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Sam Beltran

At Tower Records in Tokyo’s Shibuya district earlier this month, fans flocked to a pop-up store set up for Filipino boy band SB19, buying exclusive merchandise including limited-edition CDs, T-shirts, stickers and phone straps.
Due to overwhelming demand, the store ran for an additional five days. During the band’s tour in Japan, SB19 met fans in Yokohama and performed in Tokyo and Osaka during the Summer Sonic festival. Another Philippine act, the eight-member girl group BINI, made their debut at the music event.
In July, SB19 performed at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago for the first time, while in April, they played a sold-out home concert in the city of Paranaque, drawing almost 100,000 local and international fans, including from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia and Germany. BINI also made history in April during their inaugural performance at the Coachella festival in California.
Their successes appear to reflect a wider trend in Southeast Asia’s entertainment scene, with more regional acts outperforming Western artists and K-pop bands on streaming charts.
Data compiled by French music analytics platform Soundcharts found that the share of Indonesian artists on Spotify’s weekly top 10 soared from 39 per cent to 97 per cent in Indonesia between 2021 and the first half of 2026.
The streaming data for the Philippines and Thailand were similar, rising from 31 per cent to 81 per cent and 71 per cent to 76 per cent, respectively, over the same period.
An independent data analyst based in Japan, who goes by the moniker Tsurezure Lab and studies music streaming trends across global markets, tracked weekly aggregations of Spotify daily Top 50 charts in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore from February 2023 to May 2026 and noticed strong intra-regional support in these countries based on linguistic and cultural similarities.
The analyst, who asked to remain anonymous, cited the popularity of Indonesian pop on Malaysian charts and an increase in Mandopop streams in Singapore.
As Southeast Asian music lovers continue to support local artists, industry players are betting that they can go further. This has raised a tantalising prospect: can artists from Southeast Asia replicate the success of their K-pop peers such as BTS and Blackpink and achieve global success?

SEAPop rising
Fans have coined a term to reflect the region’s growing music scene: SEA-pop, or Southeast Asian pop.
“In recent years, SEA-pop has become increasingly vibrant, with local music dominating the charts like never before,” said Roslyn Pineda, Hong Kong-based president of Sony Music Publishing in Asia.
“In the Philippines, where I entered the music industry in 2001, international music was once the trend. Today, original Pilipino music claims 81 per cent of Spotify’s weekly top 10, marking a significant shift in audience preferences,” she said.
Thailand has also seen the market share of Thai pop, or T-pop, rise since 2023, according to Pineda.
For Darynaufal Mulyaman, an assistant professor of international relations at Universitas Kristen Indonesia, whose research focuses on pop culture, soft power and Korean studies, SEA-pop mirrors the broader region.
SEA-pop’s diversity reflected “Asean’s founding paradox playing out at the level of culture”, he said.
Exemplifying the “unity in diversity” ethos of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the region’s historically, culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse countries had been “held together by consensus diplomacy rather than a shared identity”, Mulyaman said.

“SEA-pop is reproducing that exact structure in music,” he said, with the genre united less by a common sound than a “shared posture towards the outside world, whether K-pop or Western pop”.
Regional acts have infused local cultures, such as indigenous instruments, into their songs to reinforce their national identity, moving away from the K-pop model that initially inspired Southeast Asian music industry players who aimed to reproduce the success of the Hallyu phenomenon, or Korean wave.
Nonetheless, K-pop’s practice of recruiting and training foreign talent had allowed performers, choreographers and producers from Southeast Asia to learn the ropes of the Korean entertainment industry and adapt lessons for their home countries, Mulyaman said.
Going global
However, exporting SEA-pop to the world would require more than strong streaming numbers.
For now, the growth of the regional artists is driven largely by themselves, music labels and fans, rather than a comprehensive national-level approach that has turned K-pop into an entertainment powerhouse.
As such, SEA-pop is “riding on a much thinner institutional floor than K-pop had, and thinner than what the EU’s cultural-integration machinery gives European pop”, according to Mulyaman.
While South Korea had integrated pop culture into its export strategy, the region did not have a similar strategy or a government agency that could help accelerate SEA-pop’s global growth, Mulyaman said.
“Asean’s cohesion is institutionally shallower than the EU’s by design,” he added, referring to the bloc’s traditional non-interference approach.

