Jay Choe describes his career as “a long chain of side quests,” a phrase that perfectly encapsulates his journey through the K-pop industry. From starting as a concert staffer in 2009 to navigating the complexities of international artist debuts, Jay has worn many hats. We sat down with him to discuss his career path, the intricacies of the work, and his advice for aspiring industry professionals.
The Beginning of a K-Pop Career
Q: You describe your career as “a long chain of side quests.” Can you tell our readers how you got started in the K-pop industry and what you’re doing now?
JAY: I started working in the K-pop industry way back in 2009, staffing and helping find staff for concerts, festivals, and conventions that my mentors were running in the U.S. That meant starting from the bottom as a gofer, ushering lines, et cetera, and eventually moving up to securing sponsors and managing my own shows. Music and entertainment were not my main focuses in school but I’ve always been music adjacent and wanted to work in the music industry. Surviving multiple recessions, every time I gained momentum and thought I could make a full-time career out of it, I had to pivot. Every time I pivoted, I gained some other interesting experience that would become helpful further down the line doing bigger projects.
I momentarily left the industry but was brought back in during the pandemic to debut a rookie group named PIXY, and since then, I’ve been mainly working via referrals to debut artists in America. Recently, I took from20 and HELLO GLOOM overseas to two conventions called Anime Weekend Atlanta in Georgia and Kawaii Kon in Hawaii. I was just brought on to work A&R and Business Development with Symphonic Distribution in Korea and Japan, helping artists and groups of all sizes get their music onto streaming platforms and collect royalties. Oh, I’m also working on an album with a few producers and frequent collaborators. Keep your ears out for that project. So yeah, my life up to this point has been a string of loosely related side quests.
The Complexities of K-Pop Tours
Q: What’s involved in setting up a tour for a K-pop group or artist?
JAY: I stopped personally touring with groups many years ago and now I mainly handle the visa paperwork and booking the first couple venues. When that’s done, I pass tour duties on to my colleagues who still do tours full time (or let the label work with a tour promoter of their choice).
To determine which cities to hit, the first thing I did back then was pull up streaming data and social media accounts of the artists I’m supporting. I’ve done this long enough where I can tell from a glance how many people to reasonably expect in a certain city based on geographical data from streaming sites.
When planning for a tour, I ask for a minimum six months head’s up to start the visa paperwork. This never happens and I usually end up having only two months to prepare the materials needed for USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), and I freak out (quietly, internally) when the government sends me an RFE (request for evidence) and I have to scramble to send in more materials. Once the visas are done though, my job is done and I get to relax. I like to plan my clients’ schedules a full year out since the cost of visas are the same whether it’s for one event or for a full year.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges in organizing a K-pop tour?
JAY: Every tour I’ve participated in was unique and brought its own challenges. Recently though, the problem has been visas. I am fortunate enough to say I have a very good record in getting my clients’ visas approved.
What some people forget is that performance visas are handled by U.S. immigration. Artists need P-1 or O-1 visas, which are non-immigrant working visas, for which I have to prove that my artists have extraordinary abilities and that I am not taking jobs away from U.S. citizens. This means that depending on the administration and how pro or anti-immigration they are, the harder it will be for my artists to get visas. I won’t get political, but politics and geopolitics definitely affect the industry, especially the smaller groups. When I’m done writing up the materials for USCIS to review with my lawyer, the packet is already over 200 pages thick, which includes a year or more worth of planned schedules, letters of recommendation, and a whole boatload of documentation proving that my artist is reputable overseas. It helps immensely if the group has done shows outside of Korea, like in Europe, South America, South Asia, etc.
Q: What would fans be most surprised to learn about the tour planning process?
JAY: Nowadays? I don’t think I can say anything new that fans don’t already know about. Maybe, the full cost of doing a concert or tour? If someone’s not very familiar with event planning or concert planning, they might be surprised how much it costs to actually bring someone over. Some of your readers may know I used to do a lot of conventions and festivals as well as tours, and I get asked all the time “can you bring so and so?” And the answer is no for most annual or one-off festivals. And it comes down to costs.
I know there are rumors going around about how much certain artists or groups cost, and people are shocked at the price tag for some of these shows, so let me put this into perspective. If you are a label and you have a group of 5 singers, you’ll need to send at least 2 managers. You’ll need someone on hair, make-up, stage/production manager, and usually someone on video and audio (gotta get that b-roll!). If there are back-up singers or dancers, that’s like 2, 4, or however many dancers you need to pay as contractors to come and perform. In the case of a tour, every single one of those people needs to get paid for the entire duration (a tour can go for over a month!). And from the tour promoter’s point of view, they largely have to cover the guarantee, plus flights of 13+ people, plus their food, housing, plane/train/van rentals, etc. If a tour bombs, the losses can be astronomical. So, going back to talking about festivals and conventions, unless you’re the biggest of the big tech/music/anime/comic convention or cultural festival, you’re not going to have enough to bring K-pop groups over. If you’re a tour promoter, unless you have an A-lister filling auditoriums with 2000+ people or stadiums with 12,000, you’ll have to rely on volume (20+ stop tours) to make it worth the effort and the initial investment.
A Career Highlight: PIXY’s U.S. Debut
Q: What’s the most ambitious concert tour or project you’ve ever worked on?
