Santos Bravos were one of the most talked-about acts at KCON LA this weekend, mainly due to their stellar live vocals. Some users on X have begun to ask how members who only trained for a very short time (3-6 months) could have such superior live vocal skills to most K-pop idols, who participate in intensive live performance training for an average of 3-6 years.
To be fair, SB’s vocal line had extensive singing experience before joining the Santos Bravos survival show. But two of the members (Gabi and Drew) are dancers. Drew in particular had no singing experience at all before auditioning for the program. Both he and Gabi had a very limited training time of 3-6 months before the show began. Yet each of them have already exhibited more solid vocal skills than 90% of fifth gen K-pop idols.
That these two so quickly mastered live vocals while most current K-pop idols are still struggling exposes the K-pop training system as a sham. The K-pop system puts its trainees through hell*–starvation, sleep deprivation, constant surveillance, crushing psychological pressure, and, up til the recent past, corporal punishment–and yet, in an overwhelming number of cases, participants don’t even gain the promised skill set by the end of the process. It makes the K-pop system look like a sadistic teenage torture syndicate more than a performance training program.
If a program promises to teach its trainees to sing and dance, yet so consistently fails to make even its top participants decent vocalists, it’s not the trainees who failed; it’s the program.
To address the litany of excuses for why 3-6+ years of K-pop vocal training produces such abysmal results:
- Companies select based on looks, not talent.
- The members of Santos Bravos aren’t ugly. Isn’t it better to have a pretty idol that can sing over one that can’t?
- Idols get less training time nowadays because of the rush to push out new groups.
- Gabi and Drew each trained for less than half a year but can still sing. Why is K-pop training so comparatively inefficient?
- Lip-syncing and other fakery has become more advanced and more accepted globally than in the past. There is no longer a need for live vocal training.
- True enough. Many western pop stars now use a ton of Melodyne, live pitch correction, and other techniques to avoid learning to sing, so why should K-pop be any different?
- But look at how viral SB go for their live vocals. Don’t companies want that for their groups? Don’t they at least want to avoid the PR disaster that ensues every time their group must sing live?
- And again, why the 3-6 years of training, then? What are trainees even learning?
- K-pop training is meant to weed out trainees who aren’t docile and obedient and may cause trouble for the company.
- This I can believe. However, being docile and obedient doesn’t preclude someone from learning how to sing.
- Idols who want to be good singers get outside vocal lessons in addition to their training.
- But they shouldn’t have to. They should be getting decent vocal lessons as part of their 3-6 year performance training program. That’s the point of the program.
The purportedly rigorous K-pop performance training has been the selling point of K-pop since its inception. But comparing the results HYBE LatAm attained in less than a year to the dismal results of most of K-pop’s current training programs shows that torturing adolescents for years is not the key to creating good performers.
It’s hard to see the current K-pop training system as anything but a reprehensible scam.
*Note: no AI was used in the making of this post, I chose to use emdashes myself.
submitted by /u/eveningsnewestetoile
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