Nonetheless, there is scope for Southeast Asia to unite and promote its soft power as it would entail less sensitivity than working together on security or economic issues, according to Mulyaman.
Pineda identifies several regional artists that have what it takes to make it big on the global stage.
“Acts like SB19 and BINI from the Philippines, Dolla from Malaysia, No Na from Indonesia, and 4EVE from Thailand are already making strides on international festival stages, producing bilingual tracks, dominating playlists, and showcasing high-fashion aesthetics,” Pineda said.
According to Tsurezure Lab, the Philippines has the strongest potential to achieve international success due to the widespread use of English in its music and Filipino artists such as BINI and SB19 having a strong global following. The analyst said that Thailand ranked second, with the likes of singer Jeff Satur and Thai hip-hop artists having a growing global fanbase.
However, the large populations in some Southeast Asian countries could ironically work against the goal of exporting SEA-pop to the rest of the world.
Last year, fans in Indonesia and the Philippines generated 23.2 billion streams and 14.2 billion streams, respectively, on the Spotify Top 200. Both countries have a much larger population than South Korea, whose K-pop industry has to look outward to expand beyond its domestic market.
“When home is that big and that loyal, the pressure to export is far weaker. Southeast Asia’s local music strength is, so far, largely inward-facing,” Tsurezure Lab said.
For Southeast Asian artists to go global, they can look at following the K-pop template in which Korean acts initially targeted attracting more fans in Japan and China before they achieved wider success in the US and beyond, the analyst added.

However, regional artists should establish their own identity instead of blindly copying their K-pop counterparts, according to industry observers.
Mulyaman warned that if Southeast Asian artists were to become K-pop “derivative products”, they would “stop being SEA-pop”.
Pineda said there was no need for Southeast Asian artists to “mimic K-pop” even as they learned from its success.
“The expansion beyond their home bases is already under way. Achieving a global breakout hit and sustaining international fandom engagement is not far-fetched. It could be just around the corner.”


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K-pop idols

BINI perform at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, in April. Photo: Reuters

South Korean boy band BTS present an award on stage during the American Music Awards in Las Vegas in May. Photo: AFP

Malaysian pop outfit Dolla. Photo: Universal Music Malaysia

Thai girl group 4EVE perform in their “TEA” music video. Photo: YouTube/4EVE 

Fans of Blackpink take pictures before the K-pop band’s concert in Kai Tak Stadium, Hong Kong, in January.  Elson Li

Filipino boyband SB19 perform at this year’s Lollapalooza in Chicago in July.  Photo: YouTube/SB19 official


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Likie Low, whose stage name is Likki, at the DJ table. Photo: Likki

Singaporean DJ Likie Low, whose stage name is Likki, in her studio. Photo: Jean Iau

People attend the Tomorrowland electronic music festival in Boom on July 17. Photo: AFP

Thai teen rocker Nene Royal talks America’s Got Talent and dreaming big

Thai teen rocker Nene Royal performs on America’s Got Talent. Photo: YouTube/AGT

Nene Royal performs on America’s Got Talent. The teen guitar prodigy is set to take part in the talent show’s live rounds on Tuesday. Photo: YouTube/AGT

Philippine Roblox ban call sparks wider debate over children’s online safety

A boy plays Roblox in front of a screen displaying the platform’s logo on December 8, 2025. Photo: Reuters 

Candles and a stuffed toy are left outside Ateneo de Zamboanga University on August 19, a day after a shooting that killed two people in Zamboanga, southern Philippines. Photo: Reuters

A screenshot of an Isis propaganda video created by a 16-year-old using game footage on the Roblox gaming platform. Photo: Singapore Internal Security Department

A young girl plays Roblox on her mobile phone at her house in Jakarta, Indonesia, on March 14. Photo: AP

Why Malaysia’s push for 15 million Muslim tourists is no sure thing

A view of Kuala Lumpur’s city skyline. Photo: Shutterstock

A view of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Selangor, Malaysia. Photo: Shutterstock

The Bukit Bintang shopping district in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photo: Shutterstock

Colourful tri-shaws on standby to take tourists around the Malacca old town in Malaysia. Photo: Shutterstock

Tourists walk past a mural featuring the Malaysian national flag in Kuala Lumpur. Photo: EPA-EFE

US transshipment ‘scam’ claims put Asean exporters in a bind

A container lifter is used to organise goods containers at a port in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: AP

A container ship is seen near the Hai Phong International Container Terminal in Vietnam. Photo: Reuters

Workers pack furniture for export to the United States at a factory in Malaysia last year. Photo: AP

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who led “The Great Transshipment Scam” report, speaks to reporters on August 11. Photo: EPA

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Even as more regional artists are performing overseas, they should not blindly copy the K-pop playbook, industry observers say


Even as more regional artists are performing overseas, they should not blindly copy the K-pop playbook, industry observers say.


Can Southeast Asian artists replicate K-pop’s global success with SEA-pop?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Even as more regional artists are performing overseas, they should not blindly copy the K-pop playbook, industry observers say

Even as more regional artists are performing overseas, they should not blindly copy the K-pop playbook, industry observers say