BTS before their debut: how the final seven came together

When we look at BTS today, it's easy to assume the seven members were envisioned as a unit from the very start. In reality, the group took several years to come together, and the project Big Hit Entertainment started developing around 2010 didn't initially look anything like the BTS that debuted on June 13, 2013. The group's concept kept changing, a rotating cast of trainees passed through the company, and the eventual seven members came from completely different backgrounds.

The story starts with RM. As a teenager, Kim Namjoon was already active on Korea's underground hip-hop scene under the name Runch Randa. He wrote lyrics, recorded songs, and performed with other young rappers, and it was through that scene that his music reached Big Hit. Bang Si-hyuk later said that producer Pdogg played him one of Namjoon's demo tracks. Namjoon was only 15, but after hearing him, Bang decided he wanted him at the company.

At that stage, the idea wasn't to create a classic K-pop idol group. Bang Si-hyuk envisioned a hip-hop group, and Namjoon became the person the new project started being built around. That's why RM is reasonably considered the first member and the starting point of BTS's story.

Min Yoongi arrived at Big Hit from Daegu. He was already writing music, rapping under the name Gloss, and working in production, and in 2010 he entered Big Hit's Hit It competition. He didn't win, but he joined the company after the audition. His original ambition wasn't to become an idol in the sense we understand the term today either. Music, rap, and production were what interested him, and that part of his background later became important to BTS's sound.

Jung Hoseok came from a completely different world. Before Big Hit, he was known on Gwangju's dance scene and was a member of the dance crew Neuron. Unlike RM and SUGA, he didn't arrive as a rapper but as a dancer. Once he joined the company, he found himself in an environment where a lot of time was spent on hip-hop, writing, and freestyle rap. j-hope later said it was during his trainee period that he started seriously developing his rapping, alongside members for whom it already came naturally.

RM, SUGA, and j-hope became the core of the early project this way, but that project wasn't yet the BTS we know today.

At that stage, other young rappers and trainees were still passing through Big Hit. That's exactly where a lot of the stories about alleged "original BTS members" come from. Some of the names that show up in those stories really were connected to Big Hit and the early hip-hop crew, but this needs some caution. Being a trainee, or working with people involved in the early project, isn't the same as being a confirmed member of the final group who got cut right before debut.

At one point, Bang Si-hyuk decided to change direction. Instead of a pure hip-hop group, the project started developing toward an idol group that would keep a strong hip-hop foundation. Bang later explained that he judged this model would give the group more options in the music market at the time. Some of the people involved in the original project didn't want to go that route and left, while RM, SUGA, and j-hope stayed.

The shift in concept created a need for different members, vocalists especially. That's how Kim Seokjin enters the story, in a fairly unusual way. Jin wasn't going to music auditions and had no plan to become a singer. He was studying acting at Konkuk University when a Big Hit employee approached him on the street and invited him to audition.

Jin had already had a similar experience with another entertainment company's casting earlier, but hadn't taken it seriously at the time. This time he went to the audition and ended up at Big Hit. When he started training, he didn't have the experience some of the other members already had. He didn't come from professional dance, underground rap, or singing. He had to learn dance and vocals practically from scratch, and he later spoke openly about how demanding that made his trainee period.

Jungkook had a completely different problem: he was extremely young and suddenly had more options than he knew what to do with. As a thirteen-year-old, he auditioned for Superstar K3. He didn't make it to the TV round of the competition, but his audition caught the attention of several entertainment companies who wanted to sign him as a trainee.

Big Hit was among them, at the time a far smaller company than some of the others courting him. Jungkook later explained more than once why he chose them anyway. He'd seen RM rap and was so impressed he wanted to be at the same company. Years later he admitted he didn't have much industry knowledge or any complicated strategy behind the decision at the time. Namjoon just seemed unbelievably cool to him.

