THE KPOP CON BY HELEN RODGERS It’s no secret that Kpop is a huge money-making industry. From selling multiple versions of one album to overworking their idols in order to maximise their sales, the industry is overflowing with greedy people. So, it’s no surprise that companies have realised the potential in Europe to make money off Kpop concerts with its growing fan base. However, the more Kpop concerts we have in the UK, the more companies seem to mess it up. The organisation of Kpop concerts in Europe – or more specifically the UK – has been dire this year and needs to be addressed. From its conception until 2017, Kpop’s UK fan base has been growing slowly but surely. The majority of Kpop fans in the UK are multi-fandom, meaning they ardently support many groups at once, whereas Korean fans tend to support one group only. These two factors combined means that up until now companies were able to bring smaller Kpop groups over for a European Tour before they’d even had a breakthrough in their home country. This is no longer the case. Since 2018, Kpop has grown incredibly which means that there has been an influx in the amount of European Kpop tours. So much so that fans have been begging companies to stop sending artists over here because they can’t afford to support them all. Kpop’s target market is young girls, the majority of which are still at school or university and, therefore, can’t work jobs that give them the money to attend many concerts. Yet companies still capitalise on the artists fans by selling overpriced tickets even for
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smaller artists who can only fill small venues. Unfortunately, Seven O’Clock were one of the artists that fell victim to the over-saturation of Kpop concerts in the UK this year. Seven O’Clock debuted in 2017 and have yet to make a significant dent in the Korean market. So, an events company called BeyondEnt, who had organised a few European Kpop concerts in the past, decided to bring them to the UK. If this had happened years ago, it is likely that the concert would have been far more of a success than it was. The Seven O’Clock concert was announced in February – the same month that Kpop power-houses such as BTS
and Monsta X also announced their European tours. As fans saved every last penny of their pocket money to attend those bigger concerts, it’s no surprise that they then didn’t have the money to see Seven O’Clock whose prices ranged from £30£105. Fans were also put off by the company’s ticket selling sites which seemed untrustworthy to fans. Subsequently, the concert was almost cancelled due to low ticket sales. Luckily, the concert went ahead as more fans bought tickets out of respect and sympathy for the group. BeyondEnt then had their second hiccough (and by ‘hiccough’ I mean utter disaster) of the year with their MASC concert in London. Once
