pmrowla

Park Boram's team won on Sugarman!

Rough translation is basically that he says it's been a long time since he got to see Yujin, and he thanks her for taking the time out of her schedule to come visit them in Busan (he's her old vocal coach and she visited his school). He also makes a joke about her moving to Busan because on the photo she wrote "I want to move to Busan" when she signed it.

If they had come from a small company I would have said they had a very successful debut, but the reality of it is that they did poorly when you take into account that they came from a company with the financial backing of KeyEast. The failure of the group is entirely on the mismanagement by MusicK. I understand that the Ark was their first idol group and that it was a learning experience for everyone involved, but given the company's resources they should have been able to promote the group a lot better than they did. edit: and yes I also like some other rookie groups with very small fanbases that still manage to be stable, but it all comes down to whether or not a company is willing to put the effort into keeping things stable, and MusicK is obvious not willing to do that here.

The reception in Korea was positive but their fanbase was always very small. The busking events attracted large crowds partly because of where they did them, and partly because of general kpop and girl group fans, but as far as a dedicated Ark fanbase, they never really had much widespread appeal.

It should be pretty obvious to everyone by now that the ark is done and musick isn't going to even bother making any kind of statement about it.

Park Boram will be coming back this month with a new single! http://entertain.naver.com/read?oid=117&aid=0002747087 (Korean source) Also, she will be on JTBC's Sugar Man next Tuesday (10:50PM KST)

Oh thanks, I fixed the link.

Park Boram had a fansign event today as a special thing for a new Mnet store opening and I took some pictures: (full hires set here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskxxqJJq)

All the buzz is only coming from international fans. Among the Korean fans, people basically noticed the website stuff and tweeted/posted on the fan cafe asking MusicK about it. Now they mostly seem to have accepted that the lack of a response regarding the Ark in combination with MusicK actively making statements about other artists (HJY & Juna) is almost definitely intentional and means the Ark is probably done. But again, no one knows for sure because MusicK won't tell anyone anything.

Yes, she's just going as a solo singer now.

This is correct, while they might be holding auditions specifically for Music K in this case (which isn't even clear because there's no audition information on the Double J site now), Music K has nothing to do with them making the advertisment. Double J just uses whatever stock photos they have on file for whichever company is using them to source talent. If you look through their twitter you can find identical copies of the poster for other agencies they've worked with, including Bighit, CJ E&M and Woolim https://twitter.com/doublejcompany

I took some pictures (more w/hi-res here https://flic.kr/s/aHskx41dRa)

Yeah I live in Seoul.

Her fan cafe might actually be closing soon, it was run by a bob girls fan who I guess doesn't really care about Migyo any more. Not sure if someone else will take over the existing one or if her new company will set up a different fan cafe.

Their fancafe hasn't been updated in a while, all of the links on it still point to the old musick youtube channel and the now nonexistent old musick/ark website. The only recent posts are fans asking what's going on with the new website and so on.

Her busking was good, and I think she will probably be doing more of them. There were a bunch of fan cammers there so videos of it should be going up soonish.

Playback is fine, they are 100% coming back after Jessica does her thing. It sucks that they had to delay for so long, but the tradeoff is they have a stable company and that will get a lot of media play. And in the meantime, Hayoung still has her weekly Arirang radio gig going, and her web drama should be coming out soon. I guess the other members haven't really been publicly active, but they're all doing fine too.

This is true. But the bigger issue that is leading to all this speculation is that the group is not listed on the website at all. It's been a like this for almost a full week, and the fact that Juna plus two groups that don't even exist yet (and won't for over a year!) are listed makes it seem likely that leaving the Ark out is intentional. Also, when they reposted the MV onto MusicK's new youtube channel they just titled it "The Light MV"without even mentioning the artist name in either the title or video description. All of the other reposted MV's on the new channel include the artist names in the titles, which again makes this seem intentional. (It's worth noting here that on the positive side, Minju and Yuna's MV's both have the artist listed, so maybe they are in fact still with MusicK). edit: I went and checked all the old MV postings to see if maybe they just copy/pasted a previous MV title that also left out "The Ark" but it looks like all three of Loen (1thek), MusicK's old channel, and the Ark's official channel each included "The Ark" in the titles.

They have had a mini album mostly done for a while, but originally it was delayed for the Eric Nam collab, and then it was delayed again after the Coridel acquisition. I'd expect they comeback very quickly after Sica finishes her solo promotions.

I think it will be relatively soon. But the one thing is no one knows if Coridel would want to manage 2 of their artists promoting at the same time. If not they'll have to wait until after Jessica's solo thing.

Coridel (Tyler Kwon's company) bought Clear Company towards the end of last year. The rebranding to Coridel Ent is recent but not too surprising since it matches the parent company naming for everything else, and since it keeps the obvious association between Sica and Tyler Kwon.

No

The 5 of them were in Hongdae, about a 10 minute walk from the new MusicK offices/studio. This does not mean anything regarding a comeback. Please don't read too far into it. But yes, I would assume that since Yujin is back with the members, if/when they come back it will be as 5.

I was wrong, and it was them. I saw the members tonight while I was walking through hongdae to get something to eat. They weren't performing tonight, just walking around and some other street performers. All 5 members were there including Yujin. They also looked like they wanted to be left alone/to not be recognized, so I didn't say anything and only took this one photo, sorry it doesn't have Yujin in it. Click here to view the Tweet