2026/07/13
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How three Berklee alumni turned ₩10 million and a borrowed car into K-pop's most talked-about rookie group of 2026.
Three Founders, ₩10 Million, and a Borrowed Driver's Seat
The K-pop industry runs on capital. HYBE, SM Entertainment, and YG Entertainment don't just sign artists — they manufacture them inside vertically integrated systems where in-house studios, training facilities, and marketing machines operate like a single organism.
Getting in front of that machine without belonging to it is, by most industry logic, a fool's errand.
In December 2020, three people decided to try anyway.
CEO Lee Ju-heon and two fellow alumni of the Berklee College of Music pooled ₩10 million — roughly $7,400 at current exchange rates — and incorporated a company in Seoul they called The Muse Production. There were no staff. No A&R department. No dedicated press team.
In the earliest months, Lee drove the artists to schedules himself.
The founders handled finances, PR, and cold outreach simultaneously. They sent hundreds of emails to broadcasting programs, pitching acts that nobody had heard of yet, from a company nobody recognized. Most went unanswered.
It was, by any accounting, an improbable start.
The CEO Who Used to Be the Performer
What makes Lee Ju-heon's trajectory unusual — even within an industry full of unconventional origin stories — is that he came up as a recording artist, not a business strategist.
Before founding The Muse Entertainment, Lee was a member of Highbrow (하이브로우), a Korean vocal group. He was the performer before he was the producer.
That perspective shapes how the label operates. The Berklee pedigree isn't incidental either. Berklee, in Boston, is among the world's most respected music conservatories — the school that trained alumni ranging from Quincy Jones to John Mayer to Melissa Etheridge. A production team with that formation thinks about music differently than one assembled from within the conventional K-pop trainee pipeline.
The company rebranded from The Muse Production to The Muse Entertainment (더뮤즈엔터테인먼트) in 2023, three years after founding. The rename signaled ambition — a move from production boutique to full-service label.
What RESCENE Actually Is
RESCENE (리센느) debuted on March 26, 2024, as a five-member multinational girl group under The Muse Entertainment.
The members are Woni (원이), Minami (미나미), Liv (리브), May (메이), and Zena (제나). The lineup spans nationalities, positioning the group for international markets from the start.
The name itself is worth unpacking. RESCENE merges two English words — "scene" and "scent" — into a single concept. The idea is that a specific fragrance can pull a past moment back into vivid focus. Music, the group argues, can do the same thing.
This isn't just brand copy. It draws on a documented psychological phenomenon: the Proust Effect.
The Proust Effect takes its name from Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator bites into a madeleine — a small French butter cake — and is instantly, involuntarily flooded with an entire childhood afternoon. The mechanism is real: the olfactory bulb, which processes smell, has a more direct neural pathway to the hippocampus and amygdala (the brain's memory and emotion centers) than any other sense.
RESCENE's stated artistic ambition is to recreate that sensation through sound — to make songs that function the way a scent does, arriving without warning and pulling the listener somewhere specific.
It's a more sophisticated premise than most K-pop debuts bother with. Whether the music lives up to it is a question fans and critics have been debating since their first EP.
Their debut single was Re:Scene, followed by the first EP SCENEDROME and the third EP lip bomb. The fan community goes by REMINE (리마인) — a name that continues the memory theme.
Survival on Fumes, Then a Meme Changed Everything
The years between founding and the 2024 debut were not easy ones.
In 2023, The Muse Entertainment closed a Series A funding round and used it to launch RESCENE. But the group spent most of its debut year largely invisible to the mainstream — no major broadcast appearances, no viral moments, no big-label backing to force playlist placement.
The label ran at a loss. By 2025, it was actively seeking new funding.
Then came the moment that changed the trajectory — and it arrived, as these things often do, from an unexpected direction.
In an online video, member Minami shouted a phrase in the direction of fellow member Woni's hometown: "Geoje ya-ho!" ("거제 야~호!") — a cheerful, slightly absurdist holler referencing the coastal city of Geoje (거제시, a port city in South Gyeongsang Province known for its shipbuilding industry and scenic coastline), where Woni grew up.
The clip spread. Then it spread further. It became a meme, then a rallying cry for the group's growing fanbase.
