That shift is still unfolding, and recent events have raised new questions about how K-pop is categorized and recognized within the American music industry. Those questions came into particularly sharp relief early this summer, when the Recording Academy announced a new category, Best Asian Pop Music Performance, for the 2027 Grammy Awards. In response, the world’s biggest boy band, BTS, announced that they would not submit their music for Grammy consideration.
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. clarified that “The Asian Pop category was created to celebrate the depth, diversity, and extraordinary growth of pop artistry coming out of Asia,” and that submitting music in a genre category would not exclude an artist from also submitting and being considered for Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year.
The first music cassette tape that I bought as a Korean kid living in Seoul in the 1990s was Mariah Carey’s compilation album, #1’s. Well into the 2000s, listening to Western pop was considered “cool” in South Korea. Koreans certainly listened to gayo, or Korean popular music, although Western pop often carried a different kind of cultural prestige. Western pop was typically described as more “intellectual,” “authentic,” and “meaningful.” Radio DJs and music critics did not hesitate to encourage young Koreans to listen to more Western pop rather than gayo.
In the years following the Korean War in the 1950s, the Eighth U.S. Army shows became an important site for the development of South Korean popular music, employing hundreds of Korean entertainers to perform American popular music and other forms of entertainment for U.S. soldiers. Korean performers would listen to the American Forces Korea Network (AFKN), transcribe music they heard on the radio, and memorize the latest American songs for performances at military bases.
U.S. military, media, and commercial networks became powerful channels through which American popular music entered South Korea and shaped the development of its contemporary popular music industry. Indeed, American pop was long considered more prestigious and trendier than Korean pop—until K-pop began to command international recognition of its own.
The K-pop universe
Shortly after I moved to the U.S., I began encountering more and more American fans who asked me if I knew acts like Girls’ Generation or BIGBANG. These fans introduced me to the world of K-pop, and I gradually stopped listening to American pop. Around the same time, Korean music critics lamented that younger Koreans were no longer listening to Western pop as they once had. Perhaps I was not the only one.
Their responses were surprisingly similar, as if they had compared notes. K-pop was “magical” and “catchy,” while American pop was “boring” and “always the same.” According to these fans, while American pop stars sang “too much about sex, drugs, and parties,” K-pop offered “dreams, fantasies, and self-growth,” often through elaborate alternative “universes” in which idols developed distinct personas and narratives.
Parallel to the fantasy world presented on stage and through mass media, entertainment companies—especially those with smaller budgets and limited access to traditional media networks—began to use online platforms to communicate with fans by revealing more down-to-earth, behind-the-scenes moments. BTS became one of the most prominent examples through its YouTube series BANGTAN BOMB, which captured offstage moments that portrayed the members as humble, playful, and hardworking. Fans, in turn, voluntarily created subtitles in multiple languages, helping introduce BTS to international audiences and expand its global fanbase.
K-pop fans have developed highly coordinated strategies to influence chart performance, spending considerable time, energy, and money to push their favorite idols’ new releases to the top. The scale of this participation can be striking: In 2023, 19 of the top 20 albums on IFPI’s Global Album Sales Chart—which measures physical album sales and full-album downloads worldwide—were by South Korean acts. This collective fandom power became especially visible in 2017, when BTS won Billboard’s Top Social Artist award, a fan-voted prize that helped propel the group into the center of American mainstream attention—a kind of “fan-forced entry” into the American market, as ARMYs sometimes jokingly put it. BTS went on to win the award five consecutive times, from 2017 to 2021, until the category was discontinued the following year.
Fan power certainly existed in the old media era, but digital media has made it more immediate, visible, and able to reach beyond the boundaries of individual fandoms. Organized fan communities directly influence entertainment companies’ decisions. This means that media industries—including the American music and entertainment industries, which have long served as powerful gatekeepers in the global music market—may not exercise the same degree of control over which artists gain visibility and recognition.
The Academy states, “The musical style is determinative of eligibility, not the ethnicity or nationality of the performer(s).” Yet it also requires that “an Asian language should play a significant role within the song,” while “incidental or minimal use of an Asian language” does not qualify. A recording performed entirely in English is therefore ineligible for the category. The Academy also prohibits artists from entering different language versions of the same recording in separate performance categories.
This creates a dilemma. An English-language recording cannot qualify as Asian Pop, while recordings primarily performed in Asian languages have historically had little presence among the Grammy General Field winners.
What is ‘Asian pop?’
This raises another question: What, exactly, constitutes “Asianness” in music? K-pop, J-pop, and C-pop, for instance, are only a few of the many musical cultures that may be grouped under the label “Asian,” yet they use different languages and emerge from distinct musical industries and cultural histories. On what musical grounds, then, are they grouped together under a single category called “Asian Pop”?
Other K-pop acts will likely continue to submit their work to the Grammys’ Asian Pop category, but not necessarily in pursuit of the symbolic recognition historically attached to the award. They may instead regard it as one among many opportunities for media exposure and broader audience reach.
The Recording Academy says it wants to celebrate an Asianness that is “widely recognized within Asian markets, including K-Pop, J-Pop, and C-Pop.” But where, then, does that leave Asian American artists whose music may be rooted in the United States rather than in an “Asian market”? For them, the United States is not a foreign market, but home.
My concern is that this framing threatens to collapse distinct cultures into one. A label as broad as “Asian” does not by itself imply a shared language, culture, or musical tradition. Pop music may be more global than ever, but not every artist gets to be just pop.
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