The story of the last 15 years of popular music can’t be told without a significant focus on the rise of Korean pop from a powerful but largely isolated industry to a border-crossing global megaforce. Starting with PSY’s ultra-viral “Gangnam Style” in the early 2010s and booming through the ever-expanding superstardom of groups like BTS and Blackpink (and their respective members’ solo endeavors) in the past decade, K-pop has grown in the United States from what was once mostly a niche fandom to a major part of the pop landscape, with chart-topping songs and albums, sold-out stadium tours and millions of devoted fans.
But the one thing K-pop still lacks in the States? Major representation on Music’s Biggest Night.
In recent years, the Recording Academy has prioritized expanding the global reach of the Grammys, with new categories such as best African music performance (introduced in 2024) and música mexicana (renamed from best regional Mexican music album in 2024 after its introduction in 2012) reflecting the increased stateside presence of their respective genres in the 2020s. But even with this lean toward global inclusivity, K-pop — which has regularly appeared on the Billboard charts for a decade now — still does not have its own Grammy category.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations about a K-pop category, actually,” Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. says. “There’s been talk of it over the years — and obviously, the music is so prevalent, so impactful and just resonating right now globally.”
Mason says that the biggest challenge in establishing such a category is ensuring first that the academy’s membership has the makeup to sustain it. “You can imagine if we added a category for a genre of music and we didn’t have enough members to evaluate that music, it would be a disaster for not only us but for the genre because it would be represented incorrectly and it would not be accurate or [have] relevant outcomes,” he explains.
To that end, the academy has been reaching out to the Korean pop community in recent years to ensure that its representation continues to grow within the institution. “We’ve been doing a lot of work between the creative community and the executive community around K-pop,” he says. “We need to continue to reach into that community and make sure the people who are creating it and writing it and producing and singing it are members of our organization so we can get it right, get the definitions of the category right, get what goes into the category right.”
Part of the difficulty in getting those definitions right may just be defining “K-pop” as a distinct genre rather than an umbrella term for Korean artists making popular music. In a 2021 Billboard article about the possibilities of a K-pop category being added to the Grammys, then-Recording Academy chief awards officer Bill Freimuth suggested that the multifaceted genre was best left to the preexisting pop categories: “What we’ve heard from the community is that they consider what they are creating to [simply] be pop music,” he explained. That article also identified submission volume as an issue, as the academy received just 14 K-pop submissions for that year’s ceremonies, constituting under 1.5% of the overall submissions in the pop field — far fewer than the academy needs to receive for a field to which it is considering devoting an entire category.
Jeremy Erlich — founder of full-service music company ALTA Music Group, which counts Blackpink solo star Jennie among its clients — sees the risk of a potential K-pop category becoming “the place where you put everything [from that world] in that category.” He points to Bad Bunny, a crossover superstar whose lone Grammy wins, despite his 2023 nomination for album of the year, have been in the Latin pop and música urbana categories. “If you look at Bad Bunny, he doesn’t want to be the biggest Latin star. He wants to be the biggest star. And he deserves the right [to have that opportunity at the Grammys].”
But Korean pop music has scantly been recognized in the larger pop or general categories at the Grammys. BTS made history earlier this decade with three consecutive nominations in the best pop duo/group performance category — for “Dynamite” (2021), “Butter” (2022) and “My Universe” alongside Coldplay (2023), the lattermost also earning the septet an album of the year nomination as part of its Music of the Spheres. Those were the first Grammy nominations Korean pop artists had received in those categories, however, and no one has joined BTS in the club since. (They also lost in all three categories.)
In the four years since that article, however, K-pop has only become more deeply entrenched within the U.S. music industry. “The amount of Korean repertoire on U.S. label rosters… it’s probably grown exponentially over the past five years,” Erlich says. “I’d assume the submissions have grown [along with it].”