The institutional world noticed. On May 22, 2026, all five RESCENE members were officially appointed as promotional ambassadors for Geoje City — a formal government designation that carried both visibility and credibility.
Shortly after, The Muse Entertainment announced a ₩2 billion investment (approximately $1.46 million) from iNet Investment Partners and JB Investment. The meme had, in a very real sense, unlocked the funding round.
What "Jungso-dol" Actually Means
To understand why RESCENE's trajectory matters to Korean pop culture at large, it helps to know one piece of industry vocabulary: 중소돌 (jungso-dol).
The term combines 중소 (jungso, meaning small-to-mid-sized) with 돌 (dol, shorthand for 아이돌, idol). It refers to any idol group that debuted under a company outside the major-label tier — outside HYBE, SM, YG, JYP, and a handful of others.
Jungso-dol groups operate under structural disadvantages that are difficult to overstate. Broadcast slots on major music shows are quietly allocated to labels with leverage. Streaming algorithms reward groups with promotional budgets. Sponsor relationships follow proven commercial quantities. A small label starting from scratch competes on content alone — and content alone, in this environment, is rarely enough.
RESCENE is a jungso-dol. That's the context for why their momentum has been received as something larger than a single group's success story.
A Korean industry columnist put it directly: when people use the phrase "jungso-dol miracle," they're not only talking about one girl group. They're expressing a wish that capital and platform don't determine everything — that the music, the concept, the human specificity of a group can still matter on its own terms.
The comparison to BTS in the Big Hit era gets made frequently, and not without reason. BTS debuted in 2013 under Big Hit Music, then a company so small it struggled to pay its bills. HYBE, which Big Hit became, is now worth billions. The trajectory feels like a template, even if most groups that follow it don't end up where BTS did.
The South Korean Government Enters the Story
Something significant happened in 2026 that positioned RESCENE not just as a success story but as a policy case study.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (문화체육관광부) and the Korea Creative Content Agency (한국콘텐츠진흥원, KOCCA) jointly announced a new support program for small and mid-sized entertainment companies seeking international expansion.
The structure is straightforward: ten companies are selected each year, and each receives up to ₩300 million (approximately $220,000) in government funding to support overseas activities.
RESCENE was the first group named on this year's list.
The Ministry's press release specifically cited the "Geoje ya-ho" moment as evidence of the group's organic cultural reach — the kind of evidence that, in a government document, carries a particular weight.
It's a meaningful development. Government cultural funding in Korea isn't decorative. KOCCA has been instrumental in the international expansion of K-content for over two decades. Having RESCENE explicitly named in a Ministry press release puts the group in a different category than "promising indie act."
It puts them in the category of strategic cultural export.
By the Numbers
| Label | The Muse Entertainment (더뮤즈엔터테인먼트) |
| Founded | December 2020 |
| CEO | Lee Ju-heon — Berklee College of Music alumnus, former member of vocal group Highbrow |
| Roster | RESCENE (리센느) — Woni, Minami, Liv, May, Zena |
| Debut date | March 26, 2024 |
| Fandom name | REMINE (리마인) |
| Key releases | Re:Scene (debut single), SCENEDROME (1st EP), lip bomb (3rd EP) |
| Official site | themuze.kr |
| 2026 investment | ₩2 billion from iNet Investment Partners and JB Investment |
| Government support | Selected for MCST/KOCCA international expansion program, 2026 |
Capital Doesn't Write the Story — People Do
The conventional K-pop playbook hasn't changed much in thirty years. Large label, large marketing budget, broadcast exposure, algorithmic reinforcement, fandom formation. Skip any step and the whole sequence collapses.
The Muse Entertainment skipped most of it.
What they had instead was a CEO who understood performance from the inside, a production team trained in music as craft rather than product, a group concept built on a genuine psychological idea, and — eventually — a moment of accidental human warmth that spread faster than any paid campaign could have manufactured.
The ₩10 million that started this company in December 2020 is a curiosity now, the kind of founding-myth detail that gets repeated at industry panels. But the more interesting number might be this: three and a half years from incorporation to government-endorsed cultural export.
