Europe’s biggest ever K-pop festival announced
Europe’s biggest ever K-Pop festival has been announced for Frankfurt, Germany in 2022.
Staged by K-Pop Europa, in partnership with PK Events and Korean broadcaster SBS Television Network, the 44,000-capacity Kpop.Flex will take place at Deutsche Bank Park on Saturday 14 May.
Monsta X and (G)I-DLE are the first names announced, with five more acts still to be unveiled for the event, which is part of a five-year plan to further grow the booming K-pop genre in Europe.
The Korean Wave has been gathering force in Europe for some time now
“The Korean Wave has been gathering force in Europe for some time now, so we are particularly excited to be able to give our growing fanbase what they want, right here on European turf, with the return to major live music events here in Frankfurt next spring,” says David Ciclitira, a partner in K-Pop Europa, which is a collaboration between Live Company Group (founded and chaired by Ciclitira) and Explorado Group.
Kpop.Flex will kick off the music season at Frankfurt’s Deutsche Bank Park, which has already sold out three dates for Coldplay and two for Ed Sheeran later in the year. Korean broadcaster SBS will film the festival and create a made-for-TV edit, for screening in Korea after the event.
“K-pop.Flex is a really dynamic addition to our line-up, which includes Ed Sheeran and Coldplay – and we’ve already pre-sold 300,000 tickets for those,” adds Deutsche Bank Park MD Patrik Meyer.
Festival-goers will also be able to view original artworks by K-Pop stars Ohnim and Yooyeon and independent talent Henry Lau. Limited edition prints of these artworks will be available to purchase.
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K-pop platform Universe records 2.6m viewers for first show
NCSoft Corporation, the South Korean developer behind the long-running online video game Guild Wars, welcomed more than 2.5 million viewers in 164 countries to its first online concert, staged via new artist-to-fan platform Universe on Valentine’s day.
Universe (no relation to the ticketing service) launched earlier this year as an “all-in-one technology platform” to connect Korean fans with their favourite K-pop and ‘idol’ groups.
The app is seen as a rival to Big Hit Entertainment’s Weverse fan platform, which is home to the likes of BTS, GFriend, CL and TXT. Weverse currently holds the record for the biggest-ever ticketed concert live stream, for BTS’s Bang Bang Con: The Live, which recorded 756,000 concurrent viewers last summer.
The concert featured a multi-view mode that allowed fans to watch the acts from five different angles
A total of 2.6m people viewed the free-to-watch debut show, Uni-Kon, which was held at 7pm Korean time yesterday (14 February). Performers included Park Ji Hoon, Iz*One, Monsta X, the Boyz, Kang Daniel, WJSN and AB6ix.
“There haven’t been big concerts recently due to Covid-19, but we could enjoy many artists’ performances today through Universe,” said Daniel during the show, JoongAng Ilbo reports. “I hope today’s Uni-Kon was a gift for the audience.”
The concert featured a multi-view mode that allowed fans to watch the acts from five different angles, as well as ‘extended-reality’ (XR) virtual stage effects. The entire show, as well as interviews and backstage footage, will be made available on the Universe platform in the coming days.
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