5 min readHyderabadJul 29, 2026 04:01 PM IST
K-pop boyband BTS have confirmed they will not put forward any of their work for the upcoming 69th Grammy Awards, in what amounts to the most significant public challenge to the Recording Academy’s awards structure by a non-Western act in the ceremony’s history.
The announcement came through a coordinated move on Instagram on Tuesday, with all seven members: RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook, posting the same message on their stories simultaneously.
“We have decided not to submit our work to this year’s Grammys. We hope music can be heard and loved as music itself, rather than being categorised by region or language. We are grateful to ARMY and everyone who has supported us,” the group said. Their agency HYBE followed with a statement of its own, making clear that the decision was driven by concerns over the timing of a new category, Best Asian Pop Music Performance, which the Recording Academy announced in June alongside four other additions to the awards structure.
“We find it difficult to accept that this change in the Grammys’ judging was made at a time when BTS was considered to have the highest chance of winning the main award,” HYBE said.
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The company was careful to frame the move as specific to BTS, not a blanket position for its entire roster. “This is not a boycott at the company level. If other artists from the same affiliation wish to participate, they will proceed as scheduled,” HYBE said, adding that participation in the Grammy Awards remains a decision for each individual artist. The company also said the decision was taken to “protect the status and pride of the K-pop industry as a whole.”
The withdrawal came as a surprise to much of the music industry because BTS were seen as strong contenders for several of the ceremony’s top prizes this cycle. Their reunion album Arirang, released in March after all seven members completed their mandatory South Korean military service, has been one of the best-selling records of the year globally.
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But the introduction of the Asian pop category complicated the picture. Under Grammy eligibility rules, tracks nominated in the new category must feature what the Academy calls “meaningful use” of an Asian language. Since more than 80 percent of the lyrics on Arirang are in English, the album’s biggest songs would not have qualified for the Asian pop prize. The concern, shared widely among fans and industry observers, was that the existence of a regional category would give voters a reason to redirect Asian artists away from the main awards rather than evaluate them alongside their Western peers.
RM had hinted at the group’s frustration in a GQ interview earlier this year. “We do not desperately want the Grammys. We don’t want to keep saying we want to win the Grammy,” he said, a comment that some observers now view as a signal that this withdrawal was already being considered.
BTS have been nominated five times at the Grammys across their career, making them the most nominated K-pop act in the ceremony’s history. They received three consecutive nods for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance from 2021 to 2023 for Dynamite, Butter and My Universe, a collaboration with Coldplay. They also earned nominations for Best Music Video for Yet to Come and Album of the Year as featured artists on Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres. They have performed on the Grammy stage multiple times but have never taken home a trophy.
The decision comes during one of the most commercially dominant stretches of BTS’s career. Their 85-date Arirang World Tour, which kicked off on April 9 in Goyang, has been one of the biggest live music events of the year, with every announced show selling out.
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Arirang would have been eligible for the 69th Grammy Awards, which cover releases between August 31, 2025 and August 28, 2026. Submissions opened on July 7 and close on August 28. The ceremony is scheduled for February 7, 2027, at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
The Recording Academy, which organises the ceremony, has not yet issued a public response to the announcement.
BTS are not the first major act to distance themselves from the Grammys. The Weeknd publicly boycotted the ceremony after his album After Hours and its chart-dominating single Blinding Lights were completely shut out of the nominations in 2020, despite being among the year’s biggest commercial and critical successes. His protest led the Recording Academy to overhaul parts of its voting process, and he returned to the ceremony in 2025 after acknowledging that meaningful reforms had been made. Other artists who have stepped away from the awards over the years include Frank Ocean, Morgan Wallen and Will Smith.
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In 2020, Drake called for the ceremony to be replaced entirely, arguing that the awards had a long history of sidelining Black artistry and rap music in particular. He said the gap between the music that has the most cultural impact and the music that wins Grammys had become too wide for the ceremony to still be considered the highest form of recognition in the industry.
