🇰🇷 TWICE

TWICE was assembled in 2015 by Park Jin-young, the producer and founder of JYP Entertainment, through the televised survival show 'Sixteen'. The format was familiar — sixteen trainees, ten weeks, ten episodes — but the casting was unusual: alongside seven Korean members, the line-up included three Japanese members (Momo, Sana and Mina) and one Taiwanese member (Tzuyu). The trilingual structure was deliberate. JYP had already started preparing for a Japanese debut before the Korean group existed.

The nine members — Nayeon, Jeongyeon, Momo, Sana, Jihyo, Mina, Dahyun, Chaeyoung and Tzuyu — debuted on 20 October 2015 with the single 'Like Ooh-Ahh'. The song was a calculated departure from the dark, mature concept that had dominated K-pop girl groups in 2014, choosing instead a sunny, almost cartoonish dance-pop sound built around a synth riff and a finger-gun choreography move. It was an immediate hit on Korean digital charts.

The single that turned TWICE from a successful debut into a cultural phenomenon arrived in October 2016. 'TT', built around a stuttering electro-house drop and a choreography point of two fingers placed under the eyes to mimic crying, became the most-streamed Korean song of the year and the longest-charting single by a girl group in the history of Korean digital tracking. The accompanying mini-album passed 350,000 copies in pre-orders alone.

Between 2016 and 2020 TWICE released eleven consecutive number-one albums on the Korean Gaon (now Circle) album chart, an unbroken run no other Korean girl group has matched. The hits stacked up: 'Cheer Up', 'Knock Knock', 'Signal', 'Likey', 'What Is Love', 'Heart Shaker', 'Yes or Yes', 'Fancy', 'Feel Special', 'More & More'. Each was choreographed around a single signature gesture, the so-called point dance, designed to be replicable by fans of any age.

Their Japanese launch, in 2017, made them the first Korean girl group to receive a platinum certification in Japan with a debut album. Within two years they were headlining the Tokyo Dome, an honor previously reserved in the Korean market for BoA and TVXQ.

The English-language pivot came in 2020 with the single 'I Can't Stop Me' and culminated in 2023 with 'Moonlight Sunrise', a track aimed squarely at the US market. The same year, TWICE became the first Korean girl group to headline a US stadium tour, selling out SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and the first to hold a stadium concert at the Tokyo Dome's larger sibling, Nissan Stadium.

Tzuyu, the Taiwanese maknae, sparked a brief but intense diplomatic incident in early 2016 when a video of her holding a Taiwanese flag at a Korean variety filming surfaced on Chinese social media. Mainland sponsors began withdrawing within forty-eight hours. JYP issued an apology video that became one of the most-viewed and most-disliked clips on Korean YouTube. The episode ended Tzuyu's mainland China commercial career almost before it began but did not affect her standing in the rest of Asia.

By the time the group renewed its contract with JYP in 2022, TWICE had become a roughly billion-dollar revenue centre for the agency and the best-selling Korean girl group in history. All nine members signed. None had publicly considered leaving. In a Korean industry where seven-year contract cliffs typically dissolve groups, this was, in itself, a record.

Sub-unit work has expanded the group's musical range without fragmenting it. Misamo, the Japanese-member sub-unit of Mina, Sana and Momo, debuted in 2023 with a Japanese-language EP that went platinum. Nayeon launched the first official TWICE solo career in 2022 with her EP 'Im Nayeon', which debuted in the top ten of the US Billboard 200 — the first solo album by a K-pop female artist to do so. Jihyo, Chaeyoung and Jeongyeon have followed with their own solo projects. The strategy, openly modelled on Girls' Generation's late-career architecture, has been to extend the group's commercial life by routing individual ambition through it rather than against it. By 2024 the group had collectively earned ambassadorships across more than thirty-five global brands, ranging from Skims and Bulgari to Prada and Calvin Klein, with the spread carefully balanced across all nine members rather than concentrated in two or three faces. The producer Park Jin-young, in a Korea Herald interview, called it 'the most successful retention engineering project in the history of Korean pop'.