Stray Kids vs. the North American industrial concert complex

The US postal service's claim to fame is that "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays" its couriers from delivering mail. The Stays of Stray Kids, however, had plenty of heat, rain, and gloom of night amid the recent SKZ North American tour.

The Dominate world tour which started last August in Seoul, made its way to the Americas beginning with dates in Chile in March. The USA and Canada dates kicked off in Seattle in May, and ended in Toronto last night (June 29). The six weeks had a rocky start, and yours truly was witness to the glorious finale, only to have a bit of a rocky exit in her own right, which really drove home just how hard this tour had been not only on Stray Kids but their fans, collectively known as Stay.

Stray Kids and Stay have been run through the ringer, with different levels of intensities amping up through the tour, even beyond these recent dates. In Seattle, there were issues with VIP & floor ticketing, kicking off a series of incidents at following concerts that fans expressed unhappiness with. But generally the shows were well-received until the New York shows on June 18 and 19, amid both heatwave and rain. The members' concern of their fans was widely shared, with Bang Chan taking to social media to question the prices of water at venues as there were multiple reports of Stays needing EMS support due to the heat and lack of hydration.

By the time they went to Washington D.C., the heat had risen to inhumane temps, and the show had to end early. There were reports of people being hospitalized after the show, and fans who had side seats reported seeing members throwing up backstage, presumably from heat-related symptoms.

The biggest issues throughout all the days were lack of water, with Bang Chan taking to his Bubble account to question why fans weren't allowed to bring in, or provided, water despite the heatwave. During the show, he had provided water to fans and offered to pay since the venue wasn't providing.

Water at US venues often costs upward of $5, sometimes over $10, but it's typical that water is given out to pits specifically to avoid hydration from the heat; not doing so amid a heatwave is shocking, even from an industry point of view, and just shows the venue's sheer inability to miss out on a few dollars.

At the next show after DC, in Chicago, water was reportedly given out for free on some lines where fans were waiting for lengthy amounts of time. Fans took this as a win, of an artist's demands being heard.

As for my experience, heat and water, nor rain, were an issue. It was practically perfect in every way, except getting home.

Having been out of town for the New York City Stray Kids concerts that were held earlier in the month at Citi Field, I decided to head north. My mom's from Toronto, and I spent a lot of my childhood visiting family members there. But since I moved back home from Hong Kong in 2023, I never had a reason to visit as many relatives have moved to the US since I was a kid, and now even our Canadian relatives come to NY pretty regularly. Since I didn't want to miss Stray Kids' big show, and I recently received my Canadian passport, I thought it'd be a fun excuse to break it in and visit some fam. I booked a cheap flight, and then spent Sunday with my relatives until I headed to the venue.

The venue was Rogers' Stadium, a temporary stadium put up by Live Nation for the summer concert season. A bit like a festival fairground in earnest, SKZ and Stay got to be the first ones to break it in, and suffer for it: while ticket entry, security and the show were honestly some of the smoothest I've ever seen at stadium venues and major kudos are deserved (the stadium was built with acoustics in mind and it showed!), getting to and from it were a far below average.

And that's my nice way of saying that I walked back to my relatives' house from the concert after it proved to be impossible for anyone to really commute properly. Most people seem to have similar experiences of struggling to get home.

For those unfamiliar with Toronto, Rogers' Stadium is in a bit of an atypical place for a concert venue: it's a former airport and military base, and is temporary until it is turned INTO NEIGHBORHOODS. It's literally sitting amid suburbs, and right off a major road, between two subway stations. But when I say it's "amid suburbs", I mean that it's literally a few feet away from houses depending on what side of the stadium grounds you're coming from. Although it's accessible from main roads, it's extremely close to side roads one would not typically drive through on their way to a concert.

While stadiums are frequently built near residential areas, they're not in the middle of suburban throughways. There are usually turn offs, or highway lanes, dedicated to venues specifically so as not to disrupt traffic patterns. There are alternative parking lots and rideshare areas, with the expectation that 10s of thousands of people cannot practically attend a venue. There are usually traffic directors and security guiding it all, and direction from public transportation. Rogers' Stadium was pretty lacking.

