As in any prominent growing industry, the next generation on average always has the higher baseline than their predecessors. They often have more resources and more importantly they get to learn from what has worked and what hasn’t for the generations that were before them. Same is true for K-pop. Companies learn about the best practices, concepts, marketing approaches, training methods through trial and error, which helps them to improve things for their future artists. Just to make it clear: this affects the AVERAGE baseline, not the specific outliers. In simpler terms: there is no guarantee that there is a modern basketball player better than Michael Jordan, but an average starter and an average bench player in NBA now are much better than their counterparts from the 90s.
There is a popular narrative that K-pop fans love to abandon girl groups as they get older citing the idols’ age being the main reason, but it’s pretty easy to see how that doesn’t make sense if we look at the most popular girl groups. Blackpink and Twice are a decade into their careers, Aespa are in their 6th year, IVE and Le Sserafim in their 5th years, they are far from being “new”. And the most popular members of the latter groups (Wonyoung, Yujin, Chaewon, Sakura) have been idols for 8 years now, so they are pretty much veterans. It doesn’t seem like fans are getting “tired” of them.
There are groups who peaked early and then lost a lot of popularity, but I don’t believe that age is necessarily the main reason. They just no longer held the same edge as they did once more and more groups debuted. If they were once standouts in their generation, known for their difficult choreographies and intricate performances, they might have not evolved enough to maintain that status. There were a lot of new girl groups that probably had as difficult / flashy of performances and who could compete for that recognition, and if they relied on the quality of their songs there were new girl groups debuting that had as good of discography etc.
And the same can be said for everyone across the industry. Groups who relied on girl crush and strong performances will get competition from BabyMonster and MEOVV, groups who relied on the quality of their discographies or the entertainment value of their variety content will get competition from Hearts2Hearts and Rescene etc. These are just some examples, but there are plenty of other very good 5th gen girl groups like ILLIT, KiiiKiii, Kiss of Life, izna, tripleS (and more) who will attract a lot of fans from the older groups if those don’t evolve enough.
I think boiling it down to just the “age” or “K-pop fans want new shiny things” is often unproductive and honestly not really accurate either, because otherwise we wouldn’t see more longevity among girl groups every year.
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