BTS boycott puts K-pop labels on spot

BTS’s decision not to submit any songs for the next Grammy Awards immediately sparked industrywide debate over diversity, authority and who might become the first winner of the newly created Best Asian Pop Music Performance award — the category the K-pop supergroup rejected.

For the rest of the K-pop industry, however, the decision presents a more complicated question: whether to enter the Grammys at all this year and, if so, through which category.

Many K-pop acts have submitted releases for Grammy consideration year after year, despite the genre’s historically slim chance of securing nominations.

The only K-pop acts to have earned Grammy nominations are BTS, Rosé and Katseye. Yet the groups that submitted work for consideration for the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, held in February this year, included Seventeen, Twice, Stray Kids, Ateez, Riize, Tomorrow X Together, aespa, IVE and Le Sserafim, as well as Blackpink members Jennie, Jisoo and Lisa and BTS members Jin, J-Hope and RM as solo artists.

Many K-pop artists and industry executives have also joined the Recording Academy in recent years. Among the most recent additions, announced in July, were JYP Entertainment founder Park Jin-young and the members of Twice and Stray Kids.

And now, BTS’s boycott and the introduction of the new Asian pop category have now turned a largely routine awards-season decision into a politically sensitive strategic choice.

Multiple entertainment companies contacted by the Korea JoongAng Daily said no final decision had been made, with one industry representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the company was closely watching the situation but was reluctant to make a decision amid the heightened scrutiny.

“There are still a few weeks left, so we are watching how the situation develops,” they said. “Nothing has been decided yet.”

But the submission deadline is Aug. 21, leaving companies with limited time to make a choice.

Broadly, K-pop acts now have three paths: They can follow BTS by withholding their music entirely; they can pursue the general fields, such as the Album of the Year, and existing genre categories — submitting to a category such as Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, in which BTS has been nominated three times, while avoiding the Asian pop award; or they can enter the new category, which may offer many Asian acts their most realistic route yet to a Grammy nomination or win.

Under Grammy rules, the same recording cannot compete in both Best Asian Pop Music Performance and another performance category. Labels, therefore, cannot submit the same track to the Asian pop award and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, meaning they must choose where their entry belongs, although it may also be entered in eligible general fields as well.

And the decisions now are under intense scrutiny.

Some BTS fans have reacted negatively to the prospect of another K-pop act winning the inaugural Asian pop award, arguing that entering the category could legitimize the regional classification that BTS rejected.

For other Asian artists, however, the category may represent a rare opportunity to gain recognition from an institution that has never nominated most of them in any category.

Zeena Koda, a member of the advisory committee for The Recording Academy's Gold Music Alliance and co-founder of Asian American Collective, publicly defended the new category’s aim as “trying to introduce Asians as a formidable force within the Grammys,” in an Instagram post uploaded on her personal account on Friday.

“It’s really sad and disheartening to see how this entire thing has been addressed when so many people behind the scenes have been pushing to bring visibility for Asians in the Grammys,” she wrote. “This is a new category and nothing is perfect […] — in many ways this wasn’t a category for BTS at all. This was for artists that need more visibility and shine — not decades deep pop superstars.”

Grammy-winning producer Sleep Deez, however, said during a livestream on Saturday that the Academy had still considered BTS as the ideal candidate as the category’s inaugural win.

Citing an Academy insider with whom he had claimed to have spoken, Sleep Deez said, “They said they didn’t create this award for BTS — but they would be lying if they said BTS winning the very first one wouldn’t be a dream scenario for them, because BTS winning the inaugural award would mean that acts in the future would follow and would want to win that award because BTS won the first one.”

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]