On Jan 1, SM Entertainment held its New Year’s concert, “SMTOWN Live Culture Humanity.” This free online concert showed off its jaw-dropping lineup that includes Taeyeon, Taemin, Baekhyun, Kai, Red Velvet, NCT, SuperM and aespa.
The concert was streamed via various platforms, including Naver V LIVE, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok from 1 pm KST and garnered 35.83 million streaming in 186 countries. This is the largest number of viewers in the history of Korean online concerts, once again proving the global power SM artists hold.
And during this concert, aespa’s Winter performed the EDM version of Raiden and Chanyeol’s “Yours (feat. Lee Hi and Changmo)” with Raiden. Her sweet vocal perfectly mashed in with the remix version, drawing enthusiastic responses from fans around the world.
However, soon, a fancam of Winter singing the song was uploaded on YouTube and Twitter, confusing fans and netizens as the concert was pre-recorded without any audiences.
Netizens started to speculate that this video was filmed by a sasaeng fan (an obsessive fan who stalks or engages in other behavior constituting an invasion of the privacy of a Korean idol) because the camera wasn’t at all steady and had a high vantage point as if they were hiding somewhere. And as Korean sasaengs are known for their crazy behaviors, this speculation started to carry more weight.
Here are some of the comments: “How can you get inside to record this? Who are you ?” “This has to be reported. How could you even enter?” “Confirmed, this account is a sasaeng bcs no one is allowed inside other than staff (i don’t think they can record that and post it on youtube) unless one of the staff is sasaeng or let the sasaeng inside secretly.” “Even if that’s a staff member, this is creepy.” “Who are you? Are you a staff or SM employee? Are you allowed to record this and post it online?”
