Almost every single year, the Recording Academy updates the terminology and categories that it uses to recognize musicians at its annual Grammy Awards. In 2026, five new categories were introduced — including an award that sparked backlash from one of the most popular groups in the world: BTS.
The best Asian pop music performance category, which will debut its inaugural slate of nominees next week, was created to award "contemporary popular music originating from or widely recognized within Asian markets, including K-Pop, J-Pop, and C-Pop." But just over a month after the Recording Academy unveiled its plans for the award, which requires "meaningful use of one or more Asian languages" for eligibility, the K-pop boyband BTS shared its own announcement on social media.
"We have decided not to submit for Grammys this year. Rather than music being divided by region or language, we hope music itself can be heard and loved for what it is," the band wrote. "We are always grateful to [our fandom] ARMY and everyone who is always with us."
The band is in the middle of a massive comeback following a years-long hiatus for its members' mandatory military service in South Korea. They released the album Arirang in March and embarked on a sold-out global tour soon after. Following BTS' statement, the K-pop group Stray Kids also announced its intent to not submit.
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. responded to BTS' statement on Instagram, writing that he was saddened but respected the group's decision.
"I do want to clarify something that seems to be getting lost in the conversation," Mason Jr. wrote. "The Asian Pop category was created to celebrate the depth, diversity and extraordinary growth of pop artistry coming out of Asia. The spirit of this new category is to shine a dedicated spotlight on these important artists. More categories mean more artists' work is recognized. It's never to divide, but to expand who is recognized by our 15,000 Grammy voters."
The back-and-forth between BTS and the Recording Academy marks the latest thread in a longer, complicated lineage of the Grammys' attempts to become more inclusive.
K-pop as a signifier
BTS has been nominated for five Grammys in the past, including several nods for best pop duo/group performance, but has never won. Mathieu Berbiguier, a visiting assistant professor of Korean studies at Carnegie Mellon University, says the new category is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it's an opportunity to highlight music from across the Asian continent, which is growing in popularity as streaming and social media collapse borders in global listening habits. At the same time, Bebiguier says the category seems like an attempt to sideline the gains made by K-pop in recent years away from the general categories. (This past February, the viral hit "Golden" from the film KPop Demon Hunters became the first K-pop song to win a Grammy).
"Given that the term K-pop in itself hasn't been created in Korea, it's a category that has been created in difference, in comparison to other genres," Berbiguier says. "It is difficult to think of it as something positive, because it's kind of saying we want to acknowledge you, but at the same time in a separate category, so that it doesn't mix up with what is supposed to be mainstream."
Berbiguier points to the contention behind K-pop as a label, a catch-all signifier used by the foreign entertainment industry in an attempt to define popular music within South Korea that's also applied to acts from other countries (see, the "global girl group" Katseye). Berbiguier himself defines K-pop not as a genre, but as a system in which young people are recruited into the Korean pop industry, given extensive training to sing, act or dance and later officially debuted either as a solo act or as part of a group.
What is considered K-pop is slippery, he explains, and even those within the system are considering shedding the label. Bang Si-Hyuk, founder of the South Korean conglomerate HYBE (which is behind several blockbuster K-pop groups, including BTS), said in a 2023 interview with Maeil Business Newspaper that the "K" might need to be dropped in order to continue expanding the genre's global appeal. RM, one of the members of BTS, told Rolling Stone that it's "an important debate" for the music industry.
It is difficult to think of it as something positive, because it's kind of saying we want to acknowledge you, but at the same time in a separate category, so that it doesn't mix up with what is supposed to be mainstream.Mathieu Berbiguier, visiting assistant professor of Korean studies at Carnegie Mellon University
"It shows you that the agenda is not the same on the side of the K-pop entertainment companies and the Grammys, because the Grammys probably think of it as a gateway to get more international recognition," Berbiguier says. "But then for the K-pop entertainment companies, that's not what they want. They want to be recognized as a whole."
A long, complicated history of inclusion
The questions raised by the introduction of the Asian pop music category — what does it mean to separate music by location, race or language? Who gets to define that region's musical identity? And does the attempt to be inclusive ultimately cement an act's outsider status? — have all been raised before at different points in the Grammys' history.
Since the Awards' inception in 1959, the Recording Academy has faced criticism for how it racializes and represents popular music in the United States and abroad. Only 12 Black artists have ever won the most prestigious award of album of the year, and Black musicians have long called out the Academy for pigeonholing them into smaller categories that they say minimize their contributions. The Academy did not acknowledge the rise of hip-hop until 1988, when it first introduced the best rap performance category, but was soon met with controversy when it chose not to televise the award during the 1989 ceremony. As a result, artists including LL Cool J, Public Enemy and DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince — who ended up winning the Grammy — boycotted the ceremony in protest.
