Can Southeast Asian artists replicate Okay-pop’s international success with SEA-pop?

At Tower Records in Tokyo’s Shibuya district earlier this month, followers flocked to a pop-up retailer arrange for Filipino boy band SB19, shopping for unique merchandise together with limited-edition CDs, T-shirts, stickers and telephone straps.

In July, SB19 carried out on the Lollapalooza competition in Chicago for the primary time, whereas in April, they performed a sold-out residence live performance within the metropolis of Paranaque, drawing nearly 100,000 native and worldwide followers, together with from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia and Germany. BINI additionally made historical past in April throughout their inaugural efficiency on the Coachella competition in California.

Data compiled by French music analytics platform Soundcharts discovered that the share of Indonesian artists on Spotify’s weekly high 10 soared from 39 per cent to 97 per cent in Indonesia between 2021 and the primary half of 2026.

The streaming information for the Philippines and Thailand have been related, rising from 31 per cent to 81 per cent and 71 per cent to 76 per cent, respectively, over the identical interval.

An unbiased information analyst based mostly in Japan, who goes by the moniker Tsurezure Lab and research music streaming tendencies throughout international markets, tracked weekly aggregations of Spotify every day Top 50 charts in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore from February 2023 to May 2026 and seen sturdy intra-regional help in these international locations based mostly on linguistic and cultural similarities.