I never thought that my first event in 2021 and my first SMTOWN concert is an online event. It has been months since this pandemic stopped the entertainment industry in producing offline concerts. A lot of scheduled concerts and fanmeets have been postponed indefinitely or worse, cancelled. That is why a lot of companies now are shifting to the online concerts, in the meantime.
SM Entertainment is actually one of the first companies to shift to the online concerts through the Beyond Live. Their concerts were actually paid and a lot of fans are actually willing to pay for it because they really miss attending concerts. But around December 2020, SM Entertainment announced that they will be holding a FREE concert, and that is the SMTOWN LIVE "Culture Humanity".
This free concert happened last January 1, 1PM KST, which featured different SM Artists' performances including aespa, NCT Dream, NCT127, NCT U, WayV, Red Velvet, EXO Baekhyun, EXO Kai, SHINee Taemin, SNSD Taeyeon, SuperM, Super Junior, and Kangta. There were also DJs present in the concert - Raiden, GINJO, and IMLAY. It was streamed
According to Lee Sooman, the main reason why SM Entertainment decided to conduct this free concert is to give hope and cheer to the KPOP fans who went through a lot because of the pandemic. One of the main points at the start of the concert were the phrases, "Be kind, be humble, be the love." We definitely need this to start the year well.
I was actually watching the concert on our TV during the first part because I was eating lunch with my family. In fact, when my mom saw NCT Dream's performance, she immediately noticed Jaemin's visual. And of course, since Jaemin is my bias, I kept on promoting him. Aside from that, I also showed her D&E's performance.
After a few performances, I decided to watch on my laptop so that I can have a little privacy - fangirling. That's also when I put some batteries on my Super Junior lightstick so that I can somehow feel that I am really watching a concert.
Aside from the performances, what made me excited was the SHINee is Back 2021 video teaser. SHINee is definitely one of the best KPOP groups there. Their vocals and dancing skills are so stable. I am really excited for SHINee's comeback, and also, I miss you Jonghyun.
For those who don't know, I started as an SM stan. I was very much aware of the SMTOWN concerts. I badly wanted to attend one not only because Super Junior is there, but also I love to see the interactions between different SM artists. This concert somehow lacked the interaction, of course, for health and safety purposes but I hope I can still see it in the future.
In the last part of the concert, SM artists sang H.O.T.'s song, "Hope". This is probably the part where I suddenly wanted to cry. The memories came back when I was just a new KPOP fan. It has been years already and I am just so happy that I became part of this family. There may be times wherein I hated SM for how they treated their artists, but I still love them because they brought these artists to me.
This concert recorded 35,830,000 streams in 186 countries. The hashtag #SMTOWN_LIVE also became the trending topic on Twitter. It only shows how happy the fans are with this free concert. Thank you so much SM Entertainment for this concert. Hoping we'll get to meet live soon once everything goes back to normal.
Did you also watch this free concert? How was it?
