The Fall of the Gangnam Megaclub: Burning Sun, COVID and a Generation That Left

From the booth of a Gangnam (강남) club in 2016 you saw purple lasers and a crowd that ran back into the dark. Between 2011 and 2016 I held residencies at two different venues in Apgujeong (압구정), and those were the megaclub years. Octagon sat in DJ Mag’s world top ten, the big rooms sold tables by the row, and Gangnam was the most visible nightlife format in Korea.

Ten years later the model survives in a handful of rooms. Three blows did it: the Burning Sun scandal in 2019, COVID in 2020, and a generation that stopped wanting what the table floors were selling. Gangnam’s clubs aren’t dead, but the megaclub is. What replaced it is smaller and more music led, and it still runs on the bottle.

Gangnam’s Big Rooms Started in Hotel Basements

Before EDM, there were hotel nightclubs. In 1981 the Riverside Hotel in Jamwon-dong (잠원동) opened Mul Night (물나이트), a club with more than 50 private rooms around a dance floor, where Cho Yong-pil once performed. It ran for 33 years and closed in November 2014 to become a lounge and steakhouse, as the Seoul Shinmun reported.

The most famous of them was Juliana (줄리아나), in the basement of the Emerald Hotel in Cheongdam (청담), later renamed Hotel Ellui. From 1994 to 2007 it drew a line about 100 metres long. Its former chief, Oh Deuk-su (오득수), told the Chosun Ilbo it took about ₩1.8 to 1.9 billion a month, even through the 1997 financial crisis. Each table had a red lamp that worked as a call button, and booking (부킹, buking) waiters ran the room, introducing tables to each other. In 2025 he and Cool’s Kim Sung-soo brought the name back near Hakdong Station (학동역), for a crowd mostly in its 40s and 50s.

The district had already been through one turnover before the megaclubs arrived. Newspim (뉴스핌) described in 2017 how the early 2000s hotel nights, Julianna in Cheongdam and Boss in Apgujeong among them, gave way to hip hop clubs, and how a Julianna night near Gangnam Station had passed through club NB to become Totoga.

For a Few Years, Seoul Ranked

Around 2010 and 2011 the old Juliana basement became Club Ellui (엘루이), built for about 4,000 people, with Funktion-One systems across its zones and 44 MC2 amplifiers, according to the installer’s own account. In November 2011 Octagon (옥타곤) opened in the New Hilltop Hotel basement in Nonhyeon (논현), at about 1,000 pyeong (평, roughly 3,300 m²) and a capacity of about 3,000, as Ilyo Sisa and DJ Mag described it.

Gangnam in the world poll

The Big Rooms in DJ Mag’s Top 100 Clubs

Best placing, size and what happened next

DJ Mag 세계 100대 클럽 속 강남

Club	Best placing	Capacity	Now
Octagon	5th, 2016 and 2017	About 3,000	Gone; still 10th in 2020
Ellui	39th, 2013	About 4,000	Gone; site rebuilt as apartments
Chroma	59th, 2020	3,000	At Paradise City, near Incheon Airport
Lion Seoul	57th, 2026	700	Open on Dosan-daero

The ruleThe rooms that rank now are a quarter of the size the old ones were.

Sources: DJ Mag Top 100 Clubs 2013 to 2026, MC2 Audio, Ilyo Sisa and Resident Advisor. Chart by The DJ Diaries.

For a few years, Seoul was on the world list. In DJ Mag’s Top 100 Clubs poll, Ellui rose from 91st in 2012 to 39th in 2013, and Octagon climbed from 97th in 2012 to 12th in 2013, then 5th in 2016 and 2017. It was seventh in both 2018 and 2019 and still tenth in 2020. Eden, in the Ritz-Carlton basement on Bongeunsa-ro, never made the list, but that same basement later became Base and then, in 2018, Burning Sun.

The formula was barely about music. A megaclub ran on tables: a floor of bottle service booths with minimum spends running from several hundred thousand won into the tens of millions for the front rows, an EDM soundtrack imported from the festival mainstage, and a door that picked guests for spectacle. The DJ was set dressing for a status economy, which is why the same era produced the superstar booking fee. Arena, Burning Sun and their neighbours made Gangnam one of the best known club districts in Asia, and the model looked untouchable. I played my residencies inside it.

Ellui’s end was a money story, not a scandal. Competition among the big rooms grew, the hotel’s finances failed, and the club was gone by somewhere between 2014 and 2016 (sources differ on the year). The hotel was sold in July 2016 for an estimated ₩80 to 100 billion, Sisa Journal-e reported, then demolished and replaced by The Penthouse Cheongdam, which by 2024 carried the highest assessed apartment value in Korea, according to eToday. One Cheongdam address went from a 1990s nightclub to a world ranked superclub to the most expensive home in the country.

