Too many rock festivals spoil the party

By Baek Byung-yeul

Fans cheer during a performance by Korean rock band Wiretap In My Ear at the 2013 Incheon Pentaport Rock Festival, Friday. / Yonhap

Kim In-kwon, an Incheon-based office worker and rock music enthusiast, is delighted that he’s seeing world-famous bands like Weezer for free. For the companies that put in a Herculean effort in recent years to organize these live music events, customers like him represent a failing business model.

Korea has seen a number of rock festivals in recent years, quenching the public’s thirst for rock and other genres that had been sidelined by the teeny-bopper boom otherwise known as K-pop.

However, the market has come to a point where the public questions whether there are too many of these events, whether the lineups are stretched too thin and whether there are large enough crowds to go around for everyone.

Entertainment companies and municipalities are desperate to sell out the shows. That’s how people like Kim score free tickets from the Internet.

"As a low-budget music lover, I am having a blast," said the 31-year-old, who went to the Ansan Valley Rock Festival, hosted by CJ E&M, after getting a free ticket for subscribing to a video-on-demand service operated by CJ’s cable television affiliate.

He went to the Jisan World Rock Festival, which continued through Sunday and featured Weezer and Jamiroqaui, because one of his friends won a free ticket in an Internet contest. A different friend found a free ticket for the Incheon Pentaport Rock Festival, held Saturday and Sunday.

"It’s cool that I was able to go to the `big three’ rock festivals without paying for a ticket. Of course, my friends `won’ the tickets for Ansan and Jisan, but there seems to be many tickets available in that way," Kim said.

Ansan, Jisan and Pentaport are the biggest of the six live music events that were or are expected to be hosted in the country in the July-August stretch alone.

The festivals have been charging 99,000 won (about $88) to 260,000 won for their tickets. In reality, these tickets have been given out free through marketing events or traded at lower costs on the Internet as organizers become desperate to fill their venues amid the over-competition.

Officials at the Incheon Metropolitan Government, one of Korea’s most indebted municipalities, recently came under fire over suspicions that they distributed thousands of free tickets. The city government claims the accusations have been overblown, saying that it issued only a “double-digit number” of free tickets.

In the online peer-to-peer commerce site, Joonggonara, three-day passes for the Jisan festival had been trading at around 50,000 won, compared to their official price of 250,000 won.

"The entertainment companies and municipalities are finding out the hard way that huge rock festivals don’t automatically guarantee huge profits," said Yeo In-hyub, chief editor of online review site IZM (www.izm.co.kr).