All seven members of BTS are currently enlisted in the military for their mandatory services, which means that the level of communication between them and fans has reduced drastically. Some fans have relied on The Camp app to get updates about the members, though there are divided sentiments around it.
The Camp is the official Korean military app, which was initially intended to serve as an integrated platform for military communication needs and allow family and friends to send encouraging messages to newly enlisted trainees. But soon, fans started using it to keep up to date with their favorite celebrities during their enlistment, leading the developer company to expand its features with plans to monetize certain services.
Since BTS joined the military, the number of users on the app has shot up significantly. According to Enable Daon Soft, the tech firm behind The Camp, their business is expected to surpass its break-even point for the first time since its founding this year, and the CEO gave a lot of the credit to BTS’s fanbase.
However, according to reports on December 23, KST, the BTS members are missing from a particular segment of the app meant for celebrity soldiers. Under the “Soldier Registration” section, there is a “Recommended Star Soldier” subsection, which lists currently enlisted idols and celebrities separately. Currently, it contains about 30 popular soldiers and trainees, including actor Nam Joo Hyuk, WINNER‘s Mino, and vocalist Go Woo Rim. But as of December 22, none of the BTS members were on this specific list.
Jang Cheol Min, the CEO of Enable Daon Soft, said the absence was because BIGHIT MUSIC owns the publicity rights of the BTS members. It implies that only the agency has the right to obtain profits by using their personal identities, such as their portrait and names. Jang said that the company “misunderstood” The Camp’s intentions, presuming that the platform is trying to conduct business through the idols. As a result, the app had to remove all artists under big management companies from the list.
This has been a welcome move among BTS fans, who had expressed concern over possible exploitation of the members by the platform after it announced plans to create a Private Brand using the enlisted celebrities’ Intellectual Property rights (IP) to expand into the e-commerce market. You can read more about The Camp’s proposed business model changes involving monetized services for K-Pop fans here.
