Why NEXZ Took 716 Days to Win Despite Critical Praise

On May 6, 2026, seven members of the JYP Entertainment boy band NEXZ cried on live television. They had just won first place on the weekly music program Show Champion with their song "Mmchk" — beating PLAVE, TWS, TXT, and MAMAMOO's Hwasa for the trophy. It was their first music-show win of any kind, and it arrived 716 days after their debut.

Music-show wins are weekly trophies handed out by Korean broadcasters such as Show Champion, M Countdown, Music Bank, and Inkigayo.

They combine physical album sales, digital streaming points, broadcast points, and viewer or fan voting into a single score, and winning one is treated as a milestone in a group's career — proof that a group has crossed from promising to commercially real. Some acts win one within days of debuting. NEXZ waited almost two years.

A win that arrived a year after the reviews turned

The delay is notable because critics had already come around. The K-pop review site The Bias List — one of the genre's most closely followed English-language outlets — was unimpressed by NEXZ's early material, writing in April 2025 that the group "hasn't yet captured my attention" and that JYP had "saddled them with lesser material."

By October 2025, the site's review of "Beat-Boxer" called it a turning point. A month later, the reviewer wrote that NEXZ had "slowly and surely won me over," and by April 2026 their song "Mmchk" was rated 9.5 out of 10 by one contributor. Critical acclaim built for roughly a year before commercial recognition caught up to it.

What a "comeback" actually costs an agency

In K-pop, a comeback is not a return after absence — it is the release cycle itself: a new single or album backed by teaser images, a title-track music video, weeks of televised performances, and fan events. Every comeback requires its own production and promotion budget, separate from the last one.

Industry researchers have documented that this cycle has been getting shorter, not longer. As more groups debut each year, agencies have compressed promotional windows from months to a few weeks, pushing new acts to prove themselves almost immediately or lose their broadcast slots to the next release.

Even a major label spreads its budget thin

NEXZ is not an underfunded act. JYP Entertainment is one of the "Big 4" agencies, alongside HYBE, SM, and YG, that control most of the industry's global revenue and roster size. But funding a group's existence is different from funding its promotion.

Reported figures give a sense of scale: managing a single idol group can cost an agency between 1 billion and 10 billion Korean won a year, and one agency head has said running two groups costs roughly 20 billion won ($13.7 million) annually.

Music-show pushes — fan voting drives, broadcast appearances, physical sales campaigns — compete for a slice of that same budget alongside touring, merchandise, and content production.

Stray Kids, TWICE, and the queue inside JYP

NEXZ debuted in May 2024 as JYP's first new boy group since Stray Kids launched six years earlier, formed through the Japan-Korea audition show Nizi Project's second season — a joint project between JYP and Sony Music Japan. The group's lineup is mostly Japanese members plus one Korean member, Sogeon.

Under the agency system that structures most of the industry — where a company trains, houses, and manages artists under exclusive multi-year contracts — a label's promotional attention is finite and its most reliable earners tend to get first claim on it.

Stray Kids has opened at number one on the Billboard 200 with every album since 2022; TWICE and ITZY are among JYP's top-selling acts.

Even members of those established groups have publicly been the subject of fan complaints about uneven promotion, which suggests how stretched the agency's promotional bandwidth is before a rookie act like NEXZ enters the queue at all.

716 days is close to average, not a failure

Placed next to other groups' timelines, NEXZ's wait looks less like a warning sign and more like the middle of the pack. A handful of acts have won within days of debuting:

• WINNER — 4 days
• ITZY — 9 days
• LE SSERAFIM and TXT — 8 days
• CIX — 7 days

Others have waited far longer than NEXZ did:

• NCT U — 1,656 days
• DAY6 — 1,416 days
• Dreamcatcher — 1,923 days
• Brave Girls — 3,629 days, about ten years

Seen against that range, a critically respected group taking two years to win is unremarkable. What makes NEXZ's case useful is that the wait is well documented, tracked publicly through sales figures and chart placements the whole way.

Why some 2025 rookies skipped the wait

Not every rookie needs two years, and the exceptions show what buys speed. ALLDAY PROJECT, a co-ed group that debuted in June 2025 with "Famous," topped Melon's chart and reached the Billboard Global 200 almost immediately — a novelty act (mixed-gender groups are rare in K-pop) with a song built to go viral.

SM Entertainment's Hearts2Hearts debuted in February 2025 with sales that broke Hanteo's all-time first-week record for a girl group, after SM introduced the group at its own 30th-anniversary concert more than a month before their actual debut — a scale of promotional lead time only a handful of labels can afford.

NEXZ, by contrast, spent its first eighteen months finding a sound distinct enough to win over critics, which cost it the kind of immediate splash that drives a fast first win.

Not every 2025 rookie skipped the wait either. HYBE's CORTIS drew mixed reviews through most of 2025 before their song "REDRED" turned into what The Bias List called a "deserved mega-hit" in 2026 — the same slow-build pattern as NEXZ, just from a different label.

A gradual breakout, it turns out, is common enough across agencies that it looks less like an exception and more like a second track record alongside the instant hits.

The groups that never get 716 days to find their footing

NEXZ's slow build was survivable because JYP kept releasing music for them and kept them visible on Japanese and Korean charts throughout 2025. Rookies from smaller agencies often don't get that runway.

Circle Chart, the industry's main sales-tracking service, recorded a 40 percent drop in the number of rookie acts appearing on its charts in a single year compared to 2023, as the gap in production spending between large and small labels widened.

Groups such as HOT ISSUE, LUNARSOLAR, and Bling Bling all disbanded within roughly two years of debuting — the same window NEXZ needed just to win a single trophy. A well-funded label's rookie can afford a slow build. A small agency's rookie usually cannot.

Whether one win moves NEXZ up JYP's queue

A single trophy does not settle the larger question. Days after the Show Champion win, NEXZ took first place on their debut appearance on the veteran cover-song program Immortal Songs, beating labelmates Stray Kids and NMIXX, who had appeared on the show before without winning — a result NEXZ members framed as a symbolic first for JYP.

What remains unclear is whether the win changes how JYP allocates promotion between NEXZ and its bigger earners going forward, or whether it was a single strong comeback inside a cycle that resets with every release. The group's split fan base between Korea and Japan, built through the binational Nizi Project pipeline, also means their commercial footing has to hold in two separate markets rather than one.

Days from debut to first music-show win

Frequently asked

How long did it take NEXZ to win their first music show?

NEXZ won first place on Show Champion with "Mmchk" 716 days after their May 2024 debut.

Why did NEXZ take so long to win a music show?

JYP's promotional budget is split with established earners like Stray Kids and TWICE, and NEXZ spent over a year developing a sound distinct enough to win over critics before commercial recognition caught up.

Is 716 days a long wait for a first music-show win in K-pop?

It's close to average — some groups like WINNER won within 4 days of debut, while others like Brave Girls waited 3,629 days, about ten years.