Korea’s top four K-pop companies, SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, YG Entertainment and HYBE, are preparing to form a joint venture to launch a global music festival.
The JV will anchor “FANOMENON,” a working title for the festival project led by JYP Entertainment founder and chief producer J.Y. Park, who serves as co-chair of the Presidential Committee on Popular Culture Exchange, an advisory body operating directly under the president to coordinate Korea’s cultural export strategy. The name fuses “fan” and “phenomenon,” framing the event around the cultural weight fandoms now carry in the global music economy.
Park first outlined the ambition at the committee’s launch at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province last October, pledging to “build a world-class K-pop venue and plan a festival that surpasses the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.” The plan pairs infrastructure development with a flagship festival designed to pull international audiences into Korea, then take the IP on the road. Following roughly two years of preparation, the festival is set to debut in Korea in December 2027 and expand to major global cities from 2028.
In a statement, JYP Entertainment confirmed that “we are in discussions with the government’s Presidential Committee on Popular Culture Exchange regarding a public-private partnership model for the global expansion of the K-culture industry,” adding that “the four companies comprising the committee’s music subcommittee are currently preparing to establish a corporation to advance the ‘FANOMENON’ event.”
The company framed the JV as “one of several cooperative models aimed at exploring the global expansion potential of K-culture, including K-pop,” noting that “stable execution requires industry-level collaboration rather than individual corporate effort.” JYP said the companies are reviewing an inter-company partnership structure and moving through required procedures, including a business combination filing with the Korea Fair Trade Commission. The initiative, JYP added, “is still at an early review stage,” with specific business details and operational methods yet to be finalized.
What makes the move notable is less the festival itself than the structure behind it: Korea’s four biggest rivals aligning under a public-private framework to build a shared festival IP, rather than competing for one. If executed, it would mark the clearest signal yet that K-pop’s next growth phase is being engineered at the industry level, not the label level.