Burning Sun Turned the District on Itself

The Burning Sun scandal (버닝썬) began with a single assault complaint about staff inside the club in the Le Méridien hotel in November 2018. MBC made it public on 28 January 2019, and it unravelled into what was widely called the biggest nightlife scandal in Korean history, with allegations of drug distribution and the drugging of patrons, hidden camera footage traded in celebrity chat rooms, prostitution, and police collusion.

Several people were later convicted, mostly on drug, prostitution and business charges; the collusion and patron drugging allegations were largely not proven in court. Seungri of Big Bang went to prison for 18 months and was released in February 2023. Burning Sun closed within weeks, and Arena was raided in a tax evasion investigation the same year. Sisa Journal (시사저널) pointed out in August 2021 that the nine charges in Seungri’s first trial concerned his own business dealings and conduct, not the wider allegations about guests, and argued that celebrity coverage let the bigger questions about Gangnam’s clubs go unanswered.

The deeper damage was to the clubs’ reputation. For young Koreans, the scandal confirmed every suspicion about what the table floors were. Gangnam clubbing became something a careful person explained away, and the domestic crowd quietly moved to other districts. The shadow is still there. On the night of 3 April 2026, the government’s drug response team, police and district offices ran a joint drug inspection of clubs in Gangnam and Yongsan, part of a two month national crackdown. They found no drug crimes, only a few food sanitation warnings, but the clubs are still where the inspectors go first.

COVID and a Generation That Stopped Coming

COVID finished what the scandal started. A megaclub’s costs, high rent, a big staff and imported headliners, only work at full density, and two years of curfews and capacity caps were the one thing the format couldn’t survive. The small basements of Itaewon and Haebangchon could hibernate on takeout beer and a patient landlord. A floor for 2,000 people with a hotel lease couldn’t. Several Gangnam rooms never reopened, and the ones that did came back to a market that had moved.

Where Seoul goes out

Gangnam Is Fourth Choice Now

Share of club goers naming each district first

강남, 이제는 네 번째 선택

Itaewon44%

Haebangchon23%

Hongdae19%

Gangnam9%

Euljiro5%

How to read itThe district with the biggest rooms comes fourth, behind Haebangchon, which has no big club at all.

Source: The DJ Diaries Seoul Nightlife Report, 343 respondents, February to March 2025. Chart by The DJ Diaries.

The third blow got less press. The audience that came of age after 2020 drinks less, goes home earlier, goes to more festivals, and likes rooms where the music is the point. In our own survey of 343 Seoul club goers, only 9% named Gangnam as their first choice district, behind Itaewon, Hongdae and even Haebangchon, a neighbourhood with no big club at all.

The spectacle moved to the festival circuit, where World DJ Festival and EDC Korea sell the same production values a couple of weekends a year without the baggage. The rest of Seoul’s energy went into the five scene map: Itaewon’s underground rooms, the HBC bar circuit, Hongdae’s student floors, and the independent promoter economy that COVID ended up legitimising.

What’s Left Is Smaller, Sharper and Still About the Bottle

The format shrank rather than died. Lion Seoul (Lion Super Club, 라이언) opened at 535 Dosan-daero in Cheongdam in January 2026, in the space that was once Answer and Cheongdam Made, and entered DJ Mag’s 2026 Top 100 Clubs at 57. It holds 700 people rather than Octagon’s 3,000, runs a Funktion-One system, and books everyone from MEDUZA and Artbat to Central Cee, with hard techno and trance nights alongside the EDM, according to Resident Advisor. Tables still start at around a million won. The rooms got smaller; the table economics didn’t go away.

The other true superclub is outside the city: Chroma, the 3,000 capacity room at the Paradise City resort near Incheon Airport, which placed 59th in DJ Mag’s 2020 poll. Lion and Chroma are the best examples of superclubs in Korea today. Back in the day there were Octagon, Arena, Ellui, Syndrome, Made and Mass, to name a few. They’re all gone.

Around them is a smaller circuit. Times sits on Apgujeong-ro 54-gil, +82, a few doors up Dosan-daero from Lion, is the after hours room, and Ace has taken over the old Race site by Sinsa Station. Frame Seoul in Cheongdam hosts OFFGRID’s house and techno, Luka in Sinsa does hard techno and trance, and Muse Seoul and Lowkey Seoul are small basements on Apgujeong-ro 46-gil, run on the music rather than the tables. Every one of them is on the map below, with what’s on in the next two weeks and Naver and Kakao links in each pin.

