Southeast Asia’s homegrown artists are knocking K-pop off its pedestal

Filipino call centre worker Jaycer Bajo’s Spotify playlist has changed a lot over the past few years.

Bajo used to mostly listen to chart-topping hits from the United States, but these days, he has a steady stream of Pinoy Pop, or P-pop, artists on rotation: from boybands ALAMAT and BGYO, to the girl group BINI, which in April became the first all-Filipino girl group to perform at the Coachella music festival.

list of 4 items

list 1 of 4US says Iran nuclear talks begin after framework deal signing
list 2 of 4UK seizes Russian ‘shadow fleet’ tanker – what that means
list 3 of 4Football upstages politics as Iranians rally behind their team at World Cup
list 4 of 4Venezuela signs power deal with US energy giant

end of list

“Over the past five years, I think I’ve switched from 70 percent Western music to, right now, around 70 percent Philippines and then 30 percent elsewhere,” Bajo, who lives north of Metro Manila, told Al Jazeera.

“There were bands and groups in the Philippines that were making quality music before 2020, but it just boomed after that here,” Bajo said.

ALAMAT, BGYO, and BINI, all of whom released their debut singles in 2021, draw heavily on influences from K-pop, J-pop, and Western pop, R&B and hip-hop, while incorporating Filipino themes and languages into their music.

“They borrowed structure from K-Pop, but the talent elements are homegrown,” Bajo said.

Across Southeast Asia, homegrown acts are increasingly displacing their Korean, Japanese and American counterparts on pop-lovers’ playlists.

In Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, the share of local artists in Spotify’s weekly top 10 rose from 39 percent to 97 percent, 31 percent to 81 percent, and 71 percent to 76 percent, respectively, between 2021 and the first half of 2026, according to data compiled by Soundcharts, a French music analytics platform.

Local artists also gained traction on the radio weekly top 10, rising from 29 percent to 55 percent in Indonesia, zero to 5 percent in the Philippines, and from 38 percent to 65 percent in Thailand over the same period, according to Soundcharts data.

Cod Satrusayang, a Thai film producer who works with local musicians on soundtracks, said he has noticed a major shift towards homegrown influences on the commercial side of the music scene in recent years.

“For the longest time, T-Pop and Thai music were just an emulation of Korean and American style, and only recently, the last five years or even less, we see Thai artists forging their own identity,” Satrusayang told Al Jazeera.

Satrusayang’s favourite Thai acts, such as YOUNGOHM, MILLI, and Joey Phuwasit, differ stylistically from the classic K-Pop formula, but he still credits South Korea’s hit-making cultural juggernaut with showing other Asian countries that there is a global audience for their music.

Since the release of Psy’s Gangnam Style in 2012, K-Pop has reached a level of mainstream success far beyond that achieved by earlier waves of Asian pop music.

While artists from Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan achieved regional fame in the 1980s and 1990s, few came close to matching the crossover appeal of Blackpink’s 2023 performance at Coachella or BTS’s collaborations with American rapper Lil Nas X and British rock band Coldplay.

In 2023 alone, the K-pop industry earned $893m overseas, including through album sales, online streaming revenue, and K-Pop performances, according to the South Korean government’s Korea Culture and Tourism Institute.

K-pop proved once and for all that Asian music can be commercially lucrative, Satrusayang said.

“Industry, the studios and independent artists see that it’s possible to make really good money going international, and it’s fuelling a whole renaissance in the Thai creative space,” Satrusayang said.

While Southeast Asia’s music industry is still dwarfed by its peers in South Korea, Japan and China, it is growing rapidly.

In the Philippines, digital music revenue – a figure that includes podcast advertising, music streaming, music downloads, and music streaming advertising – doubled from $93m to $180m between 2021 and 2025, according to data shared with Al Jazeera by Julia Stoll, an analyst at the global data platform Statista.

In Thailand, digital music revenue rose from $132m to $204m over the same period, according to the data, while revenue in Indonesia increased from $164m to $264m.

Innovating for a new market

Much of this success would not have been possible without social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, which have enabled artists to reach out to their fans directly in short-form videos.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from the Philippines, the members of the boy band BGYO said social media is as important to their job as their training with South Korean and Filipino coaches.

“We interact with all of our fans every single day, when we wake up until we sleep. We’re on the phone a lot, so we’re posting TikToks, dances, funny things. We’re tweeting, and we’re interacting with them through comments,” said 23-year-old BGYO member Nate Porcalla.

Like their K-pop peers, the band engages with local fans through regular performances and events, but on songs such as Forever Tonight, their latest single, they sing in a mix of English and Tagalog.

Southeast Asia’s pop renaissance dovetails with a rise in consumers’ spending power across the region, echoing trends seen in the US and East Asia during their post-WWII economic booms, said Mary Ainslie, who researches culture and media in Southeast Asia at the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo Campus in China.

Thailand was designated an upper-middle-income country by the World Bank in 2011, after its Gross National Income per capita hit $4,210.

Indonesia has been designated an upper-middle-income nation since 2023, after falling out of the bracket in 2020 due to the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Philippines is still classified as a middle-income country, but President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has said he wants it to break into the next income bracket by the time he leaves office in 2028.

“All of these different ‘waves’ adapt and innovate for both regional and global consumers and appear in tandem with the economic growth of each nation,” Ainslie told Al Jazeera.

“K-pop has demonstrated that Asian-based pop culture is globally viable and attractive; this has provided both inspiration and a model of innovation for local industries,” she said.

Regional outliers

Two of Southeast Asia’s wealthiest countries, Singapore and Malaysia, are notable outliers to the trend.

Western and K-Pop remain the musical genres of choice on Singaporean and Malaysian radio, as well as on Singapore’s Spotify playlists, according to Soundcharts data.

While local acts have made some ground in Malaysia, regional artists dominate the country’s playlists.

While Malaysian artists’ share of the Spotify weekly top 10 grew from 1 percent in 2021 to about 8.3 percent in the first half of 2026, regional groups rose from 5 percent to 45.7 percent over the same period, according to Soundcharts data.

Much of this interest in regional pop music has been driven by Indonesian artists, according to Tsurezure Lab, an independent researcher and data analyst whose work has been cited by the Japanese government.

Analysing Spotify’s Weekly top 50 songs from 2023 onwards, Tsurezure Lab found that Indonesian artists rose from an 18 percent share in Malaysia in 2023 to about 22 percent in early 2026.

The researcher, who asked to remain anonymous because he works in the private sector, said this was an example of “cross-border cultural alignment”, because Malaysia and Indonesia have similar cultures and languages.

Millions of Indonesians also live and work in Malaysia – among other countries in Asia – bringing their music with them.

For Elhana Sugaiman, an Indonesian who works at an NGO in Taiwan, the rise of Indonesian pop music has helped her remain connected to home while living overseas.

Sugaiman said she has been listening to a lot of No Na, a girl group whose members all hail from Indonesia, although they are signed to the US label 88Rising, which promotes Asian and Asian-American artists.

No Na’s tracks offer listeners like Sugaiman a dose of Indonesian culture and nostalgia, incorporating sounds that locals would instantly recognise, like the local bus and traditional Indonesian gamelan, in their music, and lush Indonesian backdrops in their music videos.

“They really put forward Indonesian culture in their music,” Sugaiman told Al Jazeera, adding that she likes being reminded of home and seeing global listeners learn about Indonesian culture through No Na’s music.

“I think it makes me proud of being Indonesian,” she said.

“I’m not sure if it’s because I live abroad… but part of it is because you get to see [Indonesia] on screen and represented,” Sugaiman said.

Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera wp:paragraph