BTS, BLACKPINK, Lisa Lead K-Pop's 2026 MTV VMA Nominees
Six K-pop acts are competing for a single award category at this year's MTV Video Music Awards, and one soloist is nominated four separate times. When MTV released its 2026 VMA nominations on Aug. 18, the Best K-Pop field alone came out to BLACKPINK's "JUMP," BTS's "SWIM," CORTIS's "REDRED," KATSEYE's "PINKY UP," LE SSERAFIM's "SPAGHETTI" featuring BTS's j-hope, and Lisa's "Dream" featuring Kentaro Sakaguchi.
Two K-pop-connected songs also made the night's biggest category. BTS's "SWIM," the lead single from their album "Arirang," is nominated for Song of the Year alongside "Golden" by HUNTR/X - the fictional girl group from Netflix's "KPop Demon Hunters," voiced and performed by EJAE, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami. It's the same song that made "Golden" the first K-pop-adjacent track to win a Grammy earlier this year.
Lisa's four nominations lead the pack
BLACKPINK's Lisa picked up more nominations than any other K-pop artist on this year's ballot: Best Pop, Best K-Pop, Best Cinematography and Best Editing, all for "Dream." Jisoo, her BLACKPINK bandmate, earned a separate nod for Best Visual Effects for "Eyes Closed," her collaboration with Zayn - the former One Direction member now several years into a solo career of his own.
CORTIS, the HYBE boy band that debuted in April, is nominated for the first time in its career, up for both Best New Artist and Best K-Pop with "REDRED." KATSEYE rounds out the field with two nominations of its own: Best K-Pop and Best Choreography, both for "PINKY UP."
For scale, Madonna leads all artists this year with 11 nominations, followed by Taylor Swift with nine and Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter with seven apiece. No K-pop act was named in the marquee Video of the Year or Artist of the Year fields - the category concentration this year sits almost entirely in Best K-Pop and its adjacent technical categories.
A category five years in
Best K-Pop has been a fixture at the VMAs since 2019, and Lisa is also the reigning winner, having taken the trophy in 2025. This year's six nominees span the range of where the genre currently sits in the U.S. market: BTS and BLACKPINK as established chart-toppers, KATSEYE as a multinational act built partly through an American reality format, and CORTIS as a five-month-old rookie already inside the same ballot.
Fan voting opened alongside the nominations on Aug. 18 and runs through most categories until Sept. 25, with a designated double-vote day on the deadline itself. Voters get 10 votes per category per day at vote.mtv.com. Best New Artist stays open until the winner is announced live during the broadcast, and Best Group and Song of the Summer are decided separately through voting on MTV's Instagram.
The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards air live from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 27, broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+. Last year's Song of the Year went to Rosé and Bruno Mars for "APT." Whether a K-pop-connected track repeats in that category - or whether Best K-Pop settles the question on its own - won't be decided until the ballots close.
