K-Pop Taught Southeast Asia How to Build Pop Stars. Now the Region Doesn't Need It.
In April, BINI became the first all-Filipino girl group to perform at Coachella. The six members trained under a mix of Korean and Filipino coaches, in a system built to look and sound like K-pop. What they're doing with it isn't K-pop anymore, and the numbers say Southeast Asian listeners have noticed.
Between 2021 and the first half of 2026, the share of local artists in Spotify's weekly top 10 rose from 39% to 97% in Indonesia, from 31% to 81% in the Philippines, and from 71% to 76% in Thailand, according to data compiled by Soundcharts, a French music analytics platform, and reported by Al Jazeera. In Malaysia, the share held by regional Southeast Asian artists - not just local ones - climbed from 5% to nearly 46% over the same period. This isn't a story about K-pop losing a popularity contest. It's a story about the region absorbing K-pop's own playbook and using it to stop needing K-pop.
The playbook, exported
For most of the 2010s, the K-pop industry's core export wasn't music - it was a production method. Trainee systems, audition formats, short-form social content built around individual members rather than just the group: HYBE, SM and JYP didn't just sell songs into Southeast Asia, they sold a template for how a pop industry could be built from nothing. Local labels across Manila, Jakarta and Bangkok studied that template closely, in some cases hiring the same Korean vocal coaches and choreographers K-pop agencies used.
BINI is the clearest case. The group, managed by Star Music and produced under a system explicitly modeled on K-pop training, debuted in 2021 to modest attention. By April 2026, the six-member act - Colet, Stacey, Jhoanna, Mikha, Gwen and Aiah - was headlining a Coachella set, the first time an all-Filipino girl group had played the festival. Filipino call center worker Jaycer Bajo told Al Jazeera his listening habits have flipped over the past five years: from roughly 70% Western music to now 70% Philippine artists and 30% everything else, BINI and P-pop acts like ALAMAT and BGYO among them.
The revenue is following the streams
Digital music revenue in the Philippines doubled from $93 million to $180 million between 2021 and 2025, according to data shared with Al Jazeera by Statista analyst Julia Stoll. Thailand's digital revenue grew from $132 million to $204 million over the same stretch, and Indonesia's from $164 million to $264 million. None of that growth required a single additional K-pop release. Local radio penetration moved too: local artists' share of Thailand's weekly radio top 10 rose from 38% to 65% between 2021 and 2026, while Indonesia's climbed from 29% to 55%.
Thai film producer Cod Satrusayang, who works with local musicians on soundtracks, described a shift in identity rather than just output. For years, he told Al Jazeera, T-pop was largely an imitation of Korean and American style. Only in the last five years or so has it started building something that sounds distinctly Thai rather than borrowed.
The Latin pop precedent
American audiences have seen this exact pattern before, just with a different genre and a different decade. Spanish-language music represented 8% of global Spotify streams in 2015; by 2025 that figure had climbed to 27% - a rise of roughly 2,500% in raw stream counts, equivalent to 587 billion additional plays, according to Spotify data. Reggaeton and Latin trap didn't replace English-language pop in the U.S. market by competing with it directly. They built their own infrastructure - production hubs in Miami and Los Angeles, their own chart ecosystems, their own crossover stars - until the genre didn't need American pop's blessing to dominate American streaming. Bad Bunny, the artist most identified with that shift, has now topped Spotify's global year-end artist ranking four separate times, more than any other act in the platform's history.
Southeast Asia's pop scenes are earlier in that same arc. K-pop was never trying to be replaced here; it was trying to expand its own footprint by training local labels in its methods. The unintended result looks a lot like what happened when Latin music stopped treating the U.S. pop charts as the ceiling and started building a parallel one.
Where K-pop still wins - and where it doesn't
None of this means K-pop's Southeast Asian audience has evaporated. Thailand's local-artist share, at 76%, still leaves meaningful room for K-pop and other regional pop, and K-pop agencies continue to route major stadium and arena tour legs through Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta specifically because demand remains real. What's changed is the ceiling: K-pop is no longer the default option filling the space local industries hadn't yet built for themselves. Indonesia's 97% local share leaves almost no room left to fill.
The agencies that built the training template Southeast Asia borrowed aren't positioned to win this version of the story. HYBE, SM and JYP compete for Southeast Asian ears the same way Miami's reggaeton producers now compete for American ones - as one option in a market they helped build the infrastructure for, not the only one.
BINI's Coachella set didn't need K-pop's permission, and neither does the next P-pop, Indo-pop or T-pop act following behind them.
