The Korean wave and above all K-pop is conquering the world. Bands like BTS or Blackpink break new music records and conquer the Billboard charts. In this blog post, I give you some tips on how to see some of your idols for free in South Korea.
The first K-pop band I was listening to was CNBLUE back in 2011. My friend Jenni was a huge fan of Japanese and Korean pop culture including K-pop and K-dramas. As a media scientist, I was more interested in dramas. When I watched “Heartstrings” with Hyung Joong-Hwa in the male lead role, I found out about CNBLUE. But to be honest, until my exchange semester in South Korea, I was listening more sporadic to K-pop music.
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💡What is K-POP?
| The shortcut K-pop (케이팝) stands for Korean popular music and is influenced by all kinds of music genres and stylistics. The term itself became popular in the 2000s but was already used before. The Korean wave brought K-pop as well as K-dramas around the globe. Usually, the songs are a mix of the Korean language with some sentences or phrases in English. Most bands get cast through a tough trainee programme at a young age like the girl band Blackpink. These trainee programmes get more and more criticised, especially by Western media outlets. Other criteria of most K-pop idols, especially former trainees are the complex choreographies but also the experimental way of fashion on stage and in their videos. Usually, K-pop groups have a leader who is the oldest or most experienced one of the group. |
Free Concerts for foreign residents
A few of my friends from Taiwan told me about free K-pop concerts for foreign residents. A free concert in Seoul with my favourite band CNBLUE included. Sounded too good to be true? Well it was, the tickets were already gone by the moment I heard about it (you can not imagine how sad I was). Spoiler Alert: I still saw them playing live – I will come back to this in a minute.
The idea behind the free concerts is to promote Korean culture to make K-pop as well as traditional Korean music more popular by inviting foreigners to free concerts. It started in 2015 organised by Hello K! which established itself as a cultural performance for foreigners in Korea. But since the last year, they seem to concentrate more on traditional music but this could be also because of Covid-19. I guess checking it out can not harm.
Festivals including free concerts
As I already mentioned, I could not manage to actually go to one of the free K-pop concerts for foreigners but I actually got another chance. During my semester abroad in 2016, I was able to visit the opening show of the Korea Sale Festa with bands like SHINee, Red Velvet, MAMAMOO, Wonder Girls, INFINITE, GOT7, B.A.P. and most importantly (to me) CNBLUE. At the opening ceremony, every band was invited to play one of their current songs. The festival is about the shopping week in Korea with a lot of different programmes as fashion shows, concerts, and obviously thousands of possibilities to go shopping. This shopping week is every year. But be warned the concerts are very popular and you have to come super early (seriously early) to get a spot. My friends waited in line seven hours before the beginning of the concert (I came a bit later because I had university) and we got in but were quite far from the stage. Anyway, I was so happy to see my favourite band, therefore, it was worth waiting for.
K-pop Music Shows
Another possibility is to attend K-pop music shows which are pretty popular in Korea, for example, Simply K-Pop (Arirang TV), MTV The Show (SBS MTV), Show Campion (MBC), M Countdown (Mnet), Music Bank (KBS2), Music Core (MBC), or Inkigayo (SBS). I did not gain any experience with this but found a good article about how to attend these kinds of shows as a foreigner by KoreabyMe, click here to read it.
If want to read more tips for free events and entrances to cultural institutions then you should read my blog post about Culture on a budget – free trips, museum admissions and discounts.
You have read the blog post How to see your K-pop idols for free on My Travel Journal-Blog.