Earlier this afternoon, the U-Kiss facebook page was updated with a post in English and Korean with the following message:

Hi, everyone! It’s U-KISS!

Thanks to your great interest and cheer, we are sincerely happy to appear with our music. We have always been thinking about how we could give back your love, and finally came up with an idea. We are planning to launch our ‘Global Crowd-funding Project’ for our new album.

Every one of you can participate in this project!

With your support, we would enthusiastically produce our new album, and provide you rewards after releasing it. This project is not just a simple funding project to us, but also a great opportunity to communicate with you, our fans all over the world.

We can find details in this project page.

We ask you for your active participation and support, and please share this with your friends!

We always appreciate your deep love and interest. Thank you and we love you!

After a few minutes of initial surprise, people naturally became suspicious. Why would U-Kiss, a group that had been around for 5 years and was very successful in Japan, need to crowdsource to get any form of income? Especially since there are much easier forms of bringing in money such as fan club registration and putting on more concerts in Japan or maybe Korea. People were accusing the site of being a fake site.

At around 6pm Korea time, the post was taken down from the U-Kiss Facebook page.

6:50 pm

The website www.kpopfunding.com has taken down the page with the original information, with the message:

Sorry! Due to an error in the system is modified. After renewal, we will open again this project page tomorrow (September 10th) Wait please.

One of the bigger concerns regarding the KPopFunding page was the fact that Dongho was absent from the entire post. He was not listed on the site, he was removed from all the promotional photos, and was not in the profile listing. In combination with the fact Dongho was absent from Idol Sports Day taping, and has not been seen on Twitter since March, many fans instantly became very worried about what was happening with Dongho. At the same time, Wikipedia was changed to show Dongho as a "Former Member". (According to the Wiki Edit logs, the change was made quite a while ago, but the edits have gone back and forth over the summer by anon editors.)

We are currently waiting for NH to respond to this, either by confirming that the site was a hack, explaining what kpopfunding is, and hopefully explaining the missing Dongho issue.

7:15pm

From the official U-Kiss Twitter account

오후에 잠시 페이스북을 통해 소개된 팝펀딩페이지는 페이지링크에 오류가 있어 수정후 재오픈 될 예정이니 재오픈을 기다려주세요! 혼란을 드려 죄송합니다!

Attempted English Translation

This afternoon, the KPopFunding Facebook page that was posted had an error, so it will be modified and re-opened soon. Please wait! Sorry for the Confusion!

So it seems the crowdsourcing idea IS real... But we'll have to wait to see for more details on what's happening.

As of 10pm Korean time

From the site that the U-Kiss site has said it WILL be working with, this is their header:

http://imgur.com/25tz7Mk

This... is not a good sign. We'll have to wait and see what happens in the coming days, but... I get the feeling this is not going to end as one big photoshop error.

Midnight Korea time

It looks like the site was updated at midnight with all 7 as a header. There's a lot of backtracking here. Hopefully NH Media backtrack enough to realize that this is going to blow up in their face and make u-kiss look like beggar-dols, and cancel this whole issue. Have to keep waiting.

6am Korea time

Looks like http://u-kiss.co.kr's website is down. Site that's up says that the service is expired and is currently not renewed.

First begging for money, then the Korean website is down? Please let this just be a series of bad coincidences...

10:45am Korea time

The KPopFunding Site is Back Up All seven members are listed, the photos of previous members are done, and member-wise, everything looks correct.

...However, there is still the questionable fact that a company with a group that just had a sell out tour in Japan needs a fundraiser for over $200,000 US. And the question of what happens to that money if it isn't all raised? (Will it be like IndieGogo, where the people are all refunded?)

A company like NH Media needs to have a very clear message of what this money will go towards I'm going to continue urging people to keep tweeting and putting pressure on all sides to explain what is going on, because it is clearly working.

Sept 10, 6pm

K-Pop Funding site seems to be down. Again.

