One of the world’s most influential musical acts, global K-pop supergroup BTS, has announced it will not submit any of its work for consideration at the upcoming Grammy Awards, a decision that comes immediately after the Recording Academy introduced a new standalone award category: Best Asian Pop Music Performance.
The announcement, made Wednesday via synchronized posts across each member’s individual Instagram accounts, has sent ripples through the global music industry, reigniting long-simmering debates about racial categorization and inclusion in mainstream Western award shows.
Prior to this announcement, the South Korean seven-piece band was widely considered a top contender for multiple Grammy general field categories, most notably Album of the Year, for its latest comeback record *ARIRANG*. Released following the group’s hiatus for mandatory South Korean military service, the album — titled for a iconic Korean folk song — has become one of the highest-selling releases of 2024, blending extensive English lyrics with explorations of modern Korean identity.
In their official statement, BTS outlined the core reasoning behind their choice to skip the 2025 awards cycle. “We have decided not to enter the Grammys this year,” the group wrote. “We hope that music is heard and loved for what it is, rather than being defined by region or language.”
Industry observers note that *ARIRANG* would not have even qualified for the new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category anyway. Among five new award categories announced by the Recording Academy last month, the new Asian pop prize requires entries to make “meaningful use” of at least one Asian language — a threshold the predominantly English-language *ARIRANG* does not meet.
The Recording Academy has defended the new category, framing it as a step toward greater inclusion, saying the award was created to honor “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.”
However, the announcement of the new category immediately drew divided reactions from music fans and industry commentators alike. Critics have argued that segregating Asian pop artists into a dedicated separate category ghettoizes their work, rather than allowing them to compete on equal footing with Western and other global artists for the awards’ most prestigious general field honors.
This is not BTS’s first interaction with the Grammys: the group made history as the first all-South Korean act to top Billboard’s U.S. Hot 100 singles chart with their 2020 all-English track “Dynamite,” and has since performed at the Grammy ceremony multiple times and earned several nominations, including a nod for Best Music Video. Despite their unprecedented global commercial success, the group has never taken home a Grammy win.
BTS’s boycott adds significant weight to growing calls for the Recording Academy to re-evaluate its approach to categorizing non-Western artists, with many industry analysts expecting the conversation around racial and genre segregation in major award shows to intensify in the coming months ahead of the 2025 Grammy ceremony.