The Culture Ministry and Korea Creative Content Agency have selected three existing facilities for a national project aimed at improving the environment for K-pop and other popular-music performances. The first group includes Goyang Sports Complex, Busan Citizens Hall Grand Theater and Wonju Chiak Gymnasium. The program targets multipurpose or sports facilities with at least 1,000 seats and will fund upgrades to performance infrastructure such as stage and sound equipment. Each selected facility can receive up to 2 billion won in national funding, giving local venues a way to adapt existing buildings rather than waiting for entirely new concert halls. The structure of the program is explicitly regional. It calls for one large venue of at least 30,000 seats in the capital area and five smaller venues outside the capital region. Two additional non-capital facilities covering the Jeolla, Chungcheong and Jeju areas are due to be selected this month. For the K-pop industry, the significance is physical capacity. More performance-ready regional venues can make domestic touring less concentrated in Seoul and reduce the gap between cities that have large buildings and cities that have buildings actually equipped for major pop productions.

Turning existing buildings into touring infrastructure