Before I got there, I figured out my plan: I'd be getting a ride to the venue from a family member, and expected to get a rideshare home. This is not my first stadium rodeo, and I know these things take time; friends and I tailgated BTS' first show at Metlife because we explicitly didn't want to deal with stress traffic jams of entering the parking lot there shortly before the show, and it was more fun than taking the train.

For Stray Kids, I aimed to get to the venue at 5PM, despite it being a 7:30 show and having assigned seats in all the sections. I planned to head out during the final encore song, ordering a rideshare as I headed to the pickup spot.

But there was no easy way to get into the venue: down the street from the venue on the way there, it became immediately obvious that there's no really good way to turn into the venue due to stand-still traffic, so I got out on the roadside and started walking. And walking. And walking. It's a gravel road seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with vague signage pointing the way, with the summer's sun beating down.

I'm not someone who minds the sun, or walking, and I had come prepared for a day in the sun with sneakers and sunscreen, a fan in my hand and a cap on my head. It took me about 10-15 minutes to walk from the actual road before I even saw or heard the venue.

Once I was there, it was concert norms as usual, but it really felt like they could have done a better job directing and creating a less exhaustive approach to the venue: I saw people walking in with physical handicaps, and there were lots of people who looked unprepared for the half-mile or so walk, including people with kids. There were porta potties, but no water, shade or really anything but the most basic signage making it clear where to go or how long it would take to get there. Just walk straight down the rocky road, and you will reach the promised land of Rogers' Stadium.

Since it was a concert at a brand new venue, it felt like many people knew to come early, and once you got there from the road or the parking lot, or the train it was an engaging festival feel with a lot going.

It was honestly a lovely day out in the sun and the heatwave had eased up; it was in the high 70s F (~25 C) then went down to the mid 60s (~17 C) after sunset. he venue had some shady pockets, snacks, and cool beverages (for a price, but there were also water refill stations). I did see lots of water bottles on the floor and trash from lines outside the venue, making me think they gave out water (but didn't hear that directly from someone).

There were many lines, including for the premium temporary bathrooms versus outright porta potties —all venue bathrooms were outside of the actual stadium—, and the premium ones were actually the accessibility ones but that wasn't made clear at all (there's an essay in here about classism and accessibility!) But once you made it inside the venue things felt easy enough. There was even a free ferris wheel (or at least a friend told me it was free), and I got the lightstick I wanted to buy after only a 45-minute wait which sounds egregious but I've, sadly, been on longer merch lines and will likely do so again.

As the show began and I head to my seat, I was pleasantly surprised: the seats in the bleachers looked good (though I heard they were a bit shaky, which is expected of a venue like this), and the floor seats weren't too tightly squeezed. There were drinks and food vendors easily accessible on the floor.

The first big mishap of the venue itself, however, was an egregious one: There was also a camera crew smack dab in the middle of the floor, blocking many views at least partially and, I kid you not, an entire section directly behind it. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fans who paid premium tickets to see Stray Kids on the floor ultimately paid to see the back of a filming tent. I looked over frequently during the show, and saw disappointed faces.

This camera faux paux may sound like whatever on paper, but it felt extremely egregious in person: Typically venues don't sell tickets for the sections or parts of sections that would be blocked by cameras, but not this one. I couldn't help but wonder if someone messed up, ordering the wrong cameras so that they couldn't shoot as far as the venue demanded, or they simply didn't care. Considering what happened at other stops of this tour, I honestly cannot say.

Aside from that, the show overall was pleasant. Being on the floor in a further section typically means you can't see the stage very well, and I had expected it when I had bought my ticket. I still had fun, singing and dancing along with all the other Stay in my section, and seeing what I could on the big screens and the tiny figures hundreds of feet away.

It was a fun night, and I cannot express how lovely the music was. JYP Entertainment acts typically tour with live bands, and Stray Kids have a great live band backing them up. Mixed with the lovely acoustics of a venue built for live music, it was a really great listening experience as much as it was a physical one.

