'KPop Demon Hunters' Proves Itself as Korea’s Top Content Force in Spotify and Google’s 2025 Year-End Rankings

Netflix’s animated film ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ reinforced K-POP’s international prominence on global music and search charts throughout 2025. According to Spotify and Google’s year-end reports, Korean content secured a leading position at the forefront of mainstream pop culture. On Spotify’s 2025 Global Top 10 Albums list, the OST for ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ ranked second behind Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny. It surpassed new albums by major American pop stars such as Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Kendrick Lamar to reach this high position. In particular, the theme song ‘Golden’ by the female group HUNTR/X, the main cast of the film, placed seventh on Spotify’s Global Top 10 Songs list. It also topped the ‘Hum to Search’ feature, which locates songs by humming them. The male group Sazaboyz’s song ‘Soda Pop’ from the film reached fifth place. On U.S. domestic charts, the OST for ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ ranked fourth among the most popular albums, while ‘Golden’ came in sixth among the most popular songs. Korean media outlet Hollywood Reporter noted that “while Bad Bunny dominated global artist and album charts with an overwhelming first place, ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ also showed strong performance.” Google’s ‘2025 in Search’ summary further highlighted the film’s global influence. It ranked second overall in U.S. search terms and topped both the movie category and actor category rankings. Google described 2025 as “the year Americans became pope and ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ took over the charts.” The OST songs also achieved notable results on search charts. HUNTR/X’s ‘Golden’ and ‘Take Down,’ along with Sazaboyz’s ‘Soda Pop,’ ranked third, tenth, and seventh respectively on Google’s song search term list. ‘Golden’ even topped the ‘Song Search’ feature, which finds songs by humming them, demonstrating strong enthusiasm from global fans. According to Spotify’s K-POP global statistics, Korean music received a total of 18.1 billion minutes of streaming in 2025. BTS ranked first on Spotify’s Global Top K-POP Artists list, and the most streamed K-POP song was the duet ‘APT’ by ROSÉ (BLACKPINK) and Bruno Mars, which also reached third place on the Global Top 10 Songs list. HUNTR/X and Sazaboyz entered Spotify’s Global Top 20 K-POP Artists list at fifth and 20th places respectively. Since its release on Netflix in June, the film remained in the top 10 among all Netflix content for English-language movies for over five months into December, holding third place and fourth place overall among all titles. It also recorded an additional 104,000 views. So far, it has stayed in the top 10 for the longest duration in Netflix history, at 24 weeks. The singalong version further demonstrated the power of the global fanbase by generating $18 million (approximately 25.2 billion won) per week at theaters.