Three years after a boardroom battle pushed him out of SM Entertainment, the company he founded, K-pop mogul Lee Soo-man unveiled two new idol groups on Monday in his first music project in Korea since his noncompete agreement with HYBE expired in February.
His Singapore-headquartered A2O Entertainment introduced 15-member boy group A2O Soul and nine-piece girl group A2O Lite at a joint showcase at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, where both groups performed live for the first time. Their digital singles, “Superstar” and “Neon,” come out at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
The launch also uses an unusual format — two groups debuting at once, linked through a shared fictional universe centered on “Soulite,” an alien planet.
“The question I get asked most is what makes A2O different,” said Lee, who took the stage at the showcase. “As long as K-pop groups are classified as singers, what a singer needs most is a song. I wanted everything, from the song to the dance, music video, performance and concert, to be different from what came before.”
Being different alone is not enough, he added — the goal is for the groups to be loved.
Longtime collaborator Yoo Young-jin, the producer behind hits for aespa and NCT, oversees music and performance for both acts.
Lee founded SM in 1995 and built the K-pop training model behind acts from H.O.T. to Girls’ Generation and EXO. In 2023, he clashed with SM’s management and sold his 14.8 percent stake to HYBE, setting off a takeover battle between HYBE and Kakao that ended with HYBE’s withdrawal.
The deal also barred Lee from producing music in Korea for three years.
Lee spent that period abroad, debuting A2O May, a girl group made up mainly of Chinese members, in 2024.
Lee framed the new project around “culture technology” (CT), a concept he coined at SM.
He said it means more than adding technology to culture, and if the technology a piece of content needs does not exist, he asks whether it can be built.
“For me, CT means finding it, experimenting with it and putting it into practice myself,” he said.
The centerpiece was “4D Gaussian Splatting,” which films a K-pop performance with numerous cameras from multiple angles and combines the data in a 3D space, so new camera movements can be created after filming ends. A2O Soul and Lite both used it for their upcoming music videos.
“It’s a shift from a camera that shoots to a camera that creates,” Lee said. He said he had pursued the idea for 16 years, since building a multi-angle camera system at SM for acts such as Girls’ Generation, SHINee and BoA.
He also described the data as a record of people today that artificial intelligence-powered robots could one day learn from.
“What technological progress needs is not intelligence, but the wisdom to make decisions,” he said.
Lee also introduced plans to launch an interactive live platform in which fans and celebrities talk face to face in real time.
“Before trying to find what’s different, the best thing is to feel that it’s good,” Lee said.
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