A weekly report on the top 100 K-pop groups released on Oct. 24 by Luminate, an American company that analyzes the music market, found that the number of such streams by the top 100 K-pop acts is 90.4 billion this year.
By country, Japan was the biggest consumer of such content with 9.7 billion streams, followed by the U.S. with 9.2 billion, Indonesia 7.4 billion, Korea 7.3 billion, India 6.2 billion, the Philippines 4.2 billion and Mexico 3.5 billion.
"Luminate’s Insights Japan Music 360 consumer research study reveals that 39% of Gen Z Japanese females listen to Korean music and are 105% more likely to listen to K-Pop compared to Japan's general population, demonstrating how the younger generation is driving K-Pop listenership in Japan," the report said.
"Vietnam and Hong Kong saw impressive growth since last year in K-Pop Total On Demand streams, with Vietnam seeing a +59% increase and Hong Kong at +60%."
The report also displayed the regional distribution of such streams from the top five K-pop groups: BTS, TWICE, BLACKPINK, Stray Kids and NewJeans.
Asia accounted for 67.6% of consumption of NewJeans' streams, followed by North America (the U.S. and Canada) with 14.4%, Latin America 9% and Europe 7.2% as well as well as over half of that of streams of the girl groups TWICE (59.6%) and BLACKPINK (58.7%).
The two Americas accounted for 34.9% of the consumption of BTS streams -- South America 20.2% and North America 14.7% -- and 37.2% of that for Stray Kids, with Latin America's share accounting for 20.9%.
Luminate also mentioned the success early this year of "Cupid," a track by K-pop girl group FIFTY FIFTY.
"As mentioned earlier, there have been many K-Pop releases this year that have had massive success worldwide. One of them is FIFTY FIFTY's Cupid, which has 1.2 billion On-Demand Audio streams globally," it said. "The sped-up version of this track was released the week of April 13th and went viral on TikTok, resulting in the lift of streams globally."
It added that "some of the track's first listeners were South Korea's neighboring countries (Philippines, Indonesia) as well as the US, then taking off in India due to the virality and reaching other territories such as Brazil and Mexico."