Illustration by Glenn Harvey
In addition to winning over more and more stateside fans every year, the cross-pollinating of Western performers with Korean artists has also swelled significantly, resulting in big-name, culture-crossing collaborations between Jung Kook and Latto or Lisa with RAYE and Doja Cat. In addition, American writers, producers and other behind-the-scenes industry figures teaming with Korean pop stars has become increasingly common. Amanda Hill, co-chief creative officer of publishing house Runner Music, has worked with American creatives who have collaborated with K-pop hit-makers Lisa and Tomorrow x Together on recent projects, and Runner co-founder and OneRepublic star Ryan Tedder teamed with K-pop label superpower HYBE to form and train a new global boy group.
“I think that the Korean music industry has done a really good job coming out this way and learning about all the songwriters and putting together interesting sessions,” Hill says. She explains that while K-pop has long had a presence in the American recording industry, the actual power players have only recently really started to put boots on the ground in the States: “I would say the last three, four years, the Korean music industry has been spending more time in Los Angeles — where, prior to that, it felt more like just email relationships.”
In the past year, K-pop’s stateside exposure has also exploded thanks to the worldwide crossover of Rosé and Bruno Mars’ Billboard Global 200-topping collaboration, “APT.”; the top 10 success she and Blackpink groupmates Lisa and Jennie had with their respective solo albums on the Billboard 200; and, particularly, the massive phenomenon of KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s animated superhero musical set in a fictionalized K-pop universe. The film’s soundtrack, released in June, became a Billboard 200-topping smash, with its breakout hit, “Golden” — credited to HUNTR/X, the movie’s fictional superstar group protagonists who are voiced by real-life Korean-heritage artists EJAE, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami — now a seven-week Billboard Hot 100 No. 1.
“We see the respect over the past decade [for K-pop] growing exponentially,” says Torsten Ingvaldsen, an independent A&R executive who works to connect American and Korean artists. “We’ve seen it all come together really in KPop Demon Hunters — that shows you what the lifestyle surrounding K-pop can achieve.”
“APT.,” as well as “Golden” and its parent album (which also includes appearances from real-life K-pop hit-makers TWICE), could all be prominent enough to puncture the pop and/or general categories at the 2026 Grammys. If they get shut out, however, it might put additional pressure on the academy to reevaluate whether K-pop should be given its own category to ensure it has some representation on Music’s Biggest Night. “If there’s a complete omission, there’ll be cause for chatter,” Erlich says.
Ultimately, for a category to be added, one or multiple academy insiders may have to lead the charge. “I think it would take someone, anyone cheerleading it to the Grammy board,” Hill suggests. “I know the songwriter of the year category [introduced in 2023] took a long time [to be added], but that was championed by a few people that were on the board that worked really hard to make it happen. So I think [a K-pop category] would just take a committed collection of people to make themselves heard.”
And as the globalization of pop music keeps spreading, Hill also wonders if adding a K-pop category might not ultimately even be dreaming big enough — suggesting a new category could be devised to cover all Asian pop music, including Japanese and Chinese, rather than being “K-pop-specific.”
“There’s lots of things happening in different countries, and I think that that would be a more inclusive category,” she says. “We’re in an era where great music is coming from everywhere… you just have to be open to and listening to music from all over the world. You never know where it’s going to come from next.”
Regardless of what form the category ends up taking, Mason cites his personal connection to Korean pop music in his earlier career as a writer-producer as a motivating factor in ensuring the music ultimately gets Grammys representation.
“I began going to Korea 15 years ago, making music — and if you look back and speak to some of the people from the labels and some of the artists, they’ll tell you I was one of the first American producers in Korea making music, bringing writers to the region to make records for their artists,” he explains. “I’ve been a fan. I’ve been, I think, an innovator in that space out there. So I would love to see more global music, more music from that region, being celebrated [at the Grammys].”
This story appears in the Oct. 4, 2025, issue of Billboard.
This story originally appeared on Billboard
