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K-pop, Mandopop, other Asian pop
LifestyleEntertainment

How Spotify had a hand in K-pop’s meteoric rise: BTS, Blackpink and Exo among app’s top streamed bands

  • BTS are leading the K-pop wave and last month had 8 billion streams on Spotify
  • The streaming service has seen an huge rise in K-pop traffic over the past six years

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BTS have led K-pop’s domination of pop music and have been streamed billions of times on Spotify.
Kate Whitehead

K-pop is at an all-time high and the genre owes a great deal of its international success to Spotify, the global audio streaming subscription service which is now dominated by the infectious sound from South Korea.

In 2014, Spotify launched its K-pop flagship playlist K-pop Daebak, which now has more than 2.4 million followers. Between January 2014 and January this year, K-pop streams increased more than 1,800 per cent and during the same period users listened to more than 134 billion minutes of K-pop on Spotify.

The first K-pop act to top the US album charts was BTS, and the seven-member boy band can claim a large part of the credit for the upsurge of interest. Not only is BTS Spotify’s most-streamed K-pop band, it’s among the service’s most streamed artists overall. Last year, BTS were the first group from Asia to surpass five billion streams on Spotify. And as of this month, they have racked up more than 8 billion streams.

BTS have boosted their international appeal by teaming up with a range list of A-list global artists. Last year’s collaboration with US artist Halsey, Boy with Luv, has clocked up 380 million streams, making it Spotify’s most-streamed K-pop track.

“There’s no denying the massive global explosion of K-pop over the last few years, and we’ve witnessed it first-hand on Spotify,” says Kossy Ng, Spotify’s head of artist and label marketing in Asia.

“This is truly the first Asian music genre to resonate so well with a global audience. K-pop fans are among the most passionate and active, and K-pop fandom – the way fans function, communicate and connect with one another – is like no other. There’s no doubt that K-pop’s immense popularity will only continue to grow, and we’re excited to continue driving discovery and connecting K-pop artists to fans all over the world.”

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