K-pop, the Grammys, and the Politics of Global Recognition

In 2009, I moved to Middletown, Conn. from Seoul, South Korea to study ethnomusicology. At the time, I admittedly did not listen to K-pop, seeing it as largely teen pop, though I would soon realize how limited my view was. Over the next decade, as the genre became increasingly visible in the United States, it reshaped not only how American audiences encountered Korean popular music, but also how I understood its global significance.

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.

The decision sparked heated debates among K-pop fans around the world, some of whom feared that the new category would sideline Asian artists by placing them in a separate “Asian Pop” category while reducing their chances of recognition in the Grammys’ prestigious General Fields awards.

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.

The cultural hierarchy between Western and Korean popular music was shaped by South Korea’s postwar political and military relationship with the United States. South Korea’s commercial recording industry began to take shape in the early 20th century through the activities of Japanese and American record companies. Following liberation from Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, and the division of the peninsula, South Korea came increasingly under U.S. political and military influence.

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.

K-pop refers primarily to music performed by artists known as “idols,” whose careers are developed and managed by entertainment companies. This integrated system was first established in 1995 by Lee Soo Man, founder and producer of SM Entertainment, to bring artist recruitment, talent management, and music and visual production under one roof. Inspired by Motown’s Fordist model of music production and Japan’s idol industry, Lee developed a cultural industry in which idols could grow into professional artists and, eventually, entrepreneurs themselves.

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.

Over the last decade, I have met hundreds of American K-pop fans as a K-pop ethnographer. My first question is always the same: “Why do you like K-pop?” The question carries an assumption: “If K-pop is merely a copy of American pop, as some critics dismissively claim, why listen to the replica rather than the original?”

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.

This idea of “universe” was first systematically introduced to K-pop in 2012, when SM Entertainment debuted EXO as extraterrestrial beings from “EXO Planet,” each endowed with a supernatural power. Since then, world-building has become increasingly intertwined with K-pop’s integration of music, dance, costume, stage design, fashion, beauty, digital media, and more recently, virtual idols and AI production, making K-pop an increasingly audiovisual, narrative, and participatory cultural form for audiences worldwide.

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.

Today, people no longer rely on MTV to learn about new releases. Nor do they simply listen to music. They actively seek out new music on platforms such as Spotify and YouTube and participate in fan discussions on X and TikTok. Fans also use these platforms to pressure media and entertainment companies through organized protests, boycotts, and coordinated online campaigns.

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.

But before considering this dilemma, a more fundamental question arises: If eligibility is determined by musical style, what does language have to do with it? Why should a K-pop act’s music be labeled “Asian” on the basis of language—and if a recording is performed entirely in English, does it somehow cease to be “Asian pop”? More importantly, why must Asian artists prove their Asianness, rather than simply being recognized as individual musicians, as Western artists often are?

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”?

BTS’s decision not to submit its music for Grammy consideration was a bold one. At the same time, the group can afford to say no. We now live in a world where BTS can walk away from the Grammys and filmmaker Bong Joon Ho can famously call the Oscars “very local.” Artists like BTS can turn instead to other mainstream platforms and reach audiences around the world. The Grammys remain prestigious, but they are no longer the only institution capable of conferring global recognition.

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.

This leaves us with one last lingering question: Can every “Asian” musician afford to say no to the Grammys? BTS can walk away and still remain mainstream artists in South Korea, receiving recognition through platforms such as the Melon Music Awards and MAMA Awards. But what about Asian American musicians in the United States, for whom the American music industry is not a foreign market they can simply leave behind, but their own domestic mainstream?

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.