K-pop entertainment company Hello82 plans to plant a flag in the festival market with the opening of 82World.

The two-day fan-centric festival comes to Los Angeles this weekend, headlined by chart-topping boy band ATEEZ.

As K-pop continues to cement its place in the global mainstream, capitalizing on interest in the form of music festivals has become increasingly common. Most of the K-pop festivals announced in the last few years never took place due to various logistical obstacles.

Hello82, the K-pop entertainment company headquartered in Los Angeles, plans to set a flag in the market with its upcoming 82World. According to Hello82 co-founder Sang H. Cho, the two-day festival, set for October 17 and 18 at Los Angeles State Historic Park, has been years in the making.

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The COO previously worked at Korean entertainment giant CJ ENM, responsible for K-pop convention-turned-festival KCON, and was a key member working to create the first KCON in 2012. "This event has become its own thing. It's very big and very stylish, very well produced and managed," Chu says.

But he and the team at Hello82 sought to create something that felt grassroots and community-focused, much like the early years of K-pop's expansion in the US. "We thought an outdoor festival would be a better format for us," Cho says. I'm not saying it's good for everyone, but it was better for us. "We were actually lucky enough to hire some of the people who worked on KCON over the years to help us with the event."

Over the past few years, Hello82 has evolved from a way to help distribute artists' albums in the US — while seeing K-pop sections on the shelves of Target or Walmart or Barnes and Noble is now commonplace, it's still a very new change — to a fan company that puts on events with artists. Last year, the company ventured into the world of live events, acting as a tour promoter for boy band P1Harmony — the boy band is set to perform Saturday at 82World.

While it's common for established festivals like Coachella or Lollapalooza to sell out before the lineup, it's rare for first-time festivals. But last year, on Black Friday, Hello82 released the festival's first batch of tickets, promising K-pop segments and events, with no artists officially attached or dates set. "We just wanted to put a stake in the ground," Chu says.

"We sold a lot of tickets in the first two hours," he says. "We had to stop very quickly, but it also gave us a boost - well, people are interested in this."

Chu says they already had commitments and mild interest from artists around the time of the first on-sale date. Not surprisingly, the company was struggling to solve the multi-artist scheduling conundrum. As Chu was quick to point out, fans speculated that a few artists with whom the company has had longstanding relationships — ATEEZ, headlining Sunday, and P1Harmony, headlining Saturday — were among them. Saturday's lineup also features plenty of rising K-pop (and J-pop) talent in Ampers&one, Be:First, Cosmosy, Girlset, Xikers and 8Turn.

Sunday will be headlined by ATEEZ, the eight-member boy group from KQ Entertainment. The group is currently the number one K-Pop act promoting in the US today and has topped the Billboard Albums chart multiple times. The group will be performing in the evening, daily programming by ATEEZ DJ sets, dance workshops to their music, trivia and smaller programming with the band members. The group, one of the only K-pop groups without a major Korean label and global success, has long collaborated with Hello82 for fan events, album promotions, and special partnerships.

As the company says, while the first festival is hardly a "super profitable thing," the commitment was largely due to continued service to their fan base. "It's great for our business as a whole because we don't look at each part of the business separately," Chu says. We always feel that they work together.

In recent years, visas for artists have become increasingly difficult to obtain, and delays in the process have caused the cancellation and rescheduling of other K-pop tours and festivals. "It just takes more time and preparation," Chu says. Fortunately, most of the artists, [if not] all of them, have been to the US before, whether they're doing promotional work or shows and tours."

For the weekend festival, Hello82 promises a lot of activities in its two-stage area. The hope is to replicate the intimate fan-artist experiences the company has put into its space for an outdoor festival. Crews have been loading up since Monday, and the team says there are plenty of surprises they haven't announced yet, though they're hoping to hit their stride in the first year. Olivia Rodrigo's recent chain Daisy Fields was a prime example of first-year festival organizing, despite the long food and shuttle lines.

For Cho and Hello82, the goal is to make 82World an annual event. This is not a one time experience. While they can't reveal the location yet, the company will bring the festival to Europe in 2027.

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