Disclaimer: These are just my thoughts on HYBE the past few days and is definitely not confirmed. Please don’t take any of this to be true.
INTRODUCTION
On January 1, 2021, Big Hit Entertainment (hereinafter referred to as Big Hit) introduced a new boy group that will be debuting under their Japan subsidiary. The news has sparked some questions among PLUShies about whether the name “HYBE” will be for the new boygroup or not. According to recent trademarks from Big Hit Japan, it was discovered that the name of the boygroup will actually be &TEAM.
So in the midst of celebration among PLUShies, there were a few questions still being thrown around but the one main question was...
Is HYBE the name of the new girl group?
Theories and different takes on HYBE’s purpose made its way around Twitter and some of the popular ones include:
The name of the group to debut under Big Hit and Source Music
A social platform
Streaming service for music
But after running the service mark applications through a couple programs and watching both corporate briefings in 2020 several times, there’s another possible theory that we could consider.
BACKGROUND
I. HYBE Activity in Chronological Order
December 18, 2019
A little more than a month after the last PLUS Global audition in Ho Chi Minh City, Big Hit applied to trademark the name HYBE. [source]
October 7, 2020
Nearly a year later, Big Hit trademarked several other HYBE-related items including 2 different logos and 2 face-marks. [logo 1 source] [logo 2 source] [face-mark 1 source] [face-mark 2 source]
II. TRADEMARK CLASSIFICATIONS
If you look through each of the 5 trademarks, you’ll see that they’re listed under various Classes including 35, 38, 41, 42, 43, and 45. These are the identifications for those classes:
These classes are very similar to many projects and campaigns that I’ve helped with that provided “portable entertainment”. I remember one of the organizations dealt with a sort of an app and amusement park combo where the app can act as a map and an interactive game at the same time.
III. CORPORATE BRIEFING
During February 2020′s corporate briefing, CEO Lenzo Yoon introduced a new plan they were planning to roll out sometime in 2020. Around the 30:19 mark of the video, he starts talking about what Big Hit’s plans were to help innovate the fans experience.
Their first plan is to boost up customer service experiences at the various tour stops that BTS does. “We will turn cities hosting these concerts into a festival.” Big Hit plans to turn the places around the concert area into “tour villages” so that fans can enjoy both the show and play tourist by doing site seeing, pop shops, cuisines, etc.
Here’s the video to the corporate briefing:
MY REACHING THEORY
In all of trademarks above, you can see that the classes they have under them can possibly imply that HYBE might possibly be this tour village. When looking at the classes of each trademark, you’ll find that the two trademarks from October 2020 without the slogan WE BELIEVE IN MUSIC are listed in all 6 classifications.
The other two with the slogan is only listed 38, 41, 42, and 45. The two classes not included were 35 and 43, which includes the retail, dining, and accommodation services part of the brand. So there might be two parts of HYBE, one that deals with the show aspects while possibly broadcasting it and the other deals with the tour villages and the more social part.
The reason they didn’t roll it out is probably because the pandemic put a halt to some plans. It’s been known that Big Hit has been taking a business approach in a lot of the things the past year and a half, so it made sense to try to take the business-like theory approach instead of a Big Hit universe one.
PERSONAL TAKE
I personally would love the group name or label to be HYBE because I’ve gotten used to the word being used in most of our theories. Given that it would be a risk for Source Music and Big Hit to debut PLUS Global’s new girl group nearly the same time as Belift’s I-LAND girls, they have no choice but to debut PGNGG during Q1.
If Big Hit wants to take a business approach by introducing all these new groups under various sub-labels at once, they would need to do it properly by keeping both girl groups at least 9+ months from each others debut dates. There were several theories going around about parts of what I just covered and I definitely see why some thought it could be the label name. The classes they fall under seem to point that way so it’ll be exciting to see if it’ll actually be the sub-label name or a streaming app! Either way, we’ll be getting news soon about the girls, whether or not the HYBE name is involved.
