AEG Presents has strengthened its commitment to the K-pop market by forming a strategic partnership with South Korean label and content company KQ Entertainment.

The move builds upon recent developments from the multinational promoting firm, which last year announced it would join forces with Korean AI metaverse firm Galaxy Corporation to further technological advancements in the touring and entertainment spaces, specifically around K-pop shows.

With this formal partnership, AEG will now lead producing and promoting breakout K-pop boy band ATEEZ’s worldwide tours. The eight-member group recently concluded the European leg of their Towards The Light: Will To Power trek, selling 180,000 tickets to sold-out crowds across the continent.

The AEG-promoted venture included milestones such as becoming the first K-pop artist to headline Paris’s La Défense Arena (cap. 40,000), and inaugural K-pop shows in cities like Lyon, Milan, and Zurich.

“We are always very keen to open up new arena markets for K-pop and we felt the perfect time to do this was on ATEEZ’s biggest-ever tour of Europe, and introduce Zurich and Milan which have both been resounding sold-out successes,” Simon Jones, AEG Presents’ SVP of international touring, said to IQ following the Swiss gig.

“The appetite for the genre shows no signs of slowing up.”

The recent tour’s North American leg sold 200,000 tickets and included sell-out shows at New York City’s Citi Field (41,800), two BMO Stadium (22,000) shows in Los Angeles, and Arlington’s Globe Life Field (40,300). ATEEZ will wrap up the tour with two Seoul shows at KSPO Dome (15,000) this weekend, 22-23 March.

Another AEG-supported K-pop project has reportedly stalled

AEG and KQ’s previous collaborations also include bringing the Billboard chart-topping band to Coachella last year as the first K-pop boy group to perform at the Goldenvoice festival, an AEG subsidiary. ATEEZ was also recently crowned K-Pop Artist of the Year at the iHeartRadio Music Awards.

This latest venture with KQ further cements AEG’s efforts in the K-pop realm. In 2022, AEG partnered with K-pop touring and marketing firm Powerhouse, which has worked with some of K-pop’s biggest stars such as BTS and Blackpink.

The two firms had been working in tandem since 2010 when they produced what’s remembered as “the first blast of K-pop in the US”.

AEG also promoted BLACKPINK’s 2022-23 Born Pink world tour, which became the most-attended concert tour by a K-pop girl group with 1.8 million attendees. The group headlined the AEG-backed BST Hyde Park in London in 2023, the first K-pop group to do so, with Stray Kids joining the headliner pool last summer.

Blackpink is due back out this year, with the Live Nation-promoted stadium tour stopping in Seoul, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, New York, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, London, and Tokyo.

But, another AEG-supported project, the 20,000-capacity, K-pop-specialised CJ LiveCity Arena in Goyang City, Seoul, has reportedly stalled.

Originally slated to open this year, the Goyang city government ended its agreement with CJ LiveCity — a subsidiary of media conglomerate CJ ENM — last year after the company halted construction in the spring of 2023 due to funding issues.

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An estimated 1,200 K-pop fans attended an innovative socially distanced live show intended to offer a blueprint for how live events may continue in South Korea while Covid-19 is still a threat.

The Live in DMZ concert, held as part of an annual event promoting peace in the Korean peninsula, was organised by the government of the province of Gyeonggi as a means of providing “comfort” to people who are tired of ongoing coronavirus restrictions, according to local media.

For the show, fans were placed in 300 clear dome-shaped tents, specially constructed for the occasion and capable of seating four people (from a single household/bubble) apiece. According to organisers, the tents aim are the first of their kind in the world, and prevent the transmission of potentially disease-carrying droplets between fans.

In addition to the unusual seating arrangement, the Gyeonggi authorities installed an ‘air shower’ gate that sprayed a disinfecting mist at the entrance to the concert, as well as a thermal temperature-checking system and a ‘distancing fence’ to prevent household mixing in the waiting area before fans took their seats, reports the Gyeonggi Daily.

In addition to the unusual seating arrangement, authorities installed an ‘air shower’ gate that sprayed a disinfecting mist

For the purposes of contact tracing, all attendees were required to fill in a health-check questionnaire and provide their details in advance of the show. After filling in the form, ticket buyers received an automatically generated QR code to use for entry into the concert.

Explaining the concept to Cities Today, Lee Jae-gang, Gyeonggi’s vice-governor for peace, says: “By operating a web-based access system that enabled entry using QR codes for confirmation, the Gyeonggi provincial government was not only able to implement rapid and accurate quarantine procedures, but [can] also undertake follow-up management by once again sending self-health-check questionnaires to concert attendees two weeks after the event.”

https://twitter.com/KJH_GLOBAL/status/1320666624010055682

Held from Friday 23 to Sunday 25 October at the 41,000-seat Goyang Sports Complex in Goyang (a satellite city of South Korean capital Seoul), the Live in DMZ show featured performances from local stars including Monsta X, Mamamoo, Itzy, Loona, (G)I-dle, and Oh My Girl’s Seunghee and Yooa.

According to Cities Today, the novel set-up gave the stadium a capacity of 1,200 for Live in DMZ, while an additional 400 people watched the concert online.

This article forms part of IQ’s Covid-19 resource centre – a knowledge hub of essential guidance and updating resources for uncertain times.

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