What the Megaclub Gave, and What It Cost

To be fair to the big rooms, the money was real, and so was the reach. They booked headliners no basement could afford, and for a few years they put Seoul on DJ Mag’s world list, with Octagon in the top ten for five straight polls. Nobody else in Korea has managed that since, and Lion only got back onto the list in 2026.

The cost was what they taught a generation clubbing was. Bottle sparklers, a velvet rope and a table you were judged by. Venues that don’t invest in sound have always frustrated me, whatever the postcode, and on a table floor the DJ was set dressing. The megaclub’s one glass tower descendant is the luxury lounge, smaller, more expensive and honest about being a bar.

As someone who played through the whole arc, I don’t mourn the format much. The money was real. But Seoul’s scene has spent the years since teaching people that a club can be about the music, one basement at a time.

How to Do Gangnam Now

Gangnam is about the look and the bottle. Dress for it. Buy a bottle or book a table and they’ll usually find room for you; turn up without one and many rooms won’t feel welcoming. Plan on tables starting around a million won at Lion on a big night.

If you want the music without the bottle, go small: Frame Seoul for house and techno, Luka for the harder end, or the Apgujeong basements, Muse Seoul and Lowkey Seoul. Sinsa Station and Apgujeong Rodeo Station are the easy starting points, and every pin on the map links to directions on Naver and Kakao.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to the Gangnam megaclubs in Seoul?

The Gangnam (강남) megaclub model was hit by three blows: the Burning Sun scandal in 2019, COVID in 2020, and a generational shift in how young Koreans go out. In 2018 it was the most visible nightlife format in Korea. Octagon, Arena, Ellui and their neighbours are gone. Lion Super Club, opened in January 2026 with 700 capacity, and Chroma near Incheon Airport are the superclubs left, and the centre of Seoul nightlife has moved to Itaewon, Haebangchon and Hongdae.

What was the Burning Sun scandal?

The Burning Sun scandal began with a single assault complaint at the club in the Le Méridien hotel in Gangnam in November 2018 and became public in January 2019. It grew into what was widely called the biggest nightlife scandal in Korean history, with allegations of drug distribution, hidden camera footage traded in celebrity chat rooms, prostitution and police collusion. Seungri of Big Bang went to prison on nine charges including prostitution brokering and overseas gambling, and Burning Sun closed within weeks.

How did a Gangnam megaclub make money?

A Gangnam megaclub ran on tables rather than music. The floor was built around bottle service booths, with minimum spends from several hundred thousand won into the tens of millions for the front rows. An EDM soundtrack from the festival mainstage and a door that picked guests for spectacle completed the formula. At Lion Super Club in 2026, tables still start at around a million won.

Where do people go clubbing in Seoul now instead of Gangnam?

Seoul nightlife didn’t shrink after the megaclub era; it moved. In our survey of 343 club goers, 44% named Itaewon (이태원) as their first choice and only 9% named Gangnam. The energy went to Itaewon’s underground rooms, the Haebangchon (해방촌) bar circuit, Hongdae (홍대) and independent promoters, while the spectacle moved to festivals such as World DJ Festival and EDC Korea. Each district is compared in a working DJ’s map of Seoul.

Further Reading on The DJ Diaries

• Hongdae vs Itaewon vs Gangnam: A Working DJ’s Map of Seoul
• How Seoul’s Club Scene Survived COVID
• The Superstar DJ: How Booking Fees Went From $500 to $500,000
• Korea’s DJ Festivals Guide

Sources

• Newspim (뉴스핌): forty years of Friday nights, from disco night to hip hop club (2017)
• Sisa Journal (시사저널): how Burning Sun became the Seungri case (21 August 2021)
• Seoul Shinmun: 강남 유흥문화의 상징 ‘물나이트’ 역사속으로 (2014)
• Chosun Ilbo via Daum: 줄리아나가 돌아왔다 (2025)
• eToday: ‘줄리아나’를 아시나요 (2024)
• Sisa Journal-e: 청담동 ‘호텔 엘루이’ 고급 빌라로 바뀐다 (2016)
• MC2 Audio: Korea’s King of Clubs (2011)
• DJ Mag Top 100 Clubs 2013: Ellui
• DJ Mag: Top 100 Clubs profile, Octagon
• Ilyo Sisa: 국내 최고 클럽 ‘옥타곤’에선 지금 (2014)
• DJ Mag Top 100 Clubs 2026: Lion Seoul
• Herald Business (헤럴드경제): 당국, 강남·용산 클럽서 마약류 합동 단속, 적발은 없어 (4 April 2026)

Written from Seoul, by someone who has been in the booth for more than twenty years. More on the site, or book a DJ.

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