Not long ago, K-pop and Western pop owned Southeast Asia’s streaming charts. Now home-grown music does. Local artists’ share of Indonesia’s Spotify Top 50 rose from 62% in 2023 to 73% in 2024 and 82% by early 2026. In Thailand, T-pop went from about 65% to 78% while K-pop fell from 27% to 11%. Philippine OPM jumped from 44% to 69% in a single year before settling around 63%. Singapore is the exception, with K-pop still holding about a third of its daily chart. The figures come from The Jakarta Post’s Weekender, with data analysis by Tsurezure Lab.
Indonesia is the engine. It logged 23.2 billion Spotify Top 200 streams in 2025, more than double the Philippines’ 14.2 billion and more than Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore combined. The track above, “Garam & Madu (Sakit Dadaku)” by Tenxi, Naykilla and Jemsii, shows what that engine can do: it has passed 200 million views and crossed into Malaysia’s charts.
Why these cities matter
The analytics firm Chartmetric calls them “trigger cities”: places where fans share tracks with friends and post them online so readily that the algorithms take notice and push an artist further. Chartmetric identified 30 of them in 2024. Its Asian trigger cities are heavily concentrated in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia and the Philippines, and it found that listeners in Latin America and Asia are the ones who drive new artists’ careers forward.
Streams and crowds
Streams are not the same as tickets. The Weekender found that Indonesia has not yet turned its streaming power into crowds for solo shows the way the Philippines and Thailand have. In a 2024 Populix study, 51% of Indonesian concertgoers said they prefer local artists, but 57% would rather go to a festival than a solo concert. Elsewhere the crowds are already big: BINI sold out the Philippine Arena, and Jeff Satur sold out two nights at Bangkok’s Impact Arena. The Southeast Asia Desk puts the region’s live entertainment market at nearly US$6 billion in 2025, heading for about US$10 billion by 2034.
