KCON LA 2026 opens Aug. 14 with TXT, ZB1, ILLIT, &TEAM and Anderson .Paak on the bill

KCON LA 2026 runs August 14 for four days at Crypto.com Arena and the LA Convention Center in Los Angeles.

&TEAM, Tomorrow X Together, ZEROBASEONE, and ILLIT headline the lineup. They share the bill with Hwang So-yoon of Korean band Saesonyeon, Korean-American pop star Anderson .Paak, and Santos Bravos, a Latin American K-pop boy group. The breadth reflects how far the festival has come since 2012.

KCON started with 10,000 attendees in year one. Now it pulls over 100,000 visitors annually across 14 global regions—Japan, France, UAE, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, and counting. KCON Japan 2026 took place in May in Chiba Prefecture, where second-year girl group RIIZE drew a strong response.

The event's consumer base is 70% female aged 18–34. That demographic has attracted major brand partners. Last year X (formerly Twitter), Walmart, and McDonald's participated. This year Sanrio, the Hello Kitty IP company, joined the roster.

"K-pop has developed from a fandom-based business to global mainstream culture and lifestyle, and the role KCON has shown in this journey is being noted by American media," a CJ ENM official said. Harvard Business School included KCON's founding process, K-brand value effects, and CJ ENM's investment case in its 2015 Business Case Studies.

Billboard columnist Jeff Benjamin covered early KCON editions. He recalled that BTS—then a rookie boy group from a small agency that debuted in 2013—"were the most rookie among the performers" when he first paid attention to them there. BTS is currently five months into a world tour, selling out every date.

August is shaping up to be a very busy month for K-pop in the US.