Two months ago, the Recording Academy announced significant rule changes for the upcoming 69th Grammys that included the creation of five new categories. The highest-profile of these are Best Asian Pop Music Performance and Best Latin Song. The Academy’s intention was to seek greater inclusion of Asian and Latin music; however, not everyone perceived the new additions that way.
K-pop fans in particular saw the Asian Pop Performance category as a consolation prize — a way to honor acts in a lesser category instead of the mainstream pop and General Field races. In a stunning repudiation, BTS, the genres standard-bearers and the prohibitive favorite for the new category, sided with aggrieved fans and chose to boycott the Grammys altogether, refusing to submit their hit comeback album, Arirang, at all.
Best Latin Song, however, did not receive the same backlash from the Latin music community and fandom. There is one major explanation for the starkly different reactions and it has to do with how Latin music has been celebrated by the Grammys.
Almost immediately after the announcement of the new awards in June, misinformation began spreading among the intensely online K-pop fandom. Many mistakenly believed that if BTS were nominated for Asian Pop Performance, the group would not be eligible for the main pop and General Field categories, or their chances of winning would be greatly reduced. Latin fans understood this wouldn’t be the case because they had the extremely recent example of Bad Bunny, who was nominated and won both Best Música Urbana Album and Album of the Year.
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Indeed, there have been mutliple Latin music categories for decades, including Best Latin Pop Album, Best Latin Rock/Alternative Album, and Best Música Mexicana Album (Including Tejano). The first Latin Album of the Year, Getz/Gilberto, was presented in 1965. Alongside such long-standing categories, the implementation of Best Latin Song wasn’t seen as surprising. That’s not the case for Asian Pop, which marked the genre’s first specific breakout category and was in turn greeted with polarized opinions.
The Latin music categories have existed for so long and have acknowledged such varied artists, that no particular fandom dominates the conversation, unlike Asian Pop, where it’s BTS and everyone else. Considered pioneers for their chart-topping catalog and the first K-pop act to break through with any Grammy nominations, the group’s ARMY tends to overwhelm any online discourse.
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Until last year, K-pop, the most commercially successful subgenre in the United States, had only one act receive nominations. The hugely popular BTS managed a grand total of five nods, winning none. Only one of those was in the General Field. (They were technically nominated for Album of the Year, but it was only as featured artists on Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres.) The 2027 Grammys, which was celebrated as K-pop’s breakthrough, saw two other acts score nominations, Rosé from Blackpink and the BTS-affiliated Katseye, along with the music team behind KPop Demon Hunters. In the end, the only winner was the KPop Demon Hunters crew for “Golden” in Best Song Written for Visual Media. (Some diehard K-pop fans refuse to acknowledge that win as the first for the genre, seeing as it was a track composed by committee for a movie, rather than a release from a recording artist or group.) Meanwhile, subgenres like C-pop and J-pop have yet to be recognized.
On the flip side, there have been many Latin performers nominated in categories beyond the genre, such as Rosalía and Anitta in Best New Artist, and Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin, and songs like “Despacito,” and “Un Día” in pop and the General Field.
In the end, the Latin community no doubt sees Best Latin Song as an extension of the music’s reach, something that has been building across decades — which is the opposite of the segregation felt by the Asian music fans. The Recording Academy is exploring next steps following the outcry and BTS’ subsequent pull-out. There are options. First, the organization could add multiple categories for Asian music to show the growing significance of the genre, as opposed to one catch-all grouping. But perhaps the best fix is systemic: further increasing membership for Asian music professionals, who can champion the art from within. The Recording Academy has been focused on diversifying and expanding its ranks — the Latin music membership has been growing for years, with obvious dividends for that genre’s visibility — and ultimately only by adding more voters representing all forms of Asian music, can the perception begin change.