That's the timeline. The question fans and industry observers are watching is what comes next — whether the Geoje meme moment proves to be a ceiling or a floor.
So far, the evidence suggests floor.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is The Muse Entertainment and what groups do they manage?
The Muse Entertainment (더뮤즈엔터테인먼트) is a Seoul-based independent K-pop label founded in December 2020 by CEO Lee Ju-heon and two fellow Berklee College of Music alumni. The company originally incorporated as The Muse Production before rebranding in 2023. As of 2026, their primary act is RESCENE (리센느), a five-member multinational girl group that debuted in March 2024. The label is independently operated, outside the major-label ecosystem of HYBE, SM, YG, and JYP, and is classified as a jungso (small-to-mid-sized) entertainment company. Their official website is themuze.kr.
Who are the members of RESCENE and where are they from?
RESCENE has five members: Woni (원이), Minami (미나미), Liv (리브), May (메이), and Zena (제나). The group is multinational in composition, which is a deliberate positioning choice for international market reach. Woni is from Geoje, a coastal city in South Gyeongsang Province in southeastern South Korea — a fact that became unexpectedly significant when a fan video of Minami shouting "Geoje ya-ho!" became a viral meme in 2026. The group debuted on March 26, 2024. Their fandom is called REMINE (리마인), continuing the memory and nostalgia theme embedded in the group's name.
What does RESCENE mean as a K-pop group name?
RESCENE combines the English words "scene" and "scent" — the RE- prefix doing double duty as both "re-" (again) and a phonetic echo of "scent." The concept draws on the Proust Effect, a psychological phenomenon named after novelist Marcel Proust, in which a specific smell involuntarily triggers a vivid memory. The group's artistic premise is that music can function similarly — arriving like a scent and pulling a listener back to a specific emotional moment. It's a more conceptually ambitious foundation than most debut-era K-pop group names, which tend toward English neologisms without much anchoring idea behind them.
What is a jungso-dol and why does it matter for understanding RESCENE?
중소돌 (jungso-dol) literally means "small-to-mid-sized idol" — any group that debuted under a company outside the top-tier labels. In practical terms, jungso-dol groups face real structural barriers: fewer broadcast opportunities, lower algorithmic priority on streaming platforms, and no major-label sponsorship networks. Their visibility depends almost entirely on organic momentum. RESCENE is a jungso-dol, which is why their 2026 breakthrough has been received as culturally significant rather than just commercially notable. It's seen as evidence that the K-pop industry's gatekeeping is not entirely impenetrable — a narrative Korean fans actively root for.
How much investment has The Muse Entertainment raised?
The Muse Entertainment completed a Series A funding round in 2023, which funded RESCENE's debut. After operating at a loss through 2024 and into 2025, the company returned to fundraising and in 2026 secured ₩2 billion (approximately $1.46 million USD at current exchange rates) from iNet Investment Partners and JB Investment. The investment followed the viral spread of RESCENE's "Geoje ya-ho" meme, which gave the label measurable organic traction to present to investors. The company also qualified in 2026 for a South Korean government grant of up to ₩300 million through the MCST and KOCCA international expansion program.
Is RESCENE getting government support from South Korea?
Yes, and explicitly so. In 2026, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (문화체육관광부) and the Korea Creative Content Agency (한국콘텐츠진흥원, KOCCA) launched a program selecting ten small-to-mid-sized entertainment companies per year for international expansion grants of up to ₩300 million each (roughly $220,000 USD). RESCENE was the first group named on the 2026 selection list. The Ministry's official press release specifically mentioned the "Geoje ya-ho" moment as a demonstration of the group's organic public reach — an unusually specific citation for a government document, and a meaningful signal of institutional backing.
Where can I follow RESCENE and listen to their music?
RESCENE's official label site is themuze.kr. Their discography includes the debut single Re:Scene, the first EP SCENEDROME, and the third EP lip bomb, all available on major streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music. The group maintains active social media presence — the platforms where their viral moments have originated. Their fan community, REMINE (리마인), is organized across platforms and has been credited with much of the group's grassroots visibility during the years before mainstream breakthrough. For the most current tour dates, releases, or fan events, checking the label site directly will return the most accurate information.
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