Based on a couple of recent posts ‘EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami’ thread that detoured a little from its intended purpose, I figured it might not hurt to have a sort of general repository for K-Pop related stuff, especially in light of the only two other threads related to it here stemming from the K-POP DEMON HUNTERS movie.

The growth of the K-Pop industry into a global +/-$12 billion machine dates back to mid-90’s South Korea but really exploding internationally alongside the rise of YouTube and social media, with the first major breakout occurring circa 2012.

Finer points can be argued about many facets of this industry (including its well-publicized dark side, or its often superficial lyrics) but the fact is it’s not a fad and never has been. Love it or hate it or don’t care, it’s a major component of the global music industry with massive demonstrated cross-cultural appeal, something the South Korean government has tripled down on for decades as a soft power initiative, to a degree of success that no other Asian power has matched (including the long-popular J-Pop industry from Japan). K-POP DEMON HUNTERS rode this wave. It didn’t create it.

Keep in mind that the simple thread title ‘K-Pop Music’ refers to exactly what it is: popular music from Korea. There’s often a misconception (even in the early running of the KPDH thread) that ‘K-Pop’ and ‘Korean Pop Culture’ are interchangeable but they’re generally not. The latter is better known overall under its well-documented umbrella term ‘Korean Wave’ (also widely known as ‘Hallyu’), which again can be traced back to the 1990’s, in particular the domestic renaissance in Korean cinema that started in 1999 and brought the first rounds of international curiosity and acclaim before their locally-popular TV dramas and bubblegum ‘pop’ music started gaining serious traction as well. Hallyu is, essentially, all of it. K-Pop is just the biggest and most profitable component of Hallyu, although when one considers that South Korean content is now Netflix’s second-largest driver of viewing hours globally, it’s pretty clear that the country’s other entertainment industries have likewise concocted reliable, profitable formulas.

But rather than drone on in a music forum about the overall history and global expansion of South Korean entertainment, you can go down a fairly deep rabbit whole just by sticking to Wikipedia alone :

The Korean Wave (Hallyu)
(also: South Korean Popular Culture)

K-Pop Music
(also: K-Pop Idol Groups 2000’s, 2010’s, 2020’s)
(also: K-Pop Artists)

Korean Cinema (aka Hallyuwood)

Korean Dramas (aka K-Dramas / Koreanovelas)


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Despite being a avowed fan of Hallyu and Korean culture in general since the mid- to late-1990’s – when all of this global outreach really began – I probably have more expertise in Korean Cinema than I do in K-Pop music, but even as a passive listener I hope that the popularity DEMON HUNTERS inspires people to venture beyond the infectious soundtrack and into the larger arena of performers and works that inspired its makers.

Based on the kinds of other threads in this section, I’m not sure K-Pop may be of much interest to DVDTalk’s demographic of mostly middle-aged dudes (and some ladies!), but hey, everything’s catchy to someone, so even if this thread only results in a popular new video posted once in a blue moon, that’s fine. And if it totally dies with this post, that’s fine, too. I’ve always been a very casual music listener in general and don’t really ‘follow’ any singers or groups (including American ones) and besides, the K-Pop industry is such a juggernaut that I wouldn’t even try to keep up. Still, stuff occasionally turns up in my YouTube feed that might be worth sharing. Who knows.

That said, here are some videos below for K-Pop tunes that have done well in late 2025 to 2026 so far, plus a couple of holdovers from earlier last year. One of these groups, the culturally-mixed, US-based-with-better-English lyrics, ‘global girl group’ KATSEYE, is indeed a K-Pop creation, in part because the reality show they were created on and the band itself are a joint venture between Korean entertainment conglomerate Hybe and Geffen Records (and that’s hardly the first crossover between the industries; it’s been going on for years). ‘JeffTheAlpaca’ posted a couple of their videos in the ‘EJAE’ thread but I’ll leave it to him move them here if he’s so inclined.

LNGSHOT - Moonwalkin’ (25 million viewe, 3 weeks)

BLACKPINK - Jump (336M, 6 months)

EXO - Crown (45M in 3 weeks)

Enhyphen - Knife (33M in 3 weeks)

KATSEYE - Game Boy (103M)

ROSÉ and Bruno Mars - Apt. (2.3 Billion)

BABYMONSTER - Drip (343M)

Alpha Drive One - Freak Drive

I can tell Brian T knows his stuff because all of the K-Pop artists he linked videos of are the exact same K-Pop artists that my teenage kids listen to, well done!

^

Hardly an expert, though, despite my long posts about it. In fact, the whole industry is just too large and the music in general is too interchangeable to even try keeping up. Usually, once in a rare while I’ll just google ‘popular K-pop songs Feb 2026’ or whatever and see what comes up, as I actually did for that first post!

