Long before hashtags and streaming goals, K-pop fans announced their loyalty with a balloon. At concerts in the late 1990s, a stand full of white meant H.O.T., yellow meant Sechs Kies and sky blue meant g.o.d. Nearly three decades later, the same instinct to show up together, in one color and with one plan, drives fan campaigns that run across continents. This is how K-pop fan culture got from there to here.
Balloons and rivalries: the first generation
SM Entertainment's H.O.T. debuted on 7 September 1996. DSP's Sechs Kies followed on 15 April 1997, and the rivalry between the two groups and their fans shaped what idol fandom would look like. Fans had no glow sticks to wave. Instead, as the Korea Herald has described, each fandom claimed a color and filled arenas with balloons in it: white for H.O.T., yellow for Sechs Kies, sky blue for g.o.d. Sechs Kies fans still call themselves YellowKies, and the color still runs through the group's tour and exhibition names.
Fandom at this stage was local and physical. News came from television, radio and magazines, and devotion was measured in concert attendance, letters and time spent waiting outside broadcast stations. The intensity was real. When H.O.T. announced its breakup in 2001, hundreds of fans gathered outside SM's headquarters in protest.
Fan cafes and the first online fandoms
The 2000s moved fandom onto portal sites. Fan cafes, the online communities hosted on Korean portals such as Daum, became the headquarters of every major fandom. Members shared photos and news, and the official cafe gave a fandom a single voice. Soompi noted in 2014 that for years a fan was hardly considered a true fan without membership in the official cafe. Agencies worked with cafe leaders to organize events, and idols often logged in to post messages of their own.
The decade also gave fandom its material culture. Se7en, who debuted under YG Entertainment in 2003, had what the Korea Herald calls the first uniquely designed K-pop lightstick, shaped like the number 7. Big Bang's crown-shaped lightstick followed in 2007 and set the template that almost every group now follows. Around the same time, in the TVXQ era of the early 2000s, fans started renting cafes for idols' birthdays, a tradition that is still a fixture of Seoul neighborhoods like Hongdae and Seongsu-dong.
Fansites, fancams and fan power
Another figure emerged in the same years: the homma, a contraction of "home master." The term dates to the time when amateur photographers ran personal websites dedicated to a single star. Hommas follow schedules with professional cameras, sell photo books and other goods, and often put the money back into birthday events and fan projects.
Fan footage could also change a career. EXID released "Up & Down" on 27 August 2014 and watched it peak at only number 94 on the domestic chart. In early October, a fan-filmed video of member Hani performing the song spread across Korean social networks. The song climbed back up and topped the Gaon chart about four months after release. In January 2015 the group won its first music show trophies, on M Countdown, Music Bank and Inkigayo, within four days. It remains the best-known case of a fancam rescuing a song.
A single fan-filmed video took a song from number 94 to number one.
Going global on social media
By the mid-2010s fan cafes were losing ground. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube let idols speak to fans directly, and agencies began to treat follower counts as a measure of global reach. Fandom stopped being something you joined in Seoul and became something you could take part in from Jakarta, Manila or Chicago. Twitter counted 6.8 billion K-pop tweets in 2020 and more than 7.8 billion in 2021, with Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and the United States as the countries with the most fans on the platform.
Global fandoms brought organizing skills to match. Streaming schedules, voting guides and translation accounts turned millions of individual fans into coordinated teams. The scale showed when BTS released "Dynamite" on 21 August 2020: the music video drew 101.1 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours, taking over the Guinness records that BLACKPINK's "How You Like That" had set two months earlier. The song went on to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Fans did not make those songs popular on their own, but the speed of those records was a direct product of coordinated fan effort.
Charity in the idol's name
Fan generosity is older than social media. The Korea Times traced the rice wreath, a celebratory wreath built from bags of rice that is later donated to people in need, to Shinhwa fans in 2007, when they sent wreaths for Shin Hye-sung's solo concert. By 2013 fans had donated about 80 tons of rice this way. Fan clubs also planted trees: Shinhwa fans funded a "Shinhwa Forest" of 1,130 trees in Gangnam for the group's 15th anniversary in 2012, and 2NE1 fans sent about 1,200 mango trees to South Sudan the same year.
Global fandoms took the same habit to a new scale. In June 2020, after BTS donated 1 million dollars to Black Lives Matter, the fan collective One In An ARMY launched #MatchAMillion. More than 37,000 people contributed, $817,000 arrived within 24 hours, and the collective announced it had matched the full amount within days.
From fan club to movement
Read in sequence, the history is one of fans taking on more of the work. First-generation fans brought balloons. Fan cafe members ran events with the agencies. Hommas became photographers, publishers and event planners. Global fandoms now handle translation, marketing and fundraising, often faster than the companies they support. For the basics of how a fandom works today, from names to chants, see our guide What is a K-pop fandom?
Update, October 2026
Two months after this story first ran, K-pop fan culture moved into Korean politics. During the protests that followed President Yoon Suk Yeol's martial law declaration on 3 December 2024, demonstrators outside the National Assembly in Seoul carried lightsticks from fandoms including NCT, TREASURE, ATEEZ and Plave, and chanted to aespa's "Whiplash." The object that began as concert merchandise became a symbol of the rallies, and the Korea Herald, writing in November 2025, described lightsticks as markers of identity well beyond the concert hall.
Editor's note: This story first appeared on kpop-fandom on 27 September 2024. It was rewritten and updated in October 2026: we verified debut dates, balloon colors and campaign figures, added the fan cafe, lightstick, homma, fancam and rice wreath history, corrected the Black Lives Matter fundraiser details, removed unsourced claims and speculation about the future, and added an update on lightsticks at the December 2024 protests.
Sources The Korea Herald: uniquely designed K-pop light sticks become symbol of identity and devotion, The Korea Times: New kinds of donations, Korea JoongAng Daily: ARMY fans match BTS's $1 million donation, Soompi: "Dynamite" scores Guinness World Records titles, Al Jazeera: Protesters turn K-pop light sticks into symbol of resistance.