In 2016, Frank Ocean declined to submit his chart-topping album, Blonde, for consideration, calling the awards' nomination and voting system "dated" and calling it his "Colin Kaepernick" moment. The pop auteur had already been nominated seven times in several categories by that point and had won twice, including for best urban contemporary album in 2013. In 2020, Tyler, the Creator took home his first golden gramophone for best rap album for IGOR. During a press conference backstage, he said he was grateful for the award but felt that the category he was placed in was a sort of "backhanded compliment."
"It sucks that whenever we — and I mean guys that look like me — do anything that's genre-bending or that's anything they always put it in a rap or urban category. I don't like that 'urban' word — it's just a politically correct way to say the N-word to me," Tyler said.
Six months later, the Academy announced it would be dropping the "urban" term and renaming it to best progressive R&B album in an attempt to be more accurate and inclusive. John Vilanova, music scholar and journalism professor at Lehigh University, says there's always been an underlying tension between the narrative the Grammys want to tell about the music industry and the reality of what's happening in the culture.
"They're not at the bleeding edge and they're kind of not designed to be. It's a legacy product," he says. "So when they're making these adjustments, it is often in this kind of stumbling, bumbling way."
When it comes to smaller genres outside the mainstream, other issues arise. In 2011, the Recording Academy announced an overhaul that would cut back from 109 to 78 categories, doing away with male versus female awards in favor of gender-neutral categories and consolidating the number of awards in certain genres. Categories for Native American music, as well as Zydeco and Cajun music, were all merged into best regional roots music. Latin jazz was rolled into best jazz album. Regional Mexican categories were also impacted. In protest, four Latin jazz musicians — Bobby Sanabria, Mark Levine, Ben Lapidus and Eugene Marlow — filed a class-action lawsuit against the Recording Academy, claiming that the changes took away potential recognition and impacted their ability to make a living. The lawsuit was later dismissed by a New York judge, but the category was reinstated.
During the 2011 changes, the category then known as "world music" (now global) was also cut in half, down from two awards (contemporary versus traditional) to a single one. Ian Brennan produced the album that won in the consolidated best world music album category in 2012, Tassil by Tinariwen. But he says the collapse of the global category slashed global representation at the Grammys in half, and pushed out many smaller, regional musicians who could no longer compete against bigger names.
"It's a very complicated category because it includes the whole globe," Brennan says. "There's no category that has greater diversity or should have greater diversity than this category. But what we see is so much redundancy."
He says the same artists and countries often end up being represented in the global categories — Angelique Kidjo has received 10 nominations, Anoushka Shankar has been nominated nine times, and hugely influential genres, such as Ethiopian jazz, have never been recognized.
In recent years, the Academy has widened the global field to include several more awards: best global music album, best global music performance and in 2024, best African music performance. The new Asian pop category is supposed to further expand this inclusion.
The future of the new Asian category
Vilanova says that despite its less-than-smooth track record, the Recording Academy has taken serious steps to diversify its voting body and, in turn, the music it represents. Earlier this year, Bad Bunny made history when DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, his genre-bending homage to the history and sounds of Puerto Rico, became the first Spanish-language album to win album of the year.
The Chinese singer Miist, who is a voting member of the Recording Academy, says she understands the criticisms lobbed at the new Asian pop category — but as a smaller artist who records in multiple languages, including Mandarin, English and Spanish, she says she feels excited about submitting to the new category.
It gives us an opportunity to showcase our music, which almost could have never had a chance to be heard by maybe 15,000 or 16,000 voting members.Miist, Chinese singer and voting member of the Recording Academy
"It gives us an opportunity to showcase our music, which almost could have never had a chance to be heard by maybe 15,000 or 16,000 voting members," she says. "They would have never had a chance to be discovered. It also gives the voting members a chance to experience these different cultures and music."
She says the Academy could've done a better job of communicating about the changes and actively including more Asian musicians in the process. But as an artist and member who has now been internally involved in discussions about the global categories as a whole, she feels this is a step in the right direction.
"The Academy has to stand at a place that represents what the members want, what the musicians want. [It's] not necessarily the same thing as what the market wants. So I can see that the Academy is trying hard to balance the two, but I think we need to give them some time to get there."
Copyright 2026 NPR
