Under normal circumstances, BTS would be entering next year's Grammy Awards with their clearest chance yet of winning their first trophy after five previous nominations.
The beloved K-pop group returned from an extended break owing to mandatory military service and picked up right where they left off. Think a comeback album topping charts across three continents and a stadium tour to match.
On June 16, the Recording Academy introduced Best Asian Pop Music Performance, an award category seemingly intended to recognise the kind of international success BTS helped spawn, only for the band to announce this week that it would not submit any work for the 69th Grammy Awards next year.
Their statement did not overtly cite the new category as the reason for their boycott, but their words left little doubt: “I hope that music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language.”
The new award appears to be another misstep by the Recording Academy, an organisation that has spent a decade fielding criticism over how it sorts genres and artists, from renaming the contested Best Urban Contemporary Album award as Best Progressive R&B in 2020, to creating Best African Music in 2024. Each decision points to the same misreading of how audiences listen, what modern pop means culturally, and how a ceremony with declining viewership and diminished cachet in North America might expand its reach.
The eligibility rules cover work originating from, or widely recognised within, Asian markets. Recordings must make “meaningful use” of at least one Asian language, and can include K-pop, J-pop and C-pop.
This is overdue recognition in the wrong sense. Had the award arrived 15 years ago, when K-pop was bubbling under with acts such as Wonder Girls and BigBang, it would have been a discovery platform. Now it does the opposite, gatekeeping a genre into an esoteric corner when its artists and producers have been the pied pipers of the last decade's sounds.
In an industry that is all about capturing or predicting the next zeitgeist, a Best Asian Pop Music Performance award would have worked when Asian pop was a scene with borders: distinct markets, national release schedules and artists who broke at home before travelling. Streaming changed that years ago, allowing Asian pop to move across markets, languages and genres.
The academy is only now trying to define it as a single category and assert its authority by deciding which track best represents that category.
It is a tall task beginning with what the award is supposed to contain: J-pop's industry veterans, Korea's global K-pop machine, China's subgenre-ridden C-pop, and the fast-growing Filipino and Indonesian scenes. That is before Bollywood and everything the Global South is producing. It encompasses a continent rather than a genre.
The irony is that the academy is in tune with the rest of the legacy industry here. Like the major labels, it has yet to come to terms with what streaming did commercially and culturally.
Founded in 1959, the Grammys were built on radio formats, record shop sections and specialist label departments, all of which pushed records towards audiences already sorted by genre, while national release schedules decided where and when music travelled.
Streaming is steadily eroding whatever assumptions we have about genre, specific markets and audiences, even as it builds and markets micro-genres that categorise music more aggressively than the old industry ever managed to. Spotify, YouTube and TikTok run songs through genre tags, moods, listening habits and online communities, allowing a BTS track to be K-pop to one listener, mainstream pop to another and a social-media soundtrack to someone who could not name the group.
At the same time, there is some credence to the academy’s approach. In its announcement of the new award, alongside four others, chief executive Harvey Mason Jr framed the new categories as a response to the growth of the regional industry and said that an Asian pop entry could also be nominated for the marquee awards of Album, Record or Song of the Year.
This is all technically true, but will Grammy voters do that when the nomination process remains controversially unexplained? Some may determine, even subconsciously, that once Asian pop has its own award, there is no need to consider it fully for the “bigger” awards.
The same could apply in the future to music from the Middle East and North Africa after the Recording Academy established a regional chapter in 2024. In an exclusive interview with The National, executive director of the Mena Recording Academy Taymoor Marmarchi said a future Grammy category for the Middle East was being discussed, with the longer-term ambition of a separate ceremony modelled on the Latin Grammys.
The case is compelling, and kudos to the academy for the approach, but the region is not immune to the streaming habits of major markets.
This raises the same questions about what a future regional award would look like in terms of eligibility and scale as it attempts to encompass genres such as Egyptian pop, Algerian rai, Moroccan rap, Gulf music and Lebanese indie, sung by artists in languages including Arabic, English, French and countless dialects that draw linguistic connections with non-Arabic languages such as Italian and French.
This brings us back to BTS and the ultimate irony of the new Asian Pop Performance award: the group may not actually be eligible, with most of the songs from its latest album sung in English and its hit single Swim entirely so.
Perhaps this was a reason to pull out of the awards while raising an important issue about what popular music is today, a universal genre that the Recording Academy is struggling to listen to.
