Korean wave crashes in Australia, as Blackpink and Stray Kids sell out tours
South Korean pop acts have begun to cross over and find a firm footing with Australian audiences, as confirmed by sold-out tours by two of K-pop’s biggest groups in Stray Kids and Blackpink.
After years of running parallel to mainstream Australian culture, South Korean pop acts have crossed over to find a firm footing with wide audiences here, as confirmed by upcoming sold-out tours by two of K-pop’s biggest acts.
On Friday and Saturday, boy band Stray Kids will perform at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, followed by two shows at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney.
In June, girl group Blackpink will follow the same four-date schedule in the two capital cities, with both tours each selling about 45,000 tickets.
Where previously you might have expected to find these concerts populated with Asian Australians, that’s no longer the case.
Today, these acts attract truly multicultural audiences that skew young, and senior music industry sources suggest that K-pop acts may now be leading the cultural discourse, a suspicion given credence when Blackpink was recently booked as a headline act at major US festival Coachella, alongside Puerto Rican performer Bad Bunny and US artist Frank Ocean.
“It’s increasingly part of the mainstream pop offering,” said Roger Field, president of Live Nation Asia Pacific.
“A lot of people may not be across it, but there is a broad community who’s very engaged in the genre in pretty much every market around the world, because it delivers fashion, catchy songs, and a lifestyle.”
Ahead of Live Nation’s upcoming tour with Stray Kids, Field told The Australian, “We’ve had the privilege of a long commitment to growing the genre across the globe, and that commitment is pulling all the levers to escalate these artists very quickly into arenas and stadiums.”
Known for their highly stylised and exquisitely choreographed performances, these K-pop groups are effectively cultural ambassadors, as their work is backed by the South Korean government’s cultural diplomacy strategy known as Hallyu, or ‘Korean wave’.
That wave has well and truly crashed on these shores: when the four Blackpink concerts went on sale last week, the entire ticket allocation – ranging from $99 cheap seats to $1399 ‘Pink Pit VIP experiences’ – was snapped up by eager fans in a matter of minutes.
According to Sahara Herald, tour director at Frontier Touring, about 40,000 people had joined the promoter’s mailing list to register their interest in the girl group’s Australian return.
Having previously witnessed the quartet perform at Coachella in 2019, Herald is ideally placed to oversee Blackpink’s tour in June. “Their set was mind-blowing; the staging and production were just spectacular,” Herald told The Australian. “It’s a complete spectacle in itself.”
With Frontier, Herald also toured a K-pop boy band named Monsta X for a short visit in 2019 – a major detour from her live music industry roots, having worked on the rock ‘n’ roll-centric Big Day Out tours for 18 years, but not an unwelcome one.
The tour director said with a laugh: “I’m not always the target market, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate a really incredible live show, and an ardent audience that’s quite feverish in their adulation of the stars in that world.”
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