Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
TGM Events, the company who masterminded the recent fail BTS concert, has posted a five-page statement on everything that went wrong at every stop on the tour. Ironically, that this had to be posted is an indictment of the tour they tried to put on in itself, and I’m not sure if what they did made it better or worse.
In short:
1) There was a lack of preparation involved in most of these errors.
2) The reason people didn’t get what they were promised was because of a lack of communication and organization.
3) If the venues were oversold, it was because somebody else’s system glitched, then the venue decided to not allow more people in and potentially violate fire code, and they had a hard time figuring out capacity anyway.
4) You can indeed get a refund … but only if you send back their t-shirt and poster to fucking Malaysia.
Here’s part of the e-mail an individual who is up for one of those refunds sent to me:
Send the shit back to Malaysia so we can give you money back for our fuckup.
What the fuck?
5) Of course, all those “explanations” tie into the most important message here: 99% of this wasn’t the fault of TGM Events!
You know, even though preparation, communication, and organization are basically the entire role of companies putting on these shows.
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Honestly, I’m generally sympathetic to these companies when it comes to communication with Korean companies, who can be very unreliable about following through on promises made to fans involving idols and what not. But in this case, TGM Events clearly fucked up with stuff that had nothing to do with BTS or Big Hit Entertainment or dealing with potential communication pitfalls across languages.
Look, every production companhy fucks up from time to time, I get that. But one can’t blame hectic situations and a lack of preparations as “not our fault” when that’s your entire reason for existence in this context. And seriously, companies who fuck up this bad just need to take the “L” and go into the red for this event. Just issue a statement like they did over the Atlanta stop…
…which takes responsibility and promises refunds (ignore that it contradicts their own recent statement), and then just give people their money back to save the company’s reputation a bit. Then, hopefully after they put on a handful of quality events in a row, people will generally forget about their fuckup (and they will, cause most are teens anyway).
Don’t skirt responsibility, promise refunds, and then make the people who got screwed to begin with spend their own money to send goods you gave to them back to a country across an ocean just so that maybe they can get a refund. Ugh.
Then again, apparently this event was not the first time TGM Events have had these issues, which might explain a lot about why their decisions in the aftermath are trying to minimize their short-term financial damage instead of playing the long game.
