As of May 2024, I’ve been to three K-pop concerts. With the amount of knowledge I’ve gathered through them, I’ll be giving some tips and tricks for K-pop concerts! This of course can apply to other concerts as well but it is mainly focused on K-pop concerts.
Ticketing
Before anything else, the most important part of going to a K-pop concert, or any concert at all is ticketing. I’ll be honest, ticketing for K-pop concerts are not easy at all, especially for bigger groups. The first piece of advice I can give you to get a good seat is try to get tickets through the membership presale. Getting memberships for K-pop groups can be simple or difficult. For example, for groups on Weverse (an app where you can communicate with K-pop idols and buy merchandise from them) you can easily buy a membership any day. But, this isn’t always the case. For some other groups, there’s a specific time period where you can get the membership and outside of that time period you cannot. Either way, having a membership is very useful when trying to get tickets. Membership presales are usually the first presale that happens, so you can be the first person to snatch those tickets. Although this might seem simple so far, membership presales aren’t very easy either. I have only done a presale on Ticketmaster before, so I will be talking about my experience using Ticketmaster. Roughly around 10 minutes before the presale starts, the waiting room will open. Once the presale starts, you will automatically be put into the queue. When your turn comes in the queue, your screen will automatically show the ticketing screen. You will need to put in your presale code, which I recommend you have ready before the presale starts. After that you will be able to buy the tickets. You will most likely need to try several times to get the tickets because it will show a pop up that somebody has already taken the tickets. One huge tip for people that have a budget is to not buy official platinum tickets. Those are tickets with jacked up prices that are not fair prices. When you find a ticket that hasn’t been taken and you check out, those tickets now belong to you.
Now, what if you don’t get a presale code? Or if you don’t have a membership? Don’t worry, because there are always resale tickets. Resale tickets can be a good choice, especially if you buy them very last minute. But, be careful when you buy them. There has been numerous cases where people were turned down to enter a concert because the resale tickets they bought were fake. My best advice for this is to try to find a trustable seller, or try to buy tickets off of your close friends that you trust.
Buying Merch
You can completely skip this part if you’re not the type of person to buy merch, but if you are I would read this thoroughly. Buying concert merch, especially for bigger groups, is very hard to do easily. What I mean by this is, you’ll probably arrive at the merch station thinking maybe you’ll wait around 20 minutes but in reality, you’ll probably end up waiting more than an hour. For me, I went to buy merch about 20 minutes after it opened up but I had to wait in line for nearly three hours. If you’re in a rush or don’t want to wait a long time, I would recommend lining up before the merch sale starts.
Concert Day Tips
Out of all of the processes for a concert, the actual concert day is probably the easiest. But, one tip I would give is to see if there are any fan projects going on. For example, there could be an event where you hold up a banner when they sing a specific song and if you’re the only one not doing it, you could feel left out. Also, a good way to make friends at the concert is handing out freebies. Freebies are little gifts that you hand out for free to people at the concert, and they can be little things like bracelets or stickers. The most important tip for the concert day tip is probably when you should start lining up for the concert. If you want to get in the venue quickly, as soon as you see a line form you should start lining up as well.