Based on the discussion in the K-POP DEMON HUNTERS thread over the past year it became apparent that the “K-Pop experience” of many folks was via their teenaged and/or twenty-something kids, and undoubtedly their younger ones too. Having daughters probably increased the chances of K-Pop being in your home, too. And, like a lot of parents regarding their kids’ taste in music, it all probably barely registered or was even annoying, at least until KPDH suddenly added yet another layer of legitimacy that, I suspect, prompted some ‘old folks’ to take a closer look at the music their kids had likely been consuming for years.

Personally, my interest is in Korean culture overall, and first and foremost Korean movies, a passion which goes back to the mid-90’s. My near-20-year relationship with my Korean-Canadian girlfriend starting around 2000 led to us both discovering Korea’s broader pop culture as time went on (strangely she had experienced very little of it growing up).

Even though the rise of Hallyu and K-Pop is as much attributable to Gen X (which covers a lot of us here) as it is to millennials, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha, it was really those later generations that were able to be more fully steeped in it alongside all the other music they had access to at the swipe of their fingers.

By the early 2010s, K-Pop had already made massive inroads globally, but 2012 in particular saw it dovetail with social media truly coming into its own in the way we’ve pretty much known it since. That was the year that Gangnam Style quite literally broke the internet by logging 1 billion views by the end of the year, becoming the first video in internet history to do so. It’s currently sits at nearly 6 billion views, and No. 9 on YT’s top ten list.

For old time’s sake:


The popularity of that, plus its quirky choereography, kicked the then-growing ‘flash mob’ movement into hyperdrive, with get-togethers like these being popping up all over the planet. I lost count pretty quickly:




Those are all from 2012 and people are still doing dance covers of the song to this day.

It goes without saying that the K-Pop industry realized very early on that the dance choreography performed by the groups on stage and in their videos was a whole other layer of marketability toward full-on audience participation in the social media era. Virtually every song by every group on every ‘tier’ of the industry features intricate, unique dance moves that fans have been duplicating and posting on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. for years now. In fact, the music companies have long been producing two music videos for nearly every song produced: one typically flashy cinematic version, and one ‘dance performance’ version designed specifically so followers can study the choreography without all the fancy sets, props, lighting, and glittery shit. These are often nearly as popular as the main videos.

This has all fuelled the ‘[KPop in Public]’ viral video phenomenon (I retained the parentheses because many of the videos include them for some reason) – the natural evolution of the flash mob era – in which individuals, groups of friends, and professional / semi-pro dance crews stage their own elaborate, expertly-shot public performances of the nearly limitless ‘library’ of dance routines that K-Pop bands have created.

The recent trailer for MINIONS AND MONSTERS features the 2020 song ‘How You Like That’ by BLACKPINK (#33 on the Billboard Hot 100 and huge worldwide):


BLACKPINK’s music video for that single currently sits at 1.3 billion views . . .


. . . while the ‘dance only’ version tops it at just shy of 2 billion views. Usually the dance videos rack up slightly less views than the official music videos, but in certain cases the numbers get swapped. Guess it all depends on the song.


That in turn leads to innumerable dance crew cover versions like this one from Vietnam gaining 25 million views in its own right.


^ That was done five years ago, btw, back when the song came out.

When K-POP DEMON HUNTERS first streamed, it wasn’t long before [KPop in Public] videos appeared for every song on its soundtrack. Like the movie itself to the uninitiated, these videos undoubtedly roped in newbies who might not have realized just how pervasive this industry has been for years now, most likely while their kids were out doing stuff like this :


^ Some of those were already posted in the KPDH thread, but I recall Story only coming into that one relatively recently so he probably missed all this stuff. I’m betting his kids were aware of it though.

Posted this just now in the K-POP DEMON HUNTERS thread, but figured I might as well copy it here as well as it’s more music-centric anyway.

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I suspect this may not be of much interest to folks for whom the notion of ‘K-Pop’ begins and ends with KPDH, but for those who’ve been inspired by it to browse the larger sphere of K-culture, Netflix has a new documentary about the return of internationally huge Korean group BTS premiering on Friday. I’ll even admit the show looks about as lightweight as every other pop star doc I’ve seen or heard of – ohh, the existential crises of being millionaire entertainers! Still, it’s not often a top-selling act can literally disappear completely for years and come back with virtually no momentum lost for a global tour that sold out every date within minutes.

This documentary is meant to coincide in part with their fifth studio album which was released last Friday and sold nearly four million copies that day (don’t know how many it’s moved since then).


