Stray Kids Join BTS in Boycotting the 2027 Grammy Awards Over New Asian Pop Category

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2026 — Two of the biggest acts in global music have walked away from the 2027 Grammy Awards. Stray Kids confirmed Saturday, through their agency JYP Entertainment, that they will not submit their music for consideration at next year's ceremony — joining BTS, which withdrew in July, in a boycott of the Recording Academy over its new category for Asian pop music.

The Academy introduced the category as a recognition of Asian pop's explosive global footprint. But the announcement landed the way so many Grammy gestures toward non-Western music have landed: as a wall dressed up as a door. Critics across the music world argue the new category doesn't honor the genre — it marginalizes it, fencing Asian artists into their own lane rather than letting them compete alongside the rest of pop music.

That is the heart of the boycott. BTS said it plainly when it withdrew in July: the group's music should be judged without being divided by region or language. Stray Kids' refusal to submit makes the same argument in institutional form — the two biggest K-pop acts on earth would rather be absent from the Grammys than be filed under a separate label. The point isn't that Asian pop deserves a Grammy category. The point, in their view, is that it deserves to be judged next to everything else.

Few stories make that case better than BTS's own long history with the Academy. The group became the first Korean act to present at the Grammys in 2019, and two years later the first K-pop act nominated, when 'Dynamite' was shortlisted for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards. The nominations kept coming — 'Butter' in 2022, 'My Universe' with Coldplay in 2023 — but a win never did. After more than a decade at the summit of global pop, with stadium tours, chart records, and a cultural footprint few Western acts can match, the group's Grammy shelf stayed empty. Previously's music desk has long treated that drought as one of the clearest data points in the case against the Academy's credibility with global music.

BTS performing live. The group withdrew from the 2027 Grammys in July, saying its music should be judged without being divided by region or language. Photo: NME

There is a telling pattern in those nominations: all three of the group's Grammy-nominated songs were in English. The Korean-language records that made BTS the biggest band in the world — the music that built their fandom into a global movement — never broke through in the Academy's major categories. The nominations arrived when the group sang in the Academy's language. It is exactly the dynamic critics say the new Asian pop category would institutionalize: recognition that arrives only on Western terms.

Stray Kids bring their own weight to the boycott. The eight-member group, formed through JYP Entertainment's 2017 survival series and now one of the highest-selling acts in K-pop, has stacked a string of Billboard 200 No. 1 albums beginning with ODDINARY in 2022, headlines stadiums, and commands one of the most mobilized fandoms in pop — STAY. The Academy has never nominated them. That fact reads differently now: with commercial power on this scale, eligibility was never in doubt, and sitting out is a choice, not a snub.

There is a history of Grammy boycotts to measure this against. The Weeknd declared he would no longer submit his music after 'After Hours' — one of the defining albums of its era — was shut out entirely in 2021. Drake withdrew his nominations the same year. But those were disputes over results. This is a dispute over structure: not who won, but how the Academy sorts the artists who are allowed to compete. It is a harder criticism to wave away, and a harder one to fix with a televised reconciliation.

The boycott also forces a question the Academy has been dodging for years: is a region-specific category a door or a ceiling? The Grammys have long sorted music by geography and language — the Latin Grammys even became their own separate ceremony back in 2000. The fear among critics is that an 'Asian pop' Grammy becomes the prize artists win instead of Record of the Year: a consolation category that lets the Academy claim inclusion while keeping its biggest prizes reserved for Western acts. It is the same argument that has trailed the urban and world-music categories for decades, now applied to the most commercially dominant pop movement on earth.

The Grammy Award trophy. The 69th Annual Grammy Awards in 2027 will go forward without two of the largest fandoms in the industry. Photo: Getty Images

Whatever the Academy intended, the practical cost is now measurable. The 69th Annual Grammy Awards — the 2027 ceremony — will go forward without music from two of the largest fandoms in the industry. Stray Kids and BTS don't just move records; they move television. Their fans are the engine of the social conversation around every awards show they touch, and their absence is a hole no amount of tribute segments can fill. For a show that has spent years worrying about its relevance to younger, global audiences, losing the two acts those audiences care about most is a credibility crisis, not a scheduling note.

The open question is whether other artists follow. The boycott's logic isn't specific to K-pop: any artist working in a non-English tradition has watched the Academy file global hits under regional categories while the general fields stay Western. Afrobeats, Latin pop, and Asian acts across the industry face the same sorting. If the boycott spreads, the 2027 Grammys could become the first modern ceremony defined as much by who refused to show up as by who won — a story our culture desk will be following closely.

That broader conversation is the real story here. For decades, Western awards bodies have treated non-English music as a specialty interest — worthy of a dedicated category, never quite of the main stage. K-pop's commercial power was supposed to break that pattern; instead, the Academy's answer was a new category, and the two biggest K-pop acts in history called it what they believe it is: segregation. BTS and Stray Kids aren't asking for more categories. They're asking for fewer — for the music to be judged on its own terms, next to everything else, without being divided by region or language.

The Academy has not indicated it will revisit the category. But awards only mean what the artists they honor say they mean, and this weekend two of the biggest names in music said the Grammys' newest prize means something they want no part of. Until that changes, the road to the 2027 Grammys runs around the boycott — not through it. This is a developing story, and the Previously newsroom will update it as it unfolds.