Previously on November 11, SM Entertainment released the concept photos and a teaser video for the upcoming album “FREQUENCY” of their boy group WayV.
However, the concept images of WayV member Yangyang immediately roused suspicions as netizens found them to bear strong resemblances to previous images from TXT’s Yeonjun’s “GGUM”.
Particularly, Yangyang’s various poses and an image where he was holding a shoes with pink chewed gum stuck to it were said to resemble Yeonjun’s teaser poster and music video concept.
Other elements, such as a mini figurine, red hair, and contacts, are also said to be copied from Yeonjun.
As a result, SM’s alleged “plagiarism” started to become a hot topic on SNS, with netizens leaving comments such as “It’s too much to be a coincidence”, “This is so shameless”, and “It’s crazy how SM is the one who always had a history of copying concepts from HYBE but they turned it around with their insane mediaplay and now they just openly do it even more with no consequences whatsoever”.
However, some fans defended SM, stating that Yangyang’s images are “NCT-coded”, and the alleged “copied” elements were all used by NCT before Yeonjun’s “GGUM”.