BTS concert numbers

What do the widely different BTS crowd estimates say about the media?

Readers may have noticed that local and international news reports in the lead-up to the BTS comeback concert last weekend said that 260,000 fans would be descending on downtown Seoul, making it one of the most thrilling non-protest events in the city center since the 2002 World Cup.

The numbers were so huge — reminiscent of major protests in recent years — that the president ordered safety measures and the terrorist alert level was raised to “caution.”

But then reports on the day, you will have noticed, went with the organizer’s claim of 104,000 attendees. This was reported without any “disappointment” or “less-than-expected” language.

But even that may have been way off. You may have missed this because it was tucked away in a Yonhap news story that did not get much pick-up at first, but the official police figure was just 42,000 participants.

The striking gap between the forecast, claimed and official crowd sizes prompted the familiar narrative about journalism: that media are unreliable, that their “facts” are elastic and often “fake,” and that malevolent hands-in-the-glove manipulate truth to fit an agenda.

You may think I am setting this column up to join in the criticism. But, actually, I feel it incumbent upon me to use this space to explain the discrepancy in figures and defend the noble craft of journalism.

I will do so because the reality of the news gathering business is the opposite of that which the conspiracy theorists in our midst claim.

Journalism is not a science of fixed answers. It is an art of careful approximation. To do it well requires skill in the assessment of conflicting information and interpretations and the ability to exercise it under pressure, not just because different forces are tugging at the reporter for attention, but because a news story must be crafted at speed.

This crowd numbers issue reminds me of my days as a news reporter. Once, back when dinosaurs roamed the streets of Seoul, then-opposition leader Kim Dae-jung asked me how big I thought his election rally a few days earlier had been.

“Huge,” I told him. It was as big as the record set by the Pope a few years earlier. “At least a million,” I said.

He looked at me as if I were a peddler of fake news. I later figured why. His aides had told him 3 million.

Back in those days, when protest was the norm, reporters in search of accuracy were torn between two agendas: that of protest organizers who gave us stats that were often fantasies, if not deliberate lies, and that of the police, which was pro-government back then, that did it the opposite way and always minimized the scale of protest.

Our savior for a while was an AP news correspondent who was older and more experienced than the rest of us. He used to dispassionately survey a crowd, from higher ground, carve an imaginary section out, count how many people were in it, and then extrapolate. We used to go with his figure and attribute it to “eyewitnesses.”

So, where did the various BTS numbers come from? The 260,000 figure was a police estimate made at the time of security planning. It was based on two calculations. One was that, even though there would be only 22,000 ticketholders in front of the stage on Gwanghwamun Square, fans would still pile into downtown all the way back to Sungnyemun Gate.

This was not an unreasonable assumption. Such had been the turnout with a Christian protest in October 2024 against same-sex marriage (1 million according to organizers, 230,000 according to police) and a political protest in November 2016 against then-President Park Geun-hye (1.5 million according to organizers, 270,000 according to police).

The other calculation was that the crowd would be dense — two people per square meter. That means, couples, friends, families, rather than individuals who didn’t know one another. This is an important measure. I remember a presidential election when rally size was a key indicator of popularity (polls were banned then). Each candidate filled Yeouido Plaza (before the park was built), claiming 1 million fans. But while the opposition rallies were dense, at the government candidate’s event, you could pirouette and even fall over without bumping into anyone.

Going with its 260,000 estimate, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety deployed 15,000 safety-related personnel, including 6,700 police. As you can see, it was a worst-case scenario for planning purposes, made with the completely under-policed crowd crush in the city’s Itaewon area in 2022, which killed 159 people, overshadowing police concerns.

In other words, the 260,000 figure was not a biblical prophecy. The vicars in government should not be slandered for having overestimated.

For the realistic calculation of numbers on the night, the same police took the 22,000 ticketholders and figured that another 20,000 people came near the venue to soak up the atmosphere. That made 42,000. Seoul City’s estimate was slightly bigger, at between 46,000 and 48,000.

I am not sure of the reason — it could have been a question of which figure was made available to them first — but reporters mostly went with the organizer HYBE’s number of 104,000 people. This was calculated by mobile network data and budget phone users. (HYBE itself incidentally deployed almost 5,000 security and other personnel in anticipation of numbers).

Thus, we had three different figures derived from three different methods, but each with logic behind it. Nobody was trying to fool or manipulate anyone. The fact is that life, like journalism, is an art and sometimes not everything is scientifically clear.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.