concert – Phlox Pro – Business 2 Demo

2026-03-11T06:01:35.777Z

Seventeen kicked off the Southeast Asian leg of their tour on Saturday in Singapore.
I was in the stadium — again — to see them live.
Sweltering heat aside, it’s an experience I’ll never forget.

Heat — that was the word of the day at the boy band Seventeen’s concert in Singapore.

Heat, with legions of fans clutching bags toting pickets bearing their favorite member’s face, comparing merchandise hauls like the spoils of war. Heat, under the blazing equatorial sun. And heat, on stage, when the nine active members of the 13-person group emerged to thunderous cheers.

Stepping into the stadium on Saturday reminded me of the bigger picture. This band is one of the crown jewels of the K-pop business machine. They’ve been working together for 11 years, playing to hundreds of thousands of people who cross continents just to see their favorite boys.

The concert on Saturday marked the start of Seventeen’s Southeast Asia tour leg

Seventeen’s Singapore concert lasted around three and a half hours, with more than a dozen encore songs.

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I’ve been following Seventeen for just over a year now, which makes me a newbie Carat — the name the group has for its fans. The band, which is down four members because of South Korea’s mandatory military service, has been touring the US and East Asia, playing over 26 shows to date, to close to 800,000 people.

Seventeen kicked off the “NEW_” tour in South Korea on September 13 and 14, and did shows in five US cities. They’re back after a short break following their winter dome tour in four Japanese cities.

Performing at Singapore’s National Stadium is no walk in the park

A composite image of the bag check outside the National Stadium in Singapore and two hands holding Seventeen light sticks. — My friend and I came prepped and ready for the show with our concert light sticks.

Cheryl Teh

The 55,000-seat National Stadium in Singapore is a tough venue to play, in part because of the humidity and the heat. It was around 90 degrees Fahrenheit at kickoff.

But it’s the stadium of choice for any big act coming to the island. Taylor Swift performed six nights at the stadium in 2024, and Lady Gaga did four shows there in May 2025.

Seventeen played the venue for two nights in January 2025.

The band is touring with nine out of 13 members, but made up for the missing members with an abundance of energy

A group shot of the band Seventeen in Singapore — Seventeen is touring with nine members — four are serving mandatory military service in South Korea.

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At nine people, the band rallied hard. They kicked off the show with tracks from their 2025 album, “Happy Burstday,” which sold over 2.52 million copies in its first week of release.

The group also dug deep into their archives and pulled out tracks like “Hot,” “Hit” and “Rock” for a segment that the members said was particularly hard to get through because of the strenuous choreography.

The fans were treated to some smooth dance moves and pop-rock

A composite image of Seventeen members Dino, Jun, and Vernon in concert. — Seventeen members Dino, Jun, and Vernon.

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Every member of the team got their fair share of airtime with the nine solo songs, each showcasing their personal style.

The group’s youngest, Dino, and Chinese member Jun showed off their slick moves in “Trigger” and “Gemini.” Korean-American member Vernon went full pop-rock and brought out his electric guitar for “Shining Star.”

The band’s vocalists also served up some sweet, heartrending ballads

A composite image of Seventeen members Seungkwan, Joshua, and DK in concert. — Seventeen members Seungkwan, Joshua, and DK performed a set of three ballads during their segment of the concert.

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Joshua — the group’s other Korean-American, and my favorite band member — kicked off a segment of ballads with his saccharine solo song, “Fortunate Change.” Hong is fresh off an appearance at the Golden Globes and this year’s Super Bowl.

His bandmates Seungkwan and DK — who are in the midst of promoting their unit album, “Serenade” — showed off their vocal chops with their solos, “Raindrops” and “Happy Virus.”

The moment the stadium started to feel like a club

A composite image of Seventeen members The8, Mingyu, and S.Coups. — It was party time with dancer The8 and the rappers Mingyu and S.Coups.

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The crowd went wild when the group’s resident Calvin Klein model, Mingyu, strutted down the stage in head-to-toe denim for “Shake It Off.” That was right after the electro-dance party number, “Skyfall,” from his bandmate The8.

The deafening cheers kept coming for the band’s leader S.Coups’ head-banging hip-hop track, “Jungle.” The rapper — like his teammates Joshua, Mingyu, and Jun — is a fashion week regular in Europe.

Some fans flew across the world to see Seventeen live

A group shot of Seventeen on stage. — Seventeen performed in five US cities. The band will wrap its “NEW_” tour in April in Incheon, South Korea.

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S.Coups was the reason Jackie Ko flew in from California. This was Ko’s 11th time at a Seventeen concert and first abroad.

Ko told me she spent around $2,500 for the trip. It was worth it, she said — she heard songs that weren’t on the US set list.

“S.Coups and Seventeen helped me get through some of the toughest times,” Ko told me. “He makes me feel rejuvenated. He’s my motivation to keep going, no matter what life throws at me.”

Seventeen, like many of their peers, have helped rev up the K-pop business machine

A group shot of Seventeen members performing — One of my personal highlights from the concert: “Network Love,” a unit track.

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Seventeen is part of an industry that generates billions in annual revenue. Tickets to their Singapore show started at $199 Singapore dollars, or around $155, and topped off at $320.

The monetizable hype was evident in the run-up to the concert: Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands resort lit up the landmark in the band’s colors, organized a party featuring their songs at the property’s Marquee club, and had half a dozen restaurants curating custom menus inspired by their tracks.

The group’s parent company Hybe is riding Seventeen and similar groups’ success: Shares are up 55% in the last year.

