Under the Spotlight
"Wait, wasn't it working just a second ago? Why isn't it working now?!"
"Heheh, of course... If I can't do it, there's no way Suyun-nim could..."
"Ah, seriously, they're so freaking cute."
Wondering how anyone could be that adorable, Ayun stared at her screen where the YouTube video had just ended. With the concert just around the corner, this video was a rare drop of rain on the desert-dry official Group Sound channel. She had told herself to save it, to watch it slowly, but now that she'd devoured it all, there was nothing left...
'Whatever! The concert is almost here anyway! I just have to wait!'
No matter what trials and tribulations stood in her way, she was confident she could overcome them. Why? Because Ayun was a two-day ticket holder for the Group Sound KSPO DOME Solo Concert.
It was nothing short of a miracle.
'I've never been so glad to pay for Premium as I was back then...'
Group Sound was famous for taking incredibly good care of their Premium (fan club) members. Premium-exclusive fan meetings, Premium-exclusive concerts, Premium-exclusive events, Premium-exclusive YouTube lives... The agency, Label Echo Sound, pampered their Premium members so much that people openly said:
Some even joked that joining Premium didn't cost 70,000 won; it actually saved you 70,000 won. Yet, despite this history of generosity, no one had anticipated the Premium-exclusive KSPO DOME Presale. Allocating 2,500 seats for each of the two days, limited to one ticket per person... and releasing them via a lottery system. It was an incredibly generous move.
Fans who hadn't joined Premium wept and beat the ground in despair, while those who had bowed three times a day in the direction of the Echo Sound building. And Ayun was one of those lucky souls. She had successfully secured one ticket through the Premium presale and another through the general sale, scoring tickets for both days.
She desperately wanted to brag, but doing so would surely get her lynched for flexing. So, she settled for a simple tweet: "Got tickets for both days!!" Since the ticketing day, she had developed a slightly dark, self-indulgent hobby: searching the internet once or twice a day to watch the people who had failed to get tickets.
And through this, she realized something. Group Sound had been talked about quite a bit in the past. Ever since the Invasion from Seoul 2024 days, there had been talk about Suyun's school bullying rumors, the documentary, their first studio album, and so on... News about them hitting the trending pages of online communities or being reported in articles wasn't incredibly frequent, but it wasn't rare either.
But compared to back then, now... The talk about Group Sound's ticketing didn't blow up into some massive, dramatic controversy on the community boards. At most, there were posts like:
But even without explosive, dramatic scandals, posts about Group Sound were constantly being uploaded to the forums.
It was as if they had become a top-tier idol group. Even without any specific news or scandals, posts about them kept popping up. Whenever she looked at a corner of the forum, one or two posts were always occupied by Group Sound.
They had moved past the stage of "getting no attention at all," and even past the stage of "only being summoned for specific controversies." Now, it felt like they had risen to the level of a "universal topic of conversation on the internet."
'I can kind of understand why they said there wouldn't be any more concerts for a while...'
Indeed, at this point, it was safe to say they had achieved everything they could in Korea. Any further goals would just be selling more albums or increasing the venue size. But those two things, as the post had said, could only be achieved by heavily relying on gacha-style marketing or waiting for years as the fanbase slowly accumulated...
Ayun was filled with a sense of pride. When had she first seen Group Sound? Her first time witnessing them was at a small venue with about 200 seats. Now, before she knew it, they were performing not for 200, but for 20,000 people. Going to that first show was probably the most valuable decision she had ever made in her life...
While she was lost in these thoughts, her phone buzzed with a vibration. She instinctively looked at her phone and frowned. A Twitter DM request had arrived in Japanese, a language she couldn't understand.
'Is this spam...?'
Surprisingly, it wasn't. And what was even more surprising was that it was related to Group Sound.
The polite DM, which started with those words, went on to ask about accommodations near the Gymnastics Arena, how to get from Incheon Airport to the arena, how to enter the Korean concert venue quickly, and how to wait in line for merchandise. These were incredibly easy questions for Ayun to answer.
As she began drafting a reply, Ayun looked through the sender's Twitter profile. And she was quite surprised.
