K-Pop's Biggest Stars Are Sitting Out the Grammys Over a Category Built to Honor Them

As Grammy voters work through the first round of balloting for the 69th Annual Grammy Awards this month, some of the most commercially dominant acts in pop music are deliberately absent from the ballot. BTS, Stray Kids and other major K-pop groups have declined to submit music for Grammy consideration this cycle, a boycott aimed at a new award category the Recording Academy created specifically to honor them.

The category, Best Asian Pop Music Performance, was unveiled by the Recording Academy in June as one of five additions for the 2027 ceremony, bringing the total number of competitive Grammy categories to 100. Academy leadership framed it as recognition long overdue for K-pop, J-pop and C-pop artists who have built enormous global audiences while remaining largely shut out of the Grammys' English-language-dominated general field. A sizable share of the industry it was built to honor wants no part of it.

A New Category, a Swift Rejection

The category requires "meaningful use of one or more Asian languages" in an eligible recording, according to the Recording Academy's official rulebook for the 69th awards, with the trophy going to the performing artist rather than songwriters or producers. On paper, it sits alongside long-established genre categories such as Best Latin Song and Best R&B Collaboration or Duo/Group Performance, also introduced this cycle.

BTS was the first and most prominent act to reject it. All seven members posted identical statements to their individual Instagram accounts in late July announcing they would not submit their comeback album, "Arirang," or any of its songs for the 69th Grammys. The group said it hoped its work could be judged on its own merits, "rather than being divided by region or language," a line that was quickly read across the industry as a rebuke of the new category's premise. Because "Arirang's" title track is sung predominantly in English, the album likely would not have cleared the category's own language threshold regardless.

Recording Academy chief executive Harvey Mason Jr. responded within a day, acknowledging the group's decision without backing away from the category itself.

"I am saddened to hear that BTS has chosen not to participate in the Grammy Awards process this year, but as a music creator, I understand and respect their decision," Mason said, adding that submitting in a genre category such as Asian Pop does not exclude an artist from also being considered for the Grammys' marquee General Field awards, including Record, Album and Song of the Year.

The Boycott Widens

What began as one group's protest has since spread across the industry's largest rosters. In early October, JYP Entertainment confirmed that Stray Kids would not submit music for the category — an eight-member act whose members hold full Recording Academy voting membership and who had been widely discussed as a leading contender for the new award — following BTS's lead roughly two months earlier.

By mid-October, reporting citing the K-pop awards-tracking outlet Grammy Guru indicated that no act under any of the industry's "big four" label groups — HYBE, YG Entertainment, JYP Entertainment or SM Entertainment — had submitted music for the Best Asian Pop Music Performance category. That left Blackpink, Twice, Stray Kids and Hearts2Hearts, among others, absent from the category's entry list, according to the Korea Times' account of the spreading boycott. HYBE, BTS's parent company, has sought to draw a distinction between the group's individual choice and any coordinated industry action, saying the decision was "not a boycott at the company level" and that other HYBE-affiliated artists remained free to submit as planned.

The practical effect is that a category built to showcase the commercial engine of modern K-pop risks launching next year with a nominee pool that excludes most of its headline acts — an outcome British broadcaster the BBC described, in reporting picked up widely across Asian outlets, as a serious setback for the award before it has even handed out a single trophy.

Recognition or Segregation?

The dispute reflects a broader argument that has followed the Grammys for years: whether carving out genre-specific lanes for non-English or non-Western pop amounts to meaningful recognition, or a polite way of keeping those artists out of the categories that confer the most prestige and promotional value. BTS, Blackpink and other K-pop acts have spent the better part of a decade selling out stadiums, topping global streaming charts and drawing nominations in mainstream pop categories without ever winning a competitive Grammy — a track record critics cite as evidence that a separate "Asian Pop" lane functions less as an honor and more as a containment strategy.

Mason has pushed back on that reading, though not without conceding ground. Facing criticism not just from fans but from artists directly affected, he announced in mid-August that the Academy's full Board and its Awards & Nominations Committee would formally review the category, acknowledging that "some artists in this space ... feel that this category isn't representing the music they work so hard to create." He has not said whether the review could lead to the category being altered, renamed or scrapped before next year's ceremony, nor has the Academy announced the outcome of that review as the current voting window has proceeded.

The disagreement also carries a linguistic wrinkle that has fed the controversy: because the category requires "meaningful use" of an Asian language, acts like BTS that increasingly record in English to reach global audiences would be boxed out of the award even if they wanted in — meaning artists can simultaneously be deemed too international for the Grammys' general categories and not "Asian" enough for the category meant to represent them.

Who Is Affected, and What Happens Next

The immediate stakes fall on a small number of institutions and a much larger population of fans and working musicians. For the Recording Academy, a marquee new category debuting without the genre's biggest commercial names undercuts the credibility of this year's rule changes and feeds a narrative the organization has fought for years: that its roughly 100-category structure still struggles to keep pace with where popular music's commercial center of gravity has moved. For HYBE, JYP, SM and YG, the episode is a reminder that artists signed to their labels can set industry-wide terms with a single Instagram post, regardless of what their parent companies prefer. And for the dozens of other K-pop, J-pop and C-pop acts who did submit, the Academy's response could determine whether their inclusion looks like genuine recognition or a diminished substitute for the acts that stayed away.

According to the Recording Academy's published schedule for the 69th Grammy Awards, first-round voting is underway now, running from October 12 through October 22. Nominees will be announced on November 16, giving a first concrete look at how the Best Asian Pop Music Performance category fares without its highest-profile potential nominees. Final-round voting follows from December 10 through January 7, ahead of a ceremony on February 7, 2027, at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, airing on ABC and streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

Whether the Academy makes any further changes to the category before nominations are locked in remains an open question. What is already clear is that a category designed to settle a long-running argument about the Grammys and Asian pop music has instead reopened it, with some of the genre's most successful acts choosing to sit the argument out entirely rather than let the Recording Academy settle it on their behalf.