You could also tell that Stray Kids' members were a) in a good mood and b) celebrating that they had completed another major leg of a show and sold so many major venues but also c) ready to be done with this North American tour after all the the ups-and-downs of it. Bang Chan aka Chris aka a man who ran away from security to get close to fans, kept commenting about how the venue was in the middle of nowhere, and expressed sheer confusion about where we were. It was hilarious to me as someone who had been wondering the same thing since Google Maps said my seat was technically an hour walk to my aunt's house so I felt both lost and familiar with the location, and was curious about how it all would end.

Which is why as the night's end approached, I made a judgement call: I had woken up at 5am that morning to make my flight so I could attend the show, and I wanted to make it back to my family before midnight since I knew they would stay up waiting for me, as worried aunties will. The show approached 11pm, and I decided to leave during the fake-out between the first and second encore that I knew was coming. I could still hear the show, and exited my way humming along while pulling up my rideshare apps. The prices seemed okay, so I decided not to call a family member for a favor, and booked a car. It said it was 17 minutes away, but I knew the walk back to the lots would be long, now equipped with a better sense of the layout than the zero sense of awareness I had entered the night with.

So I started walking, and walking again, and got to the Rideshare area a bit after 11, and started the wait. I texted a relative around 11:20 that I was still waiting for a car, and then again at 11:40. At this point, I was no longer an early arrival, and just one of thousands of people praying their ride arrived and could get out in a relatively timely manner.

In between, I messaged the driver to see if there were any issues because he was about 7 minutes away from the venue according to the app, but I had been waiting since I got there. Too much traffic, he responded. I watched as he sat across the road about 2.5km away, in stand-still traffic at minutes to midnight, because of this concert. At 11:50, I gave up waiting and cancelled the ride, called my aunt to tell her I'd just walk back the 25 minutes to the house, a bit over a mile now that I had walked so far already. As I walked, I saw that traffic backed up about half of the walk, with buses, taxis, and cars all attempting to get into or past the venue's pile-up. I later saw videos of people saying the access to the metro was similarly a mess.

I got to the house shortly after midnight, and went to bed shortly after a quick shower. I figure if I had actually waited for a car or a family member had attempted to get into the venue's pick up line, I/we probably wouldn't have made it out of the traffic jam until around 2AM.

The path itself was a bit of an adventure: I had walked towards the road, the gravel path fell away, and I ended up trekking across a grassy area that clearly hadn't been prepped for pedestrians, with frequent dips. There were some generator-fueled spotlights making it less hazardous, but it felt like a serious twisted-ankle trap, and terribly inaccessible for anyone who may struggle at all physically, or was with kids.

So what was going on with the cars themselves? Well, the parking lot was a disaster to get out, and no rideshares or pick ups could get in. I saw people sitting down in huffs beside the road, seemingly just giving up in frustration over the immense crush of it all. It made me realize this was one of the only times I've been at a music event and there weren't any outside vendors selling water, food, or merch, which often get the most of their business after shows due to the crowd being hungry, exhausted, and tired, and in use of a pick-me-up.

It felt generally like LiveNation opened up a venue without thinking twice about maybe starting out with smaller shows to figure things out. Stays became the guinea pigs ahead of a Coldplay concert series this weekend, and Stray Kids' tour generally suffered because of the way that the LiveNation-dominated touring industry in North America doesn't give an ounce of sympathy towards the fan experience. Concerts are a luxury as they are, they shouldn't cost you your sanity or health too.

Some reading...

I posted on Threads a bit about the experience, and a Toronto Star reporter reached out to me. We spoke for a while and he ended up quoting me, an expert on K-pop and a journalist in my own right, on... lines at the washrooms! I can't help but laugh that this is such as thing for a guy to write about when hearing it from a woman, considering that women are definitely more used to restroom lines at venues.

There's also a really terribly stereotypical story from The Globe and Mail, using all the typical "shrieking fangirls" and "formulic robotic Asian boy band" tropes. So sick of this all, honestly. Music journalism, artists, and fans deserves better than this redundant approach towards K-pop.

If you weren't taking the metro, you were shit out of luck.