There were tweets with hundreds of retweets and replies. There were people actively discussing the concert. A dedicated hashtag for Japanese fans had already been created. There were even listening parties and distributions of self-made merchandise. Seeing how these events were held multiple times and hundreds of items were distributed, it didn't seem like just a few noisy individuals.
While it wasn't as massive as the K-pop idol fandoms in Japan, because of that, it was clearly a grassroots community... It was a group that looked exactly like Group Sound's early fandom.
Ayun typed rapidly. She felt a strange flutter of excitement at the thought of sharing the same hobby with someone across the sea. Until now, she had simply been waiting for the day of the concert, but now, she felt like she had even more to look forward to...
The day of the concert.
"The line to enter is this way!! If you want to buy merchandise, please line up over there!!"
'Holy crap, why are there so many people?'
In Korea, there is a saying: "an experienced newcomer." It sounds like a paradox, but Korean society values experience so much that the phrase actually makes sense. This logic applied to part-time jobs as well, and concert staffing was one of the fields where "experience" was most heavily valued.
And even to his eyes—having worked concert part-time jobs for a long time—the crowd gathered in front of the venue today was staggering. From where he stood, the line to enter stretched out of sight, and the queue for the merchandise booth was just as endless.
'At this rate, they're practically on the level of IU or Lim Young-woong...'
He thought to himself as he guided the orderly crowd. This was completely different from those concerts that claimed to be "sold out" through media play but only had 5,000 or 7,000 seats, barely filling them by handing out free invitation tickets. This was the kind of crowd only shown by artists who had reached national status. The actual number of people was smaller than those massive stadium shows, but the vibe he got was exactly the same. He felt they were fully capable of reaching that level.
The only problem was that a crowd this big made his job incredibly exhausting.
"The baggage storage is over there!! Please check your gate location!! It's much more convenient to use the restroom before you enter!!"
Hoping the endless line would shrink quickly, he shouted his directions until his voice went hoarse. If it were a concert with a shorter line, he could have slacked off a bit, but working a crowd of this scale was absolute torture...
Though the audience had finished entering, his work wasn't over. Next up was enforcing the no-photography rule. He had to patrol the aisles, catching anyone with a camera and deleting their footage.
As he stepped into the arena for his shift, he caught his breath. The seats were packed to the brim, without a single empty spot. From the very first row right in front of the stage to the seats that seemed to touch the ceiling, there wasn't a single vacancy.
'What a sight...'
In those seats, lightsticks glowed with their own unique colors. Some swayed, some blinked, and some remained still. But other than that, there was no movement. Like pilgrims visiting a holy sanctuary, the audience sat quietly, calmly waiting for Group Sound.
Looking down toward the stage... Behind the stage stood a giant screen, larger than any he had ever seen in his life.
'What on earth are they planning to do with a screen that huge?'
He wondered as he walked down the stairs. As he descended, the stage setup came into clearer view. It looked somewhat sci-fi, yet not quite. There were decorations whose purpose couldn't be guessed at first glance, and a wall of lights that looked almost like a fortress.
Suddenly, as if the start time had arrived, the lights in the arena went completely black. Eyes unaccustomed to the darkness could only register a few glowing objects. The emergency lights on the stairs. The multi-colored lightsticks. And the light spilling from the phone screens of a few inconsiderate people.
'Those guys are going to get caught immediately...'
"Waaaaahhhhh!!!"
Before he could finish the thought, a massive roar of cheers washed over him. The sheer physical volume of the sound felt like a heavy weight pressing down on him. He held his breath for a moment before slowly letting it out. What followed was a whisper thick with anticipation, blanketed by a thin layer of silence.
The darkness showed no sign of lifting, until...
A beam of light pierced the dark. A single spotlight turned on, illuminating the stage. Beneath it stood two things. An instrument stand, and the guitar hanging from it.
And then, a silhouette that anyone in this room would recognize instantly. An unmistakable silhouette with long, flowing hair... slowly stepped out from the kingdom of shadows that blanketed the arena, and walked into the spotlight.