South Korea’s four largest entertainment companies—HYBE, SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and YG Entertainment—are moving forward with plans to establish a joint venture aimed at launching a large-scale global music festival.
According to a report by Business Post on April 16, the companies have recently submitted a business combination filing to South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission as part of the process to form the new entity, which will focus on concert and festival production.
The filing is required due to the size of the companies involved. HYBE qualifies as a large conglomerate with assets exceeding 5 trillion won, while SM Entertainment operates under the Kakao Group, also categorized as a major corporate group.
While officials declined to confirm specific filings, a representative from the Fair Trade Commission noted that review timelines vary depending on the complexity of each case.
A Joint Venture, Equal Stakes
The proposed joint venture will be structured with equal ownership among the four companies. However, key governance details—including executive leadership and board composition—have not yet been finalized.
The entity is expected to be named “Fanomonon” (a combination of “fan” and “phenomenon”), signaling its core concept: a large-scale cultural event driven by the collective power of fandom.
The venture will serve as the primary platform for executing the Fanomonon Project, an initiative led by Park Jin-young, who currently chairs the Popular Culture Exchange Committee.
Aiming Beyond Coachella
Park has positioned Fanomonon as a festival designed to surpass global benchmarks such as Coachella.
Speaking at the launch ceremony of the committee in October 2025 at KINTEX in Goyang, he outlined an ambitious roadmap:
A flagship festival in South Korea beginning in December 2027, held annually
Expansion into a global touring festival starting May 2028, visiting major cities worldwide
The 2027 event is expected to feature artists from all four companies, marking an unprecedented level of collaboration across the K-pop industry.
From Concerts to Cultural Infrastructure
The Fanomonon project aligns with the broader cultural policy direction of the administration under Lee Jae-myung, which has emphasized K-culture as a future pillar of the national economy.
The government has promoted a so-called “arm’s length” approach—supporting the industry without direct interference—while encouraging public-private collaboration to develop large-scale cultural intellectual property.
Within that framework, Fanomonon is being positioned not as a one-off event, but as a national-level performance IP, comparable to how festivals like Lollapalooza, Glastonbury Festival, and Fuji Rock Festival have become defining cultural assets for their respective countries—driving tourism, city branding, and global visibility.
A Structural Shift for K-Pop’s Live Business
Unlike traditional K-pop concerts, which center on individual artists or groups, Fanomonon is designed as a fandom-driven, multi-artist global festival model.
If executed as planned, it could mark a turning point in how the industry approaches live events—expanding beyond tour-based revenue into a scalable, festival-driven ecosystem with recurring global impact.
At its core, the project reflects a broader ambition: to transform K-pop’s live performance model into something that operates at the same structural level as the world’s most influential music festivals—while leveraging the unique power of fandom as its driving force.