JAY: I haven’t personally worked on a tour in a long time, but the one show I am quite proud of is the debut of PIXY in the U.S. When I was asked to help the group out, it was in the middle of the pandemic. The last show I worked on was in 2015 and I mainly did boy groups and larger shows under my mentors. With larger groups, beyond a certain level of popularity, we are almost guaranteed to sell tickets, and so many promoters bid for and pitch those labels for tours. On the other hand, rookies come with a lot of risks. PIXY was a group I advised since before their debut in Korea, and as pandemic restrictions were being lifted, I pitched this idea of debuting them at an anime convention.
I have always known that anime, j-rock, j-pop and k-pop shared audiences, and I thought debuting the group at a festival with 45,000 people to win new fans would prove more fruitful than doing multiple small cities by themselves. After their successful debut at Otakon, I booked them for Anime Weekend Atlanta and Kawaii Kon the following year, before the label brought in a traditional tour company. Watching them perform with Rolling Quartz and AleXa in a packed room of 2000+ people… that felt amazing.
Advice for Aspiring Industry Professionals
Q: What advice do you have for someone interested in concert promotion or tour management for K-pop acts?
JAY: Only get into it if you’re the type of person who gets joy from other people having joy.
The best feeling to me is seeing the fans gather and having fun, and seeing the smiles on their faces. Volunteer for nonprofits and festivals. Go volunteer at KCON or an anime con. Work as a staff for other tour companies. You will learn a LOT of great skills while gofering for conventions. And be nice to people. Entertainment is a small world and word travels fast, good and bad, so always be sincere. If you are honest and consistent, people will call you back for more work.
Dreaming Big, Songmaking, and Looking to the Future
Q: If you could debut a group with no constraints, what would be your dream debut setup?
JAY: I won’t be greedy and ask for a whole stadium. Give me a 20,000 seater half-stadium debut. As I mentioned, I’m not very active in the concert space anymore, but when I see my colleagues debut their groups in the U.S. and their first show fills half a stadium, I am both extremely proud of them and extremely jealous (not in a bad way). I want to do a half-stadium show with a million-dollar budget for the platform and lighting rigs, with maybe some pyrotechnics. I also want my artists to drop in via parachutes like the Power Rangers did in the first Power Rangers movie, but I’m not sure if the insurance company will approve.
Q: What challenges come with launching a new group in an already crowded industry?
JAY: Crowded is an understatement. How many groups debuted in 2024? And how many of those disbanded within the year? If you’re a rookie group, your biggest challenge is competing with the other 99 rookie groups to debut this year, and also to stand out among the big groups. People’s attention span is short and there are constant comebacks and changing trends. To meet these demands, you are constantly moving, constantly doing activities, constantly spending money. It is a very high-stakes endeavor. Major DSPs, networks, and platforms prioritize popular and established groups. So many things have to go right. You need: good talent, money, a strong PR and marketing team, money, friends in high places, good album concepts, money, a comeback every 4 months, and most importantly, money. You need money to stay consistently active and you need to have the foresight to stay ahead of trends. There are so many moving parts and hundreds of people working together to get the music out, and everyone has to be on point (which is something you rarely have control over).
Q: Tell us about your approach to music production – how do you define success when crafting songs? What are some lessons you’ve learned that you wish more people understood? How do you stay ahead of industry trends while maintaining authenticity?
JAY: My approach to production is not going to be unusual in K-Pop. Though a lot of us have produced tracks from start to finish, very rarely will one person be exceptional at everything (we’re not all PLEA or Timbaland), so we designate roles and divvy out the tasks. I am stronger with lyrics and coming up with concepts, so I stick to the writing part. This is generally my process: we first discuss the concept. The producer/beatmaker sends us a beat, maybe 30 seconds long, enough to cover one chorus or hook. The topliner will then expand on that and come up with a verse and chorus, and record a sketch. I’ll get with the topliner and the artists and finish writing the lyrics, and send it back to the producer to fully develop the instrumentals. Then, it’s sent off to an engineer to be mixed and mastered. I feel like a song is a success when everyone in the room starts bobbing their heads.
What are some lessons I learned? When I first started writing and producing music, I wanted to do everything. First thing I had to do was to stay humble and know my limitations. Find collaborators who complement you. Also, when you get to the end of the project, wrap it up and forget about it. No need to endlessly make tweaks. No one’s going to hear your small mistakes.
As for how I stay ahead of industry trends, I don’t know if I always do, but that’s okay. It’s tough to always be original, as someone who listens to music and works with music, I listen to a lot and I’m inspired by a lot. That’s why I have collaborators from different backgrounds, so that as we work through songs, the final product ends up becoming an amalgamation of all of our different personalities and backgrounds.
Q: What do you think will be the next big trend in K-pop debuts?
JAY: I hope it’s not involving AI, but it likely is. Do you remember in 2021 and 2022 when everyone was jumping onto the NFT craze? Yeaaaaah….
From his early days ushering concert lines to orchestrating high-profile K-pop debuts, Jay Choe’s career is proof that perseverance and adaptability can lead to incredible opportunities. As he continues shaping the industry, one side quest at a time, fans can look forward to more exciting projects on the horizon.
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Instagram: https://instagram.com/JayIsStillAlive
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