What is ‘Asian Pop’? – Music Business Worldwide

MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed comes from Eshy Gazit, founder of management company EG Management and label Intertwine Records, who works across New York, Los Angeles and Seoul. Gazit was Big Hit Entertainment’s exclusive US partner between 2016 and 2018, and today manages Monsta X, Wonho, IVE and KiiiKiii.

On July 29, all seven members of BTS posted an identical statement to their individual Instagram accounts, confirming that they would not submit their comeback album ARIRANG for consideration at the 2027 Grammy Awards.

The decision, which keeps ARIRANG out of Grammy contention, as MBW reported — arrived weeks after the Recording Academy unveiled a new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category for the 69th Grammys, set to air on February 7, 2027.

Here, Gazit argues that the Recording Academy has built an award for something it can’t define…

On July 29, all seven members of BTS posted the same sentence: they would not submit ARIRANG for consideration at the 2027 Grammy Awards. They hoped music could be heard and loved for what it is, rather than divided by region or language.

Most of the coverage since has been about politics — whether the Academy meant well, whether a genre-field trophy is a floor or a ceiling. Those questions skip the one that comes first.

What is Asian pop?

Not rhetorically. Literally. If you’re handing out an award for it, you have to be able to say what it is.

THE DEFINITION FALLS APART ON CONTACT

Best Asian Pop Music Performance recognizes artistic excellence in Asian pop music performances originating from or widely recognized within Asian markets, including but not limited to K-pop, J-pop and C-pop, with meaningful use of one or more Asian languages.

Read the second clause literally, because the Academy wrote it. Widely recognized within Asian markets. Coldplay is widely recognized within Asian markets. So are Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift — several of them play stadiums across the region. Under that branch they originate nothing and qualify anyway.

“Coldplay is widely recognized within Asian markets. So are Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift — several of them play stadiums across the region.”

The only thing keeping them out is the language test. Which means the language clause isn’t a detail — it’s the entire load-bearing wall. This is a language category wearing a map as a costume.

So what’s an Asian language? The Academy doesn’t say, and can’t. Asia holds roughly 2,300 languages across families with no relationship to each other. Korean isn’t related to Japanese or Chinese. Hindi is related to English — actual linguistic cousins, closer to each other than either is to Korean.

And the map has edges: Hebrew and Arabic are Asian languages by any atlas. Three quarters of Russia is in Asia. Turkey sits on two continents. Nobody has to answer those questions today. Somebody will, the first time an entry arrives from Tbilisi.

THREE COUNTRIES WITH “-POP” ATTACHED

Look at the examples of the definition names: K-pop, J-pop, C-pop. Every one is a country with a suffix. None names a sound.

Compare how genre normally works. Bossa nova is a harmonic and rhythmic practice. Drill names a tempo and a hi-hat pattern. Reggaeton names the dembow — a rhythm you can notate. Now try “Asian pop.” Not a rhythm, not a harmonic language, not an instrument, tempo, texture, or lineage. Nothing in the term describes sound. It describes a passport.

And each named industry is musically incoherent by itself. Put K-pop under one roof and you’re asking Jersey club to sit beside industrial hip-hop, acoustic balladry, synth-funk and trap — records sharing a business model, a training system and a promotional calendar, and almost nothing musically. C-pop isn’t even one industry: Mandopop out of Taipei, Cantopop out of Hong Kong, and mainland pop are three histories in two languages.

“Look at the examples of the definition names: K-pop, J-pop, C-pop. Every one is a country with a suffix. None names a sound.”

Here’s what the category gets backwards. The reason you can’t hear Asianness in a K-pop single is that a K-pop single is Western pop architecture executed to a higher standard — American R&B and hip-hop, EDM, Scandinavian melodic topline writing, assembled through international writing camps where the melody may have been written in Stockholm before it reached Seoul.

That’s the real craft story, and it’s a story about a transnational industry. The Academy answered it by drawing a border.

Then there’s everything the three named markets leave out: Hindi film playback, the Punjabi pop and hip-hop wave, Tamil and Telugu film scores, Indonesian dangdut, Thai pop, V-pop, OPM, Persian pop, Turkish pop. A category cannot honor a continent by naming three of its markets. It can only flatten it.

