SPOTIFY has been a huge supporter of K-Pop since the launch of the first K-Pop flagship playlist “K-Pop Daebak” in 2014. Spotify, the most popular global audio streaming subscription service, recently revealed a series of statistics and trends which show how the world fell in love with K-Pop.
From 2014 to January 2020, K-Pop’s share of listening (and lovers) on Spotify increased by more than 1,800 percent and that same “K-Pop Daebak” playlist now has more than 2.4 million followers. Since 2014, K-Pop music has been streamed for more than 134 billion minutes on Spotify. So how else is K-Pop dominating?
Spotify’s most-streamed K-Pop group, BTS, released its album “Map of the Soul : 7” Feb. 21, and on Spotify, the group’s journey has been marked by a series of milestones:
In 2019, BTS was the first group from Asia to surpass five billion streams on Spotify. As of February 2020, BTS has clocked more than eight billion streams. In 2019 alone, the group’s music streamed more than three billion times.
In September 2017, BTS became the first K-Pop artist to enter Spotify’s Global 50 chart, with the track “DNA.”
BTS has the most-streamed K-Pop track on Spotify: “Boy With Luv” featuring Halsey, with more than 380 million streams. The track was released in April 2019, so it took less than a year to become 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, 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.”
In 2015, Spotify launched an entire genre hub dedicated to K-Pop. It features playlists catering to the many facets of this exciting genre, from rising artists, to collaborations, and to original soundtrack recordings from Korean film and TV dramas, known as OSTs. Fans can also check out BTS’ “Map of the Soul : 7 The Enhanced Album,” an exclusive to Spotify and featuring original content directly from BTS. (PR)