Kim Taehyung didn't come to Big Hit planning to audition. He went along to support a friend who was auditioning in Daegu. Someone from the company noticed him there and asked if he wanted to try too. With his parents' permission, he auditioned, passed, and became a trainee.

Taehyung's pre-debut story also stands out because Big Hit didn't publicly introduce him for a long time. The other future members gradually appeared in content the company released before debut, while V stayed hidden. That's how he later got the well-known "hidden member" label.

Various theories grew up around that too. One was that the company wasn't sure whether V would debut at all. Bang Si-hyuk later explained, though, that the hiding was deliberate. He felt Taehyung had the look and personality to grab attention, and his later reveal was meant as a surprise once the group finally introduced itself. Even V himself didn't fully understand at the time why the others were allowed to talk about their trainee days and post content, and he wasn't.

The last member to join the lineup was Park Jimin.

Unlike most of the others, Jimin already had serious formal dance training. In Busan he studied contemporary dance and attended Busan High School of Arts. His teachers noticed his talent too, and it was one of them who recommended he audition for an entertainment company.

After passing Big Hit's audition, Jimin moved to Seoul in 2012 and joined the other trainees. That meant he had significantly less preparation time than members who'd already been at the company for years. Alongside vocal training, he also had to adjust his approach to dance. The contemporary dance he'd spent years learning and the precise, synchronized choreography of an idol group called for a different approach.

Stories about Jimin's trainee period often claim he was "almost kicked out of BTS eight times" or that he faced the threat of elimination daily. Jimin himself has talked about not being sure he'd actually debut, and about people at the company who didn't think he fit the group, but the specific numbers that keep circulating on social media should be taken with a grain of salt. As with the stories about former members, the fandom has often turned real statements into far more dramatic versions over the years.

By 2012, the seven were finally together, but even then their life didn't look anything like the life of future global stars. They lived together in a small space, shared rooms, trained for hours, and tried to finish school, write music, and prepare for debut all at once. The differences between them were significant. RM and SUGA already had experience writing and rapping, j-hope was an experienced dancer, Jin came from acting, Jimin from contemporary dance, and V and Jungkook were very young and still developing their own performing identities.

Before their official debut, Big Hit also did something else that would later become important to the relationship between BTS and their audience. They let the members post their own content and talk about what they were going through, through blogs, vlogs, and social media. That's how the audience got to know some of them even before there was a first official BTS album.

The final lineup debuted on June 13, 2013, with the song No More Dream and the album 2 Cool 4 Skool. That was the first time RM, Jin, SUGA, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook stood in front of an audience as BTS.

Given everything that happened before that, it's not quite accurate to picture BTS's formation as a classic audition where Big Hit picked the seven best candidates. There was no single moment where someone decided that exactly these seven people made up BTS. The group came together gradually. First there was Namjoon and the idea of a hip-hop project, then other rappers and trainees joined, the concept changed, some people left, and new members kept arriving until a lineup formed that was ready to debut.

That's also why the question of who "was supposed to be the eighth member of BTS" deserves some caution. During the early years, there were people who trained alongside the future members and were connected to different versions of the project. That doesn't mean there was an official eight- or ten-member version of BTS from which certain members were cut right before debut. Many of the claims that have spread across TikTok, YouTube, and fan sites over the years don't have solid confirmation behind them.

What we can reconstruct fairly reliably from the members' own statements and Bang Si-hyuk's is a lot more interesting anyway. A fifteen-year-old underground rapper caught a producer's attention. A hip-hop group started forming around him. Over time the project completely changed shape, and young men joined it one by one who, in some cases, would probably never have met at all if it weren't for Big Hit.

One came from the underground rap scene in Seoul, another from Daegu with ambitions to produce music, a third from the dance scene in Gwangju. One was spotted on the street while studying acting, one chose a small company over several bigger offers because he liked Namjoon, one actually only showed up to an audition to keep a friend company, and the last arrived from a dance school in Busan less than a year before debut.

That's how the final seven came to be.