There’s a reason fans shell out for the band — these concerts feel like once-in-a-lifetime experiences

A crowd shot of the Singapore stadium during the Seventeen concert. — There’s really nothing quite like a Seventeen concert.

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For four hours, there is nothing that shines brighter or makes me happier than watching Seventeen perform. In these troubled times, that’s something worth holding onto.

Seth Aw, an artist from Singapore, agreed.

“The feeling of being in a stadium with other fans enjoying the same moment is so healing,” Aw said. “I don’t think anything can compare to how a good concert makes me feel, and that gives me strength to deal with many things in life.”

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In 2021, the Barclays Center arena — home to the Brooklyn Nets and concerts ranging from Disney on Ice to Bad Bunny — decided to switch from Ticketmaster to another ticketing company, SeatGeek.

The switch didn’t go well.

Ticketmaster retaliated hard, a federal jury in Manhattan heard on Wednesday, as testimony began in a high-stakes government effort to split the ticketing giant from parent company Live Nation.

“Ticketmaster pulled up the drawbridge behind them,” refusing to help with the transition to SeatGeek, testified John Abbamondi, Barclay’s then CEO.

And soon, Live Nation retaliated as well, Abbamondi testified, supporting the federal antitrust allegation that any venue that refused to use Ticketmaster would be threatened or punished.

After booting Ticketmaster in October 2021, the 18,000-seat arena saw a dramatic drop in Live Nation-promoted concerts, Abbamondi told the jury — from more than 20 a year to fewer than eight.

Abbamondi cited a Billie Eilish concert as one example of what he called “smoking gun” evidence: that Barclays was punished for quitting Ticketmaster.

Word got back to Abbamondi, he testified, that Live Nation pulled a planned Barclays concert featuring the Grammy-winning artist. A concert date for Eilish, who was promoted by Live Nation, was switched from Barclays to the USB Arena near JFK Airport in Queens, Abbamondi said.

“It was Live Nation’s decision,” Abbamondi said an Eilish manager told one of his executives of the Barclays snub.

John Abbamondi in 2019.

Dave Reginek/NHLI via Getty Images

Live Nation’s retaliation campaign did not come without warning, Abbamondi told jurors.

The ex-Barclays CEO said that six months before the switch to SeatGeek, he received a cautionary text from his friend, Patti Kim, a Live Nation vice president.

In the text, Kim warned that he “should think about the bigger relationship with Live Nation” before going with SeatGeek, according to a copy of the exchange shared with jurors.

Kim’s email was signed with “a winky face emoji,” Abbamondi noted.

“I took this as a friendly warning to me that I was about to make a big mistake,” he told jurors.

When Abbamondi called two Live Nation executives weeks later to break the news that Barclays still planned to switch ticketers, the profanities flew, he said.

Joe Berchtold, Live Nation’s Chief Financial Officer, “dropped an F-bomb on me,” Abbamondi said, when a government lawyer asked how he knew the CFO was angry.

“He told me it was going to be difficult to put concerts in Barclays Center,” Abbamondi told jurors.

Asked to elaborate on his retaliation concerns, Abbamondi said “I would describe it as a widely-shared concern in the industry.”

The answer was stricken from the record as unsupported hearsay, as was Abbamoni’s reference to a Eilish manager saying Live Nation had pulled her concert from Barclays.

Abbamondi’s testimony also supported the government’s contention that Ticketmaster’s technology is “held together by duct tape,” as a government attorney had told the ten-woman, two-man jury on Tuesday.

In his opening statements, Assistant US Attorney David Dahlquist pointed to Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift Eras Tour crash in 2022 as evidence that a lack of competition let Live Nation get away with foisting an inferior product on fans, artists, and concert venues.

In his own opening remarks, Live Nation attorney David R. Marriott called Ticketmaster “the highest quality product that there is on this planet in terms of delivering quality ticketing services.”

But in his testimony Wednesday, Abbamondi told jurors that the decision to switch was clinched by SeatGeek’s superior technology. At one point, Abbamondi likened SeatGeek’s tech to “the Mac OS,” while Ticketmaster was more like “Windows 95.”

Abbamondi joked from the witness stand that the blinking green cursor he would see when running the Ticketmaster venue interface was “like something out of the 1980s.”

The Department of Justice has joined with a consortium of attorneys general from 39 states and the District of Columbia in pressing for the Ticketmaster-Live Nation split.

The feds say Live Nation holds a monopoly in the live music industry, which it uses to compete unfairly with its much-smaller competitors— and that Barclays’ experience is a case in point.

“They lost concerts, they lost profits, they lost revenue as a result of the move” to SeatGeek, Dahlquist told jurors in opening statements.

“And of course, because the Barclays Center wants to succeed, to be successful, they’re forced to go back,” to Ticketmaster, he said. “So today, they are a Ticketmaster entity.”

Marriott countered in his own opening statement that Barclays’ return to Ticketmaster, two years after the switch to SeatGeek, was based not on retaliation, but on Live Nation’s superior product.

“They came back to Ticketmaster not because of any threats, but because SeatGeek fell down on the job,” Marriott said.

Lawyers for Live Nation say that yes, they compete aggressively — but they do so fairly. Artists remain free to choose promoters, and arenas and venues remain free to choose who does their ticketing, they argued.

The civil antitrust trial, the culmination of a May 2024 federal and state lawsuit, is expected to last six weeks.

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Hot boys, bright lights, sweltering city: Inside Seventeen’s Singapore stadium concert