At some South Korean festivals, paper now joins the queue
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The sheets of paper were marked with dates, phone numbers and the number of people in each group to indicate that the spots had been claimed.
PHOTOS: SEOUL_ROY_KIM, FAMISHED_YK/THREADS
- At South Korean festivals, fans use A4 paper sheets taped to pavements to reserve queue spots, avoiding overnight waiting banned by organisers.
- This informal 'paper queue' culture, common in K-pop events, involves fans managing spots and returning later to line up.
- The practice causes public disruption and littering, sparking complaints and calls for regulation before it spreads further.
AI generated
At some festivals in South Korea this fall, a piece of paper can apparently do the waiting for you.
A trail of A4-size sheets of paper, each taped to the pavement, stretched for hundreds of metres along a sidewalk leading to the entrance of the Busan International Rock Festival on Oct 2, the first day of the three-day event.
The sheets were marked with dates, phone numbers, the number of people in each group and notes indicating that the spots had been claimed.
A similar scene unfolded in Incheon, where the Korean-Japanese music festival XMF was held at an outdoor venue at Paradise City over the weekend.
The paper markers even made their way to a military festival.
At the 2026 Ground Forces Festival, an annual military culture festival hosted by the Republic of Korea Army, paper placeholders lined parts of the sidewalk, drawing complaints from pedestrians, news reports said.
The festival kicked off on Oct 1 for a five-day run at the Gyeryongdae military airfield in South Chungcheong Province, featuring military equipment displays, hands-on activities and performances by soldiers.
Hundreds of K-pop fans from South Korea and abroad flocked to the event to watch performances by members of idol groups currently serving in the military.
These makeshift queues were organised by fans as an alternative to waiting overnight, which event organisers had prohibited for safety reasons.
“The organisers didn’t allow us to line up overnight, but they did allow us to set up our own queue outside,” Lee So-jeong, who visited the military festival to see K-pop star Kang Daniel, who started his military service in February 2026, told The Korea Herald.
“Everyone came back to the spot they had marked with their own piece of paper and lined up again before entry. There was no cutting in line or anything like that.”
Some see the trend as K-pop fandom’s informal queueing culture making its way to the broader festival scene.
Fans say paper queues have long been common at some K-pop events, particularly those where entry is on a first-come, first-served basis. For paper queues, one or two fans may serve as unofficial line managers, assigning numbers and keeping track of the order so that others can return to their places later.
The practice has drawn criticism for causing disruption in public spaces.
“Some fans were even complaining that people had stepped on their paper, when they were the ones taking over a public walkway in the first place. They don’t even remove all the paper afterwards. It creates more trash and wastes labour on clean-up. Something needs to be done before this practice spreads further,” one online user wrote. THE KOREA HERALD/ ASIA NEWS NETWORK