Hallyu Now

KPop Demon Hunters has spent 55 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Soundtracks chart. Seven more weeks there and it ties the all-time record — a mark Disney's Moana set back in 2016 and has held ever since. I pulled up Billboard's own running list Tuesday morning to check the math myself, and it holds up. The Record It's Chasing Billboard's Top Soundtracks chart has existed since June 2001, and in that time exactly 12 albums have logged 25 or more weeks at No. 1. Moana tops the list at 62 weeks, a run that started the day after Christmas 2016 and simply never got dislodged. Frozen II sits at 51. Barbie: The Album managed 33. KPop Demon Hunters , which first hit No. 1 on July 5, 2025, has already passed every one of them except Moana itself, per Billboard . It hasn't been a clean sweep the whole way. The soundtrack has actually spent 59 weeks total on the chart, and lost the top spot for exactly four of them: one week each to Wicked: For Good , the pere...

American K-pop fans bought 281% more Korean albums this year than last, and the fans spending the most per person are largely in their 40s and 50s. That cuts against the assumption that this fandom runs mostly on teenage allowance money. That's the headline out of a report from The Korea Times , published this morning, drawing on Korea Customs Service export data and a Billboard survey of nearly 1,400 fans, K-Pop Fandom in the U.S. , released last year. It puts a number on something a lot of longtime fans have suspected for a while: the demographic that's loudest online isn't necessarily the one funding the industry. The Numbers Behind the Headline K-pop album exports to the US hit $74.12 million in the first half of 2026, up from $19.45 million a year earlier, per the Korea Customs Service figures the Korea Times cites. That makes the US the single largest overseas market for Korean albums, ahead of both Japan ($45.61 million) and China ($61.18 million). Germany posted...