In March, all seven members of the superstar K-pop boyband BTS will perform for the first time in nearly four years, following each members' requisite military service for the South Korean government. Taking the stage from Seoul's Gwanghwamun Square, the show is the first chance that its infamously rabid fanbase "ARMY" will get to hear songs from the band's forthcoming album, Arirang, which drops a day before the show. But BTS stans won't need to travel far to attend. For many of them, the show might even be free — but that depends on who in their household is responsible for paying their Netflix subscription, where the concert will stream live.
BTS' reunion, coming not just after several years of the military-induced hiatus but also a canceled 2020 tour due to the pandemic, is the kind of hit offering that any other artist would hinge the exclusivity of an entire tour on. (Consider the Oasis reunion, which ended a 16 year hiatus — there's a documentary being made of those performances, but it's still in the works.) And BTS is going on tour, shortly following the livestream performance, for over 70 dates in stadiums around the world. But in just a few days, BTS sold out all of its North American, Europe and U.K. stadium tour dates, nearly 2.4 million tickets overall. For a lucky few, the Netflix stream will just be a preview for the real, live experience to come. For most BTS fans, it'll be the only experience. And if they're wanting more, the band will also screen taped performances from the first two stops on that tour from South Korea and Japan in theaters worldwide, and Netflix is also releasing a documentary on the band about making the new album.
It sounds like a lot, doesn't it? It's a lot. But over the last few years, some of our biggest pop artists have turned to filmed concert experiences to fossilize fleeting live tours in their aftermath, from The Weeknd to Olivia Rodrigo. Harry Styles recently announced that Netflix would release a filmed version of the artist performing his new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally in Manchester the day of release (unlike BTS, the show won't be a livestream.) This year sees concert films from Billie Eilish (her third, this time co-directed by James Cameron in 3D), Eric Church (whose film appears exclusively in IMAX theaters) and Twenty One Pilots.
If livestreams, whether on free platforms like Youtube or Netflix, offer fans the lowest barrier to experiencing a performance, concert films are the next level, often combining a mixture of on-stage and behind-the-scenes footage to give viewers a more in-depth look at a concert. But it's the releases that get fans off their couch and into a physical movie theater that best try to approximate the phenomenon of seeing your favorite artist live.
Whereas the concert film was once a chance to immortalize a particularly special tour or event for superfans, in theaters it seems increasingly like a replacement for the original experience itself — and a necessary supplement for artists whose fanbases may no longer afford the costs of seeing live music. In 2023, both Taylor Swift and Beyoncé released documentaries of their respective blockbuster Eras and Renaissance tours, striking unprecedented distribution deals with AMC rather than going through traditional movie studios. When I saw the Renaissance Tour film in theaters, with a packed, rowdy audience decked out in the same intergalactic cowboy attire the Beyhive wore to the real thing, I felt the power of how a concert film could replicate the original material's impact in miniature. Every time women in my theater sang along, hyped up Beyoncé as if she was there with us, I knew I wasn't just watching a movie but experiencing something symbiotic like a live performance, but on a different scale. And that's the point. A filmed concert can never replace the experience of seeing your favorite artist perform in the room with you, but when a secondhand ticket to a show can cost thousands of dollars, that experience is only accessible for a select, sainted few.
For fans looking to buy concert tickets, especially for shows performed by music's 1%, the ticket market can be intimidatingly complicated, riddled with bots, expensive secondhand tickets and a dizzying amount of special pre-sales. When Harry Styles announced his now sold-out 30-date residency at Madison Square Garden earlier this month, fans raised complaints online against Ticketmaster for long wait times in the virtual queue and against Styles for high resale prices. (Tickets currently listed on the secondary ticket site SeatGeek for some of the shows range from about $400 to over $1,000.)
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster, alleging the company misleads ticket buyers about prices and knowingly benefits from scalpers. It followed a different lawsuit filed in 2024 by the Department of Justice and 30 states against Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment, alleging the company had created a monopoly over ticket prices for live events. In a previous statement to NPR, Live Nation said that the Justice Department lawsuit, which went to trial this week, "won't solve the issues fans care about relating to ticket prices, service fees, and access to in-demand shows. Calling Ticketmaster a monopoly may be a PR win for the DOJ in the short term, but it will lose in court because it ignores the basic economics of live entertainment, such as the fact that the bulk of service fees got to venues, and that competition has steadily eroded Ticketmaster's market share and profit margin."
Like Taylor Swift, who was at the center of her own ticket sales controversy in 2022 when fan demand for her Eras Tour far outweighed the number of tickets available, the hunger to see BTS perform is no doubt far larger than what the band can realistically provide fans. So the group turns to the screen, releasing four concert films across the course of its career, all of which were re-released in theaters late last year to get fans ready for the comeback tour. These days, the concert film formalizes how so many music fans now experience live pop music, which is often through a screen anyway. Even before the Renaissance Tour Film, I felt like I had experienced it to some extent given how often videos from the show dominated my TikTok feed. Special guests, ballroom routines, robot choreography — if I was a fan who'd paid top dollar for tickets, I might be slightly annoyed that I had so many beats of that tour spoiled beforehand by my algorithm.
You could argue that events like BTS' Netflix stream, or Eilish's 3D concert tour, only make performance more accessible to a general audience whose ability to afford or access tickets remains limited in a competitive market. One only has to casually follow the Billboard charts year over year to realize how much American music listeners' artist allegiances stay frustratingly fixed on just a select rotating few at the top. But it's also never been more clear that we exist in a music economy where live music is a tiered experience predicated entirely on how much you're willing and able as a fan to buy-in. I gained something in a dark movie theater with a crowd of women watching Beyoncé perform that I wouldn't have gotten if I had rented the movie alone at home. But I know from spending so much of my career seeing live music, from inside crowded stadiums to dingy DIY venues, with artists who mess up or improvise and feed on a specific audience's energy and give it right back to us, that nothing comes close to experiencing music in person, which is always more than just witnessing the person on stage. Surely not anything you can watch on a screen.
Copyright 2026 NPR
