The K-Pop Festival “Music Bank in Paris” neglects Domestic Fans

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“Music Bank in Paris” was a grand festival which was a testimony to the worldwide popularity and growing awareness of K-Pop. But as a show, it was a let-down.

The show, hosted by three MCs Lee Jang-woo, SNSD Soo Young, and Son Mina, was aired to domestic fans on the 18^th through KBS 2TV.

With the fantastic opening performance by U-KISS, the festival featured powerful performances by some of the best-loved K-pop artists including Sistar, 4Minute, SHINEE, 2PM, T-ara, B2ST, and SNSD. The camera showed European fans absolutely captivated by the performances, many of them singing along to all the lyrics or even bursting into tears.

But the show also had several shortcomings. Due to the duration of the actual show (which lasted about three hours), many parts were edited out, especially the parts featuring the MCs. Son Mina, ex-announcer of KBS who is currently residing in Paris, was recruited as a special MC but it was unclear why they had even gone through the trouble of securing her in the first place.

On top of that, most of the artists had taken about 1-3 minutes before their performances to greet their fans in English or in French but there were no subtitles.

During 2PM’s photo time with fans, Taekyeon purposely used English in order to communicate with them and although it was not that difficult to understand what was going on, the lack of subtitles was a little unexpected.

B2ST member Son Dong Woon’s name was misspelled and there were even some technical difficulties during Sistar and SHINEE’s performance.

Viewers commented “Son Dong Woon’s name was misspelled!” “What’s wrong with the sound quality” “It was fortunate that my English was good but the show would have seemed rather inconsiderate to people who can’t speak English very well” “It was good to see the overseas fans but I kept wondering about what the MCs were doing all that time.”

“Music Bank in Paris” was primarily intended for the enjoyment of overseas fans. But the performance was on the 8^th and it was aired for domestic fans 10 days afterwards: Hence there was plenty of time to edit and include subtitles for the convenience of Korean fans. Such considerate measures would have further elevated the domestic perception of the K-pop fever overseas.