K-pop band BIGBANG doing booming business in Toronto

K-pop band BIGBANG doing booming business in Toronto

K-pop band BIGBANG’s ACC show proving a hot ticket.

By: Nick Patch Entertainment Reporter, Published on Sat Sep 26 2015

South Korean boy band BIGBANG is coming to Toronto next month — and demand is out of this world.
All tickets for the Seoul heartthrobs’ Oct. 13 engagement at the Air Canada Centre, which originally ranged from $95 to $275, are sold out.

Resale prices, meanwhile, are astronomical. StubHub’s hopeful entrepreneurs are asking anywhere from $285 to $1,000, while Ticketmaster’s resale website doesn’t offer a single seat for less than $400. (Live Nation refused to disclose how many tickets were originally available.)

This BIGBANG gig is “by far” the biggest K-pop show ever staged in Canada, said Gerald Belanger of Kpopcanada.
“It seems like Korea finally caught up with what Toronto knew the whole time: that there’s a lot of fans here,” said Belanger, who claims tickets were gone in three hours.

The show will conclude BIGBANG’s six-date North American sojourn and mark the hip-hop quintet’s first performance in Canada (an aborted 2012 show here during their only previous American tour still rankles fans).

Formed in 2006 and captured in fledgling stages by reality TV cameras, BIGBANG is a Pan-Asian sensation, with a dozen-plus chart-topping hits in Korea and ravenously faithful followings in Japan and China.

Their music videos have accumulated hundreds of millions of views on YouTube, with “Fantastic Baby” standing as their most-watched clip with 170-million-plus clicks.

It’s easy to see why. The video opens with rapper G-Dragon perched atop a concrete throne clutching a bejewelled cane, his metres of fiery orange hair splayed majestically across the floor. His face is smudged with makeup and his Beetlejuice-like pinstripe suit is covered in stars.

It’s not even the most outlandish outfit in the four-minute clip.

The group’s hotly anticipated third album, Made, is their first in three years — which, by the furiously prolific standards of Korean pop, might as well be a century.

BIGBANG has released two-song teasers for months to pique hysteria for the full-length, with the four singles selling more than 10 million copies combined.

The new singles are diverse — if not as stylistically adventurous as the group’s flamboyant fashion — with sounds spanning strobe-lit pop-rap (“Bang Bang Bang”), finger-plucked guitar balladry (“If You”) and minor-key piano shuffles (“Loser,” which features the English chorus: “I’m a loser.”)

Given BIGBANG’s relative veteran status, their fan base skews older than the tweens who Belanger says populate many K-pop gigs.
“They’re a national treasure,” said Belanger, whose organization is handling local promotion for the show.
“When the show was announced, people from the (Korean) consulate were calling us.”

That said, Belanger stresses that K-pop audiences are richly diverse. He estimates that Korean fans comprise no more than five per cent of a typical crowd.

“Walk into a full TTC subway car and you’ll same diversity of a K-pop audience,” he said.

Source: The Star Toronto