Alternative or “New Normal”: Shifting Trend of K-pop Concerts in COVID-19 Time

Abstract

The pandemic has greatly changed the production and consumption patterns of culture around the world. Many experts predicted that K-pop, performance-oriented popular music, would suffer a deep recession as offline communication channels, such as concerts and fan meetings, were shut down at the start of the pandemic. Nevertheless, K-pop has survived in a new way with accelerated technology developments to adapt to the condition under the pandemic. This paper explores how K-pop's performance culture attempted to survive the pandemic by reviewing the cases of a number of online concerts held during the pandemic from popular music studies and cultural industry studies perspectives. With this approach, it also considers whether online concerts will remain a temporary alternative to the offline performance culture of K-pop or become a “new normal.”