# The Grammys Made an Asian Pop Category and BTS, Stray Kids, and Blackpink All Skipped It

By Abdullah Al Foysal · Entertainment · Published Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:00:06 GMT
Source: The Current Tribune — https://currenttribune.com/article/grammys-asian-pop-category-bts-blackpink-boycott

The Grammys created a new category specifically to recognize Asian pop music, and the three biggest acts the category was arguably built for all declined to show up for it. BTS passed. Stray Kids passed. And Blackpink, the group many assumed would be the category’s marquee nominee, turns out to be ineligible entirely. For an award meant to celebrate a genre’s global rise, the Best Asian Pop Music Performance category is opening its first year looking conspicuously empty at the top.

## The Category Nobody Major Wanted

The Recording Academy introduced Best Asian Pop Music Performance ahead of the 69th Grammy Awards, set for early 2027, framing it as overdue recognition for music coming out of China, Japan, and South Korea. The eligibility window runs from August 31, 2025, through August 28, 2026, and the rule drawing the most scrutiny requires that submitted songs feature at least one Asian language for what the Academy defines as a meaningful portion of the track.

That single rule is doing most of the damage to the category’s credibility in its debut year. It’s also exactly the kind of well-intentioned criteria that tends to produce unintended consequences once it collides with how globally successful Asian pop acts actually make music in 2026.

### Why Blackpink Specifically Got Shut Out

Blackpink’s most recent album, “Deadline,” is predominantly English-language, a creative and commercial choice that’s increasingly common among K-pop acts chasing global crossover audiences. That choice left the group with exactly one song, “Jump,” that might have cleared the language bar for submission. The problem is timing: “Jump” was released before the category’s eligibility window opened, meaning Blackpink has no qualifying material to submit at all. A group widely considered one of the two or three biggest acts in the genre worldwide is sitting out the inaugural year of a category built around genres like the one they helped popularize globally, not by choice, but by a scheduling technicality.

## BTS and Stray Kids Didn’t Have a Timing Problem. They Had an Objection.

Unlike Blackpink, BTS had eligible material and chose not to submit it. The group’s stated reasoning draws a clear line in the sand: “We hope music can be heard and loved as music itself, rather than being categorized by region or language.” That’s a pointed rejection of the entire premise behind a region-specific category, not a complaint about this particular category’s rules. BTS is essentially arguing that the best Asian pop music deserves a shot at competing in the Grammys’ main pop categories against anyone, rather than being funneled into a separate lane defined by geography.

Stray Kids followed with a non-submission of their own, though their agency, JYP Entertainment, offered no formal public explanation for the decision. The lack of an official statement hasn’t stopped observers from connecting the timing to the broader backlash the category has faced since its announcement, with Stray Kids’ silence reading, to many, as its own kind of statement.

### An Argument With Deep Roots in Grammy History

The criticism animating this backlash isn’t new to the Grammys, even if the specific genre is. Artists and fans pushing back on the Asian Pop category have explicitly drawn parallels to the Recording Academy’s long and frequently criticized history of segregating Black and Latinx artists into genre-specific categories, a practice that critics have long argued limits those artists’ recognition in the Grammys’ biggest, most visible categories like Album or Record of the Year. A region- or language-based category for Asian pop, in this framing, risks repeating that exact pattern: creating a tidy box for a commercially massive genre instead of letting its biggest acts compete, and win, in the categories that actually move the cultural needle on Grammy night.

## The Recording Academy Isn’t Backing Down, Yet

Despite the very public boycotts from two of the genre’s three biggest global acts and the eligibility quirk that sidelined the third, the Recording Academy has maintained the category as originally structured heading into its first year. There have been signals the Academy is open to reconsidering elements of the category in future cycles, but no concrete rule changes have been announced, leaving this year’s inaugural class of nominees to be decided under the same rules that just repelled its most obvious headliners.

## What This Means

With BTS, Stray Kids, and Blackpink all out of the running, the inaugural Best Asian Pop Music Performance nominees are likely to be drawn from the broader pool of K-pop, J-pop, and C-pop acts who are commercially significant but haven’t reached the same global household-name status. That’s not necessarily bad news for those artists, who stand to gain real visibility from a Grammy nomination they might not have earned in a more crowded field. But it’s a rocky start for a category that was announced specifically to recognize the genre’s biggest global stars, only to watch its three most obvious contenders exit for three different reasons, one by principle, one by silence, and one by an accident of release timing.

The Recording Academy now faces a choice that will define whether this category survives in its current form past year one: adjust the eligibility rules to bring the genre’s biggest acts back into the fold, or let the category establish itself with a different, less universally recognized set of winners and hope the backlash fades. Either path says something about how seriously the Grammys are willing to take criticism that, by the Academy’s own history, it’s heard in different forms before.