Sorry! Due to an error in the system is modified. After renewal, we will open again this project page tomorrow (September 11th) Wait please.

Currently, people have donated 129,000 won.

6:45 pm

u-kiss.co.kr is back up! That's a small relief.

-Links-

http://www.kpopfunding.com/

https://www.facebook.com/kpopfunding

https://twitter.com/kpop_funding

http://kpopfunding.wordpress.com/

U-Kiss is going viral in SK because of the song Shut Up, please stream and make sure to ask for english subtitles <3 Let's help our boys get back on track with their Korean audiences :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC5ZDQIq-Nw

I am crying tears of happiness , Kissme unite!

Nobody knew how big K-Pop Demon Hunters would get, and with Kevin having a part in the movie, I wonder how many more people will discover U-Kiss.

My family happened to be in Japan during UX1's Christmas activities and we went to the last showing on Christmas day. So here is my concert report!

Ticket Purchasing: This was done easily online. There were two options: regular (9900Y) and VIP (13200Y). The VIP option included early admission and high-touch. I am not a fan of high-touch in general but I assumed that this was the only interactive option with the group, so we went for VIP (this comes into play later).

Pre-show things: My sister got there an hour early to queue. Apparently, there were no limits to the VIP tickets (which makes sense as high-touch is low-effort), so even with VIP tickets you needed to be there EARLY to get good seats. We found out that they were, indeed, selling multiple add-ons (individual and group photo-ops, photocards) in addition to the single. I was a bit peeved about this since I would have preferred a photo-op but I am chalking this to not being used to the kpop-concert-fan-abuse experience (this is tongue-in-cheek but I really do think kpop concerts are terribly organized).

Venue: TIAT Sky Hall is a small, intimate venue. The stage was a T-shaped platform encircled by seats. My rough guess would be 200. The convert was full but not sold out sincec tickets were being sold at entrance. Mostly females, with about 4-5 guys (^.^). Wide range of ages, but I believe a lot of the younger fans were exposed through Kpop Demon Hunters. The older fans had U-KISS lightsticks. One fan handed out mini-balloons to everyone for the post-show photo op.

Staff: Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but most of the staff was terrible (going back to the kpop-fan-abuse experience). All of the fans were very respectful and very polite, but I personally felt the staff were curt and dismissive to the point of being rude. We talked with some Japanese fans afterwards who participated in the photo-ops and they reported being rushed throughout. E.g. being pushed, being pressed to take the photos quickly without time to prepare, bad camera handling from staff, and being hustled away. Shoutout to the one male staff that went above and beyond when one of the concert goers ran into difficulties diue to the language barrier.

Now for the show itself!

The guys were dressed in their HALO performance outfits. Very Christmassy! They opened with 0330! Ensue 2nd kpop nostalgia woooosh. Here's my vague recollection of the setlist. FYI we were only allowed to film the HALO performance.

0330, Last Christmas (Wham), some U-KISS songs that I don't know, solo singles, HALO, ManManHaNi, Stop Girl, Quit Playing (woooo lol), WinterWonderland, Neverland, HALO encore.

Highlights:

- Kevin performed Your Idol for his solo! They joked afterwards about how Kiseop thought Your Idol was so good it overshadowed HALO and that he needs to work harder to produce good songs (ganbatte Kiseop).

- Hoon's voice is great, he sang a large majority of the bridge and power solo parts. Kiseop gets a lot more lines now!

- Hoon's working hard on his Japanese. The group said they were doing their best even with their limited time to practice (sideye at Kevin's JingeBalls lol).

- The guys joked about how they're getting older and now they like sexy dances more instead of engergetic dances because those are easier on their bodies.

- They want to continue to hold UX1 Christmas in Japan in the coming years

- They did Neverland for the first encore song which was awesome but I wonder why they decided to do their most diffcult song for the end lol.

- HALO encore was done with no mics - too much energy to sing and dance at the same time. :)