One of the fastest-growing music genres in the world will take over the world's biggest casino next weekend when the Venetian Macao hosts what is being dubbed 'Macau's first Korean music festival'. The bill features about 30 famous faces from the massive K-pop industry, who come together to form four boy bands, one girl band and a solo act.
This showcase of Korean pop music in the global gambling capital follows Sunday's concert by the nine-member girl band Girls' Generation in Hong Kong, an 'Invasion of K-Pop' show at London's O2 Academy Brixton last month, a 'K-Pop Masters Day' at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in November, and another sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City the month before.
Much like the chiselled physiques of the male performers and the slim waists of their female counterparts, these shows are something of a construct - all part of an intricate system meticulously designed to push South Korean pop music, widely known as K-pop, onto the world.
The popularity of South Korean pop culture in other parts of the world is nothing new. In the early 2000s, mainland journalists were so baffled by the local obsession with South Korean television shows such as Winter Sonata and singers from that country that they dubbed the phenomenon the 'Korean wave'.
The term has been widely used by Western and Eastern media since then. But K-pop - the genre that practically dominates the entire South Korean mainstream music industry - has amassed such a global following that it has outgrown the general term and become a phenomenon in itself.
K-pop is characterised by fluffy, hook-heavy songs that are either hip-hop-influenced dance music or sappy piano ballads, and almost none of the stars write their own music. In a sense, K-pop is not unlike Hong Kong's own Canto-pop, only it is reaching a much wider audience and a level of fame that most Canto-poppers can only dream of.