They also performed a free concert – their first in four years – for tens of thousands of fans in Seoul's Gwanghwamun Square, one of South Korea's most famous landmarks that was also streamed live, globally, last Friday on Netflix. I don’t have the service but I assume that’s still up for viewing? Trailer for that:



The group will also appear on Jimmy Fallon this week on both Wednesday and Thursday.

Latest BLACKPINK is great.

A coworker is slowly introducing me to KPop. BTS is pretty good but my favorite so far is Monsta X particularly this song

I almost posted that BLACKPINK video here a couple weeks ago, but wasn’t sure this thread had much interest! At the time it was already at around 20 million views in just a few days, and it’s up to 60 million after just three weeks. That group gets some damned catchy tunes.

That Monsta X song is pretty solid, too. I’m not familiar with them but it sounded like a new tune. Clicked though to YouTube and turns out it’s ten years old! Further proof of something I probably mentioned in one of those long earlier posts: the K-Pop formula was formed decades ago and a lot of the older music is as catchy as the new stuff.

Rosé's solo album (and the F1 soundtrack) pulled me in. Then I heard Jump last year and liked it. Loved GO since first time I heard it on SiriusXM Hits 1. Huntr/x also pulled me into KPop.

^ Speaking of which, at 71 million views . . .


The song caught my ear in the movie and it kinda sounded K-Poppy to me, but I didn’t realize it was her until I saw the credits. Tons of K-pop band members have had successful solo careers, but Rosé seems to be truly at the top of that pyramid.

Speaking of which, APT. is at 2.4 billion views now.
Shame that APT. and Golden came out the same award season.
Might have cost them a Grammy competing against each other...

^ Impressive. It was at 2.3 billion in the first post of this thread, so that’s like another 100-ish million in a month and a half. And regardless of it being more popular, it was just cool to read that something K-Pop-adjacent finally won a top prize after all the snubs over the years.

This is the video for the lead single ‘Swim’ from that new BTS album. I’m not a fan of ‘yeah, girl’-style slow numbers no matter who sings them or what culture they’re from, but it does seem to be performing/steaming well along with the rest of the album. The actress in this is Lili Reinert. I only know her from HUSTLERS, but I see that she was a regular on a show called RIVERDALE.

That is in constant rotation on MTV Live channel 572 on Directv

BLACKPINK's Lisa lands the first-ever Vegas K-Pop Residency

That's pretty huge for her. Her stardom has taken off since did White Lotus.

Swim debuts at #1 on the Hot 100
Now the 7th #1.BTS song.
15.3 million official streams and 25.8 million radio airplay audience
impressions and sold 154,000 (digital and physical singles combined)
“Swim” debuts at No. 2 on Streaming Songs, No. 18 on Radio Songs,
and No. 1 on Digital Song Sales, BTS’ 13th leader, the most among groups.

ARIRANG debuts at #1 on the Billboard 200, now the 7th #1 BTS album.
The set opens with 641,000 equivalent album units earned,
532,000 are in pure album sales (physical and digital albums).

Dreams do come true : BTS on Hot Ones this week.

Swim falls to #2 this week, leading Digital Song Sales for a second week
(67,000 downloads sold, down 29%).

ARIRANG is now the first BTS album to reach #1 twice on the Billboard 200.
187,000 equivalent album units:
album sales comprise 114,000 (No. 1 on Top Album Sales for a second week),
SEA units comprise 65,000 (68.49 million on-demand official streams),
TEA units comprise 8,000.

Ella Langley #1 for a 5th week!

I would love to see Lisa live. She's also Thai like me. Want to support the Thai people.

But, the Colosseum in Vegas ticket are likely super high and with the outrageous fuel prices right now, it wouldn't be worth a special trip to Vegas.

My best hope is that she eventually has a gig locally in LA at some point. But, that would likely be just as insane, ticket wise and crowd wise.

Here’s one for JeffTheAlpaca : ‘Pinky Up’ by KATSEYE, posted yesterday. Heads up: it gets dragged quite heavily in the comments section. I don’t have enough familiarity with the group to know the ins and outs of that, but it does seem rather rote.

At Coachella, Katseye brought out Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami for Golden.

ARIRANG is now the first Kpop album to reach #1
for a third week on the Billboard 200

124,000 equivalent album units in the United States:
71,000 album sales (No. 1 on Top Album Sales for a third week)
50,000 SEA units (52.44 million on-demand official streams)
3,000 TEA units

“Swim” falls to #5 on the Hot 100, it leads Digital Song Sales
for a third week (24,000 downloads sold).

My favorite singing clown covers HUNTR/X :