“FROM FANS TO FOMO”

The major revolution of the K-Pop industry has becoming more well known
throughout the years, with the help of variety types of social medias. K-Pop is
an acronym for Korean Pop, which is based on South Korea that combines
various types of musical genres and styles such as pop, hip-hop, rap, rock, R&B
and electronic music that are often used to music performed by young idol
singers. K-Pop is very popular among young generations especially teenagers.
With the major change in the K-Pop industry, a huge number of K-Pop fans has
turned out to have a FOMO mindset within their peers.

One of the situation where fans are starting to feel missing out is when K-Pop
idols held various events that are on for a limited time. This is because, K-pop
idols often hold concerts, fan meetings and live broadcasts that are known to be
exclusive. However, there are fans who can't afford to attend these kinds of
experiences, and will immediately feel anxious about not being able to keep up
with these kinds of unique interactions with their admired idols. This is for the
reason that some of the fans are still young, therefore most of their time are
packed with school related works and others. Even so, quite a number of
students are still very determined to keep up with the latest concerts. That is
why, in order to attend those concerts they are being accompanied with the fear
of missing out, hence they decided to skip school just to watch their favorite
idols perform live. For instance, there was this one K-Pop group who recently
came to Malaysia in July which is called iKON. With iKON being one of the
biggest K-Pop groups to be known worldwide, many fans were scrambling to get
their hands on the tickets, and of course, lots of them were unsuccessful. As a
result, they were starting to feel the fear of missing out and fee like they are
being left behind. They will also start to feel anxious about missing out on the
discussions and sharing stories within the fan community.

Other than that, study have been conducted a lot of K-Pop fans collecting their
idols merchandise as a appreciate and support to their favorites idol singers for
having a comeback. The items can be posters, album, magazines, photo-books,
and various other productions. Hence, certain items also are often release a
very limited quantities. Due to this, some fans of K-Pop will compete each other
to get the merchandise. There are some people will not get the particular items.
Thereafter, fans who are unable to purchase these items might feel like they're
missing out on owning a piece of their favorite group's legacy. They tend to be
sad and feeling anxious. Basically, FOMO happens to fans who are students
because they still study for their education and they use more money. For
example, a company from South Korea which called SM Entertainment has been
responsible for fostering and popularizing the careers of many K-Pop stars. They
sell and produced many merchandise of their idols to make fans buy all the
merchandise such as ‘Season Greeting’ for the idols, a photocard, plushies and
others. However, SM Entertainment put the limited quantities of the items and
this can cause of fans scramble to get the item. We can called it as ‘first come
first serve’. To sum it up, this has led to a tendency for fans to become more
waste on their money and at the same time can lead to exposure of the
phenomenon of fear of missing out in a K-Pop fan.

As a conclusion, the level of the correlation between FOMO and K-Pop fans is in
the category of moderate relationship. K-Pop is just a path to release fans
tension on this world, and sometimes we don’t need to catch up all the things
happen in K-Pop. Just focusing on the things that are good in our life.