IS THERE A EUROPEAN POP CATEGORY?

This is the fastest test, and it’s empirical.

The 2026 ceremony handed out 95 awards. Search for geographic categories and you get African Music Performance, Global Music Performance, Global Music Album, Reggae, Regional Roots, the Latin field — and from 2027, Asian Pop.

Search for Europe: nothing. No Best European Pop, no Best British Pop, no Scandinavian anything — despite Sweden being one of the most influential pop songwriting exports on earth, and despite much of what wins in the pop field having been written or produced there. Search for North America: nothing.

Now run the mirror. What would Best European Pop Music Performance contain? Berlin techno, Portuguese fado, a Swedish topline single, Irish folk-rock, French chanson, Balkan brass. Incoherent, obviously, instantly. That category dies in the room. Nobody has ever proposed it — because European music is heard as music and sorted by what it sounds like.

Same continent-sized incoherence. Opposite reflex.

And notice what the unmarked categories are called. Pop. Rock. Country. R&B. Not one says American, and every one behaves as though it does. They don’t need a geographic modifier because they’re the default. That’s what a center looks like from the inside: it doesn’t experience itself as a location.

“Global” has always been the tell. It was renamed from World Music — the old catch-all for everything that wasn’t Anglophone pop — and it has never meant of the globe. It means everywhere that isn’t here.

The 2026 ceremony made that unmissable: Bad Bunny won Album of the Year and Best Global Music Performance on the same night. Album of the Year is the whole world. Global is a pre-telecast slot. Same artist, both at once.

THE ACADEMY ALREADY KNOWS BETTER

The detail that finishes it comes from the Academy’s own rulebook.

Latin music doesn’t get one category. It gets a field: Latin Pop, Latin Rock or Alternative, Tropical, Música Mexicana, Música Urbana, Latin Jazz, and now Best Latin Song. Sorted internally by genre — because at some point the Academy accepted that Latin music isn’t a sound, it’s a region containing many sounds, and that filing salsa next to reggaeton would be indefensible.

Exactly right. Now apply that reasoning to Asia and count the slots.

One.

Four-point-eight billion people. Roughly 2,300 languages. Dozens of unrelated traditions. Several of the largest music industries on earth. One category — from an organization that already proved, in writing, that it understands regions contain multiple genres.

None of this requires bad faith. Institutions default to their own center without deciding to. But the default is measurable: a category that would be laughed out of the room aimed at Europe passed a board vote aimed at Asia.

THE HONEST COUNTERARGUMENT, AND THE ACTUAL FIX

The real case for these lanes: without them, non-Western artists get shut out, and some recognition beats none. The Latin Grammys built a genuine institution on that logic. People making that case aren’t fools.

And the obvious rejoinder to me is that the fix is more Asian categories, not zero. Fair — that would at least be coherent. But notice the cost: a permanent second building, sorted by origin, for most of the human race, while Pop and Rock keep their unmarked doors.

“The listener stopped sorting by origin years ago. The institutions are the last holdout.”

The alternative isn’t a better box. It’s fixing the electorate instead of the ballot. Recruit membership globally. Weight nothing by language. Judge songwriting, production, performance, arrangement, impact — things a genre claim can actually be made about. If the voting body is global, the general categories are global, and the regional lane stops being necessary.

Changing the ballot is a press release. Changing the electorate is work.

ARIRANG, by the way, is largely in English. Under the Academy’s own language test, the album that started this conversation likely wouldn’t have qualified for the category built in its honor. Too Asian for the pop field, not Asian enough for the Asian one. When a rule produces that on the day it’s written, the problem isn’t an edge case. It’s the axis.

A sixteen-year-old’s playlist runs Bad Bunny into Burna Boy into a Korean group into an English indie band and registers exactly zero crossings. There is no crossing. There’s just the next song. The listener stopped sorting by origin years ago. The institutions are the last holdout.

I’ve spent a decade building artists between New York, Los Angeles and Seoul, and I still can’t tell you what Asian pop sounds like.

Neither can the category.Music Business Worldwide