Fed up Pinoy K-pop fans watch concerts overseas
JANEL SUMMER SISON, a 26-year-old civil engineer from Manila, flew to Bangkok on Oct. 1 to watch the concert of K-pop group Seventeen, her first trip in three years amid a coronavirus pandemic.
This was after she failed to get a ticket — sales started as early as July — to the group’s performance in the Philippine capital, where the South Korean stars did their concert leg a week earlier.
“I’d rather watch a concert in another country,” Ms. Sison said in an Instagram message. “As much as the Philippine crowd is iconic, the first step — ticketing — is too stressful, not to mention confusing.”
A global coronavirus pandemic forced concerts, operas, ballets and plays to cancel at the last minute starting in 2020 because of high coronavirus transmission rates among performers and diving audience numbers, especially amid concerns over the Omicron variant in the latter part of 2021.
The concert scene here and overseas appears to be back, with a lust for life, after most countries eased lockdowns and learned to live with the virus at the start of 2022.
It used to be that a frustrated fan travels abroad to watch a concert if their favorite artist or group skipped their country as one of the stops in a tour.
Some Filipinos appear to be skipping the local concert scene altogether to avoid the hassles of local ticketing policy or to simply go on a music holiday.