Kpop to Socal (Southern California) & YG

Every year, there is a Kpop festival at the Hollywood Bowl. This year, or actually I believe most years, it's held in May. This year, KBS has agreed to sponsor a free festival in the LA area, with a good K-pop lineup. I'm actually curious as to why they agreed to this, considering there is the Hollywood Bowl concert each year, and its a pretty hefty price tag to bring everyone to the U.S. for one concert. But that actually isn't the main story in this post.

Why SoCal (for those who don't know... SoCal = Southern California)?
Well, in terms of Korean diaspora, Southern California has the largest Korean Diaspora population in the U.S. The greater Los Angeles area is the #1 metropolitan area with the highest Korean American population (see the 2010 Census, or.. wikipedia)

Several K-pop stars hail from the LA area as well, including Tiffany (SNSD), Nicole (Kara), Nichkhun (2pm) and more. In part, because well... because there are k-pop concerts and also places to audition. Particularly with the rise of survival audition TV shows, one of the locations guaranteed to go appears to be LA (and also NY seems to be another popular spot) for K-pop Star, Superstar K, Birth of a Great Star, ect. In addition to concerts (Kim Bum Soo, 2ne1, Big Bang, SM).

So why am I bringing this up?

It actually started more as a post about recent news than all this stuff about Southern California. So apparently YG CEO Yang Hyun-suk has plans to make a music complex in the LA area. Called "YG Land" (at first I thought it was an amusement park, thank goodness not... although the celebrity wax figures seem to be pretty popular around the world... in any case, I digress) To better equip YG to (I assume) do a number of things:

• audition more singers from the U.S. (which initially, with their recent news of going into China, that should be an interesting change to YG). As of late, they are still the only group with only Korean singers that have debuted. For better for worse. And as of late (in terms of actually debuted stars, I know there are Korean Americans in Team B) everyone is still Korean (unless you count CL, who lived for part of her years in Japan and several other places and also Dara, who lived in the Philippines). 
• get more headway into America (this is actually a touch-and-go. YG fans are probably aware that 2ne1 had come regularly to America to work with producer will.i.am, but no news of that release anytime soon). More recently CEO Yang has said that he think CL could make a niche market, particularly as the first / only / a rare Asian female rapper. I'd actually be curious to see if this would happen, and how much he would push it. Also, what would this mean for 2ne1?) 

The building is slated to be up and running in 2015, so I'm curious to see if it can make that deadline and how (if at all) that will change YG's promotion activities. As you can see with Big Bang and even with the new group Winner, Japan seems to be the main target in recent years, in addition to, of course, domestic activities.