I watched an interesting popsori video recently where he discusses why Kpop tours pick some cities to have concert stops while others are skipped over. It was a cool bit of insight, but he only covered the United States and I wanted more, so I took his criteria, expanded upon it, and used it to look at other countries. The results are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Probability of select urban areas to get a concert during a Kpop tour. Gold squares = over 90%; Cyan squares = 65-90%; Magenta squares = 45-65%; Dark green squares = 20-45%; Red squares = under 20%. Map adapted from Wikipedia.

In the figure you can see the breakdown by probability, where gold-colored squares represent cities most likely to get a concert (over 90%) down to red-colored squares which have the lowest chance (under 20%). As one might expect, big names including Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Paris are the luckiest in each region as they have the best opportunity to get a show, with others such as Sendai, Calgary, and Lyon being less fortunate.

There were oddballs however, with one instance being Vancouver. The Canadian city has strong metrics but it often gets skipped over in favor of nearby Seattle due to its stronger presence. The opposite happens in Orlando as its centralized location taps into a larger pool of fans compared to the distant Miami.

Sometimes crazy spots pop up too, notably with Dreamcatcher in Reading, United States, and with TWICE in Turin, Italy. Areas like those don't get looked at in the model but they would presumably have a low probability. For those concerts, it could be explained that the tours were aiming for a specific target—in this case, Philadelphia and Milan, respectively—but had to settle for a less-than-ideal venue nearby.

Smaller tours down the road?

These probabilities are of course dynamic as cities are always changing in metrics like population and music streaming. For example, Los Angeles and the Bay Area have been seeing a drop in population whereas Atlanta and Houston have seen an increase. This could result in better odds that the latter locations get concerts during a North American leg.

Music streaming for its part is looking pretty stagnant (Figure 2) so the number of Kpop listeners may have plateaued, meaning that there may not be many new people to sell tickets to. That combined with increasing competition from local idol groups, such as BINI in the Philippines and 4EVE in Thailand, and a turbulent economic situation may suggest that future tours could focus on cities that are safe bets, specifically those marked in gold and cyan, or even downgrade to smaller venues as existing fans limit their spending.

Figure 2. Approximate mean streams (worldwide) of select 4th and 5th generation boy and girl groups. Blue line = girl groups; orange line = boy groups. Stream numbers are measured in the thousands. Data derived from YouTube Charts.