though labeled easy listening, it wasn’t like the moombahton of Summer Cream, but closer to the bedroom pop of Resume.
Frankly, Han Sion probably had the world’s deepest understanding of easy listening at this point.
In 2018, easy listening wasn’t so much a genre but a category.
Music made effortless and pleasant to listen to was called easy listening.
However, after the seismic shifts caused by the pandemic, the term easy listening would evolve.
Artists would grow tired of their music being boxed into genres.
Especially Black artists frustrated at being labeled hip-hop for doing contemporary R&B, or white artists being categorized as post-rock for doing emo hip-hop.
Gradually, artists started calling their music easy listening instead, and by the 2020s, it became a genre on its own.
A genre pursuing the most pleasing sounds and melodies.
A genre that fit perfectly with streaming-era public taste.
Han Sion had lived that era and savored it for a long time.
The essence of it was packed into Masked Robber’s album.
Which meant—
[Unit Masked Robber – Courtship Official M/V]
They revealed to the world that this was not just a single, but a full album.
The double titles Separate and Courtship were shot in the U.S. with a professional Hollywood crew.
So aside from sheer scale (which State Of Mind still held as the largest), it was the highest quality music video Sedalbaekil had ever produced.
Just three days after Self Made Season 2 Episode 4 aired, the album was released.
Title: Stage Side A
Artist: Masked Robber
Track: 08
Track List:
- Separate (Title)
- Courtship (Title)
- Last Night
- Chicken Game
- If We Look at Different Places
- Shower
- Vitamin D
- Stage
There wasn’t even much promotion.
Come to think of it, The First Day was also released with little pre-release promotion.
It felt more like they promoted it after releasing it.
But when they released TFD, they were still dealing with Taehyoh and Ryan Entertainment’s interference. That wasn’t the case now.
Sedalbaekil was now firmly part of the mainstream.
Ironically, Ryan Entertainment was now quietly avoiding Sedalbaekil.
They wouldn’t appear or operate in any area where Sedalbaekil was active.
Because being associated with Sedalbaekil was now damaging to their own image.
So while this was a situation where they could easily promote, it almost felt like there was too little promotion.
Even if it was a unit album.
And this stirred discontent among Koo Taehwan and Lee Ion’s personal fans.
-The songs are so good but they dropped it without any promo?
-Did they release it reluctantly?
-I feel like Han Sion checks out emotionally when he’s not leading the project himself.
For Han Sion, this was ridiculous.
He had poured more effort into this album than The First Day.
In fact, TFD was easier.
He was rearranging songs by legendary artists, from whom even Han Sion could learn.
But Koo Taehwan and Lee Ion’s fans were dissatisfied, which rubbed Onsaemiro and Choi Jaesung’s fans the wrong way.
Regardless of promo, the album was created based on the sacrifices of the other members, so of course they weren’t happy.
Of course, the angriest were Han Sion’s own fans.
-Our Sion writes great songs, produces full albums, supports every member, but only gets hate. How does this make sense?
In a way, Han Sion’s fans probably saw the situation most accurately.
But all this was internal noise. From the outside, the view was completely different.
-Holy shit, this song is amazing lololol
-It’s proper R&B. Not some cheap rock ballad knockoff or weak imitation.
-lol exactly lolol. Honestly, all Korean R&B ends up being rock ballads lol. But this is real rhythm and blues.
-Damn, why is Lee Ion singing so well?
-Koo Taehwan wasn’t just an intro master… he’s just a master!
-Every part Koo Taehwan sings is addictive.
-Isn’t track 5 a total banger? If We Look at Different Places.
-Yeah yeah yeah. They should’ve made that the music video.
Top star, superstar, trend leader, trendsetter…
All those titles basically mean one thing — an entertainer with the highest brand image at that time.
So what advantage do such high-brand artists get?
The answer was simple.
When they release a song, people listen — at least once.
That alone was incredible.
Getting the public to praise the music, get addicted, or create sustained buzz is the job of A&R, composers, and singers.
The marketing team’s role is simply to get people to listen in the first place.
That’s the ultimate task of marketing — and incredibly hard.
But for artists with strong brand images, marketing becomes redundant.
When The Beatles were in their prime, they didn’t need pre-release promotions.
Whenever The Beatles dropped an album, the whole world listened.
If LPs sold out, people hunted down bootlegs and pirate copies.
Why?
Because they wanted to listen.
Sedalbaekil might not be The Beatles, but for people who had heard TFD, it created the same feeling.
If Sedalbaekil releases a song, you just want to check it out.
In Korea, many listeners experienced full-length albums for the first time thanks to Sedalbaekil.
And they became addicted to the thrill of following an album’s narrative from track 1 to the end.
But few artists can deliver that satisfaction, and it always leaves people wanting more.
So they had no reason not to listen.
Thus, Masked Robber’s Stage Side A began selling at a terrifying speed.
The physical copies hadn’t even dropped yet…
But the eight tracks quickly dominated the top of the charts.
Little Pink Starfish 
Leave a comment