Panomenan Festival: K-pop's new 2-week fandom event set for Dec 2027 at Seoul Arena and KINTEX

The Panomenan Festival is scheduled for December 2–12, 2027. Two weeks split between Seoul Arena in Changdong and KINTEX in Ilsan.

Large-scale concerts featuring domestic and international artists share the bill with an awards ceremony built around fandoms. The fandom judged to have shown the greatest influence over the year wins. The artist of that winning fandom collects the trophy in person.

JYP Entertainment CEO and producer Park Jin-young, co-chair of the Public Culture Exchange Committee, led the July 27 press conference at the Seoul Museum of Modern Art. He didn't shy away from the award format's risks: "If we measure fandom passion to give awards, there will naturally be side effects, but I think the positive effects are greater than the negative effects, so we are going ahead with it."

Park also rejected the idea that the government dreamed this up. "The government did not propose this; it is led by a joint company of the four major K-pop agencies that received government support," he said. Agencies and artists can't sustain losses, he added. The real goal is for them to want to show up and perform.

Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Choi Hwee-young confirmed that artists from the four major agencies have already adjusted their schedules to align with the festival window. She thanked those agencies for "sacrificing some of their schedules and revenue" to participate.

Park pointed to Coachella's reported 14.9 billion won appearance fee for headliner Justin Bieber as the international scale Panomenan is chasing. YouTube and Spotify partnerships are in the works. A consolidated two-week festival, he argued, could spare artists from the current glut of K-pop awards ceremonies.

(He also asked the press directly for support, saying the event's success depends in part on media cooperation — which, given the outlet's headline framing, may not be a given.)