Mandopop star JJ Lin sells 30k tickets in 1.5 hrs

Singaporean singer JJ Lin will perform an additional date at the country’s National Stadium after all 30,000 tickets to his 21 December show were snapped up in under two hours.

Following a Mastercard presale on Thursday 29 August, tickets went on general sale at 10am local time this morning (Friday 30 August) and sold out in an hour and a half, according to promoter Unusual Entertainment.

December marks the first performances at the National Stadium, the city-state’s largest concert venue, for Lin, although he sold out the Singapore Indoor Stadium (12,000-cap.) last year, writes the Straits Times.

Lin’s Sanctuary 2.0 stadium tour kicked off in Hangzhou, China, in March.

Lin, who released his debut album, Music Voyager, in 2003, is one of Singapore’s most popular singers and foremost exponent of Mandopop, or Mandarin pop music (a subset of wider Chinese, or ‘C’, pop).

Lin’s Sanctuary 2.0 stadium tour kicked off in Hangzhou in March

While C-pop is growing in popularity outside east Asia, it hasn’t yet made the same impact in the western world as K-pop, from neighbouring South Korea, and its poster boys BTS. According to the SCMP, the reason for this is “simple”: unlike the smaller Korean market, “China doesn’t have any financial need to take C-pop global. As the world’s most populous country with the second-largest economy, China also has a self-sustaining entertainment industry.”

In addition to Lin, upcoming shows for Singapore-based Unusual, part of the mm2 group, include Andy Lau, Kang Daniel and the Walking with Dinosaurs expo.

The company floated on the Singapore Exchange market in early 2017, delivering a 118% return on investment to shareholders, and has largely held its value since – at press time its market cap was S$283 million, compared to C$280m (US$200m) in 2017.

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