SHINee

SHINee

SHINee is a South Korean contemporary boy band formed under the label S.M. Entertainment in the year 2008. The group consists of five members: Lee Jinki (Onew), Kim Jonghyun (Jonghyun), Kim Kibum (Key), Choi Minho (Minho) and Lee Taemin (Taemin). The group was introduced as a R&B boy group by their company with the goal to become trendsetters in all areas of dance, music, fashion, etc. They first made their debut with the single “Replay” on May 25^th 2008, on SBS’s Inkigayo (a popular music show in South Korea).

The group’s songs are mostly written and composed by the member Jonghyun but on some occasions, all the members take part in writing the lyrics to most of the songs in their album. As each of them have a different role in the group e.g. Jonghyun being the main vocalist composes their songs, and rappers Key and Minho write the raps in their songs. However during their early stages, the company that they were under were the ones who wrote the songs and composed them for the group. As they are now considered as one of the senior groups in the K-pop industry with 8 years of experience, they are also one of the most respected groups around. This makes them to be Sunbae-nims (a term in Korean which means a person who is more experienced in a field of industry longer than you) and with this comes the fact that groups that are younger than you would cover your songs. EXO are hugely known Internationally and in Asia, they are also under the same label as SHINee and are 4 years younger than SHINee in the music industry. They once covered “Why So Serious?” by SHINee in 2013 as well as having the opportunity to perform a SHINee song on stage with them during their debut era, the song they covered was called “Lucifer.” Furthermore a group that have recently debuted called NCT127 (also under the same label as SHINee) covered SHINee’s debut song – “Replay.”

Since they are under a highly protected company, the chances of having any of their music leaked online is very unlikely. S.M Entertainment is one of, if not the most popular and well known company in K-pop who hold great power, and it is always their duty to keep safe all the music that their artists are working on, until they are deemed to release it for the public. Their music can be found on Spotify if it were to be searched, pretty much all their songs and albums can be found here. It is not clear exactly how much SHINee make through Spotify as their record label are not the ones who upload the albums, and because of this, this information is hard to find.

SHINee are under the label S.M. Entertainment since 2008 and still currently are, and in addition to this, they made their Japanese debut in 2011 under EMI Records Japan which is linked in with Universal Music. S.M. Entertainment is home to many of South Korea’s legendary bands that have formed over many years. These include boy groups such as: H.O.T, SHINWHA, TVXQ/DBSK, Super Junior, Girls’ Generation, SHINee, BoA, F(X), EXO, Red Velvet, NCT, NCT127 and NCT Dream. All of these groups as very well known in the general public in Korea as well as being known internationally over the years in which K-pop has bloomed.

To be specific, there is no certain genre that the label produces music in, this is due to the fact that there are many artists signed to their company, all who have a different style musically. The genres that the label produces are k-pop, electropop, dance – pop, pop, R&B, hip hop, EDM and trot.

The member Taemin collaborated with his best friend and label mate Kai from EXO in his solo debut for his mini album that was released in 2014 with the track “Pretty Boy,” the lyrics for it were written by Taemin’s band member Jonghyun and was a huge hit as the two – referred to as “Taekai” by fans are known to be amazing dancers, and with Taemin’s vocals and Kai’s rap in the upbeat song, it was hugely famous. Another collaboration would be Jonghyun and Chen of EXO, who released a single trach called “A Day Without You,” as one of S.M. Ballads. In addition to this, there was a time when SHINee collaborated with their label girl group mate F(X) for a single that was called “Lollipop” with a funky and upbeat tune. There has also been instances where Key collaborated with many of the Girls’ Generation members for their solo debuts.

SHINee’s records are distributed by KT Music and Naver (a social media website that is used in South Korea to view new music releases. They also have a Vevo channel on Youtube which is called SHINeeVevo - https://m.youtube.com/user/SHINeeVEVO?

They have not been promoted or collaborated with any other company within the Vivendi group. However they have appeared on many adverts for different brands to promote the product. These include “Nature Republic” which is a very famous brand in South Korea known for their amazing skin products. “The Saem” is a popular cosmetics store that is both affordable and good quality for the public. Another one would be “Shilla Duty Free,” which sells the widest range of cosmetics and perfumes, mostly in Asia – Pacific airports. Moschino is an Italian luxury fashion house who specialize in ready-to-wear, fashion accessories, leather, shoes, luggage, perfume etc. One of their all time famous brands was “Ppusyeo Ppusyeo,” which is a noodle brand that quickly became well known after SHINee filmed an advert for it in 2010 and have recently filmed another one in 2016. Not to mention that member Key is one of Jill Stuart’s model and has helped modelling for their bags. SHINee have been filming CFs since their debut and are still doing so.

When they first debuted, their target audience were girls that were older than them (during 2008 all the members were teenagers) this quickly attracted a lot of people’s attention as the culture in Korea is different, and older women being fans of younger boys is viewed as something odd, in fact it is the total opposite. It also helped that their debut song’s Korean name was “Noona Neomu Yeppeo.” “Noona” refers to an older girl, “neomu” means very and “yeppeo” means pretty, so the phrase translates to “Girl, you are very pretty.” The fact the SHINee are a contemporary band means that they change their music style each time they have a comeback, this would result in them targeting many different types of audiences of various music styles and ages.

Their last two albums were called “Odd” which came out in 2014 and “1 of 1” that was just recently released – October 5^th 2016. Ways in which they promoted their albums was very wide ranged. These included things such as TV show appearances, interviews during music shows and photoshoots, live performances on many music shows such as Inkigayo, Music Bank, Music Core, MCount Down, Mnet, Melon etc. They also made appearances in live and viewable radios. In fact Jonghyun himself hosts a radio show called “Blue Night” that airs at midnight and goes for a hour. The whole team have come to Jonghyun’s radio show 4 times now, as well as Sukira, ShimShimtapa and KBS World. Their photoshoots were to help promote their albums more as they were released as magazines with little snips of their interview. S.M. Entertainment has established billboards for SHINee as this is a compulsory way for promoting.

Other ways in which they promoted SHINee’s albums was through S.M. Entertainment’s Official website : http://m.smtown.com  They also have an official Twitter page that allows fans to follow in on the new updates that the group would be having. In addition to this, Onew, Jonghyun and Key have social media accounts that include Instagram and Twitter which allows them to post or tweet about their new album.

Since SHINee are a group that mostly promote in either South Korea or Japan, their way of promoting is very similar. They usually release a music video teaser in Korea, this is a short clip that consists of maybe 15 seconds of the actual music video which would be released probably in the following day or two on the company’s Youtube page. Soon after that, they perform in music shows which allows the fans to vote for their favourite band, and at the end of each day, there would be a winner, this would carry on for a maximum of 5 weeks. However in Japan, it’s a bit different. This is because even though they release a teaser video, the full music video would never be released on Youtube for fans to view. The reason for this is to make sure that the fans buy the physical album. There are many concerts that take part in both South Korea and Japan that SHINee get to perform for 3-5 days each year, either in the Tokyo Dome, or in Seoul.