HYBE x Geffen group KATSEYE have been nominated for Best K-Pop at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards (VMA), and instead of pinkies, eyebrows are going up at this decision. The global act is nominated alongside BLACKPINK, BTS, CORTIS, LE SSERAFIM, and LISA.

They have also received a Best Choreography nomination for the same track, “Pinky Up”. The nominations arrive at a moment when the question of what actually qualifies as K-pop, especially for awards purposes, is a subject of contention.

For the unitiated, KATSEYE, comprising members Daniela Avanzini, Lara Raj, Megan Skiendiel, Yoonchae Jeung and the currently hiatus-ed Sophia Laforteza and Manon Bannerman, was created by HYBE and Geffen Records through reality competition The Debut:Dream Academy reality competition as a deliberate attempt to build a K-pop-style group for Western markets.

Emphasis on style.

If ones squints hard enough, perhaps it is possible to see how the VMAs arrived at this conclusion. KATSEYE does seem K-pop adjacent, considering that their training, incorporation of high-powered choreography, parts of their target audience and much of their marketing techniques overlap with the K-pop system.

However, only one of their members (Yoonchae) is Korean, the group has never introduced themselves as K-pop, and it is plain as day that zero of their released music has featured Korean lyrics.

This including the song that just scored an MTV VMA nomination for ‘Best K-pop’.

How MTV VMA Nominations Actually Work

While the winners of the VMAs are chosen by the public, MTV is famously opaque about the selection rules behind the nominee pool that the audience gets to vote on.

There is very little public information about how the nominees are selected (reps for MTV owner Paramount declined to comment on the selection procedure), unlike the Grammy Awards, where labels and Recording Academy members formally submit artists to specific categories.

This development once again raises a question the category's existence has been circling since its introduction in 2019: what does MTV think K-pop is?

The category was introduced at the 2019 VMAs and immediately drew criticism from K-pop fans who felt it segregated their artists from major categories like Video of the Year and Artist of the Year. BTS fans started up a #VMAsRacist hashtag, which, seven years later, seems rather similar to the furore over another major awards ceremony (more on that later).

KATSEYE has actually been nominated for a VMA before; their debut song “Touch” won a moon man in 2025 for ‘Push Performance of the Year’. This made sense, because they are extremely talented, and none of the words in the category name were ‘Korean’ or ‘pop’.

This Is Not The First Time The VMA K-Pop Category Has Had This Problem

In the years since 2019, the category has nominated and awarded acts whose relationship to Korean music has become increasingly tangential. BTS won with "Butter" in 2021. The song was sung entirely in English, though all members are Korean.

The next year, BLACKPINK’s Lisa won with "Lalisa" (a Korean-English mix) and again in 2024 with "Rockstar" (fully English) — both tracks from a Thai artist who is a member of a Korean group. In 2025, her collaboration "Born Again" with Doja Cat and Raye won the category despite being completely in English and featuring two artists with no connection to the Korean music industry.

Lisa is nominated again this year for “Dream”, another 100 percent English track.

KATSEYE’s 2026 nomination continues that trajectory, only slightly further along the line, because as has been made clear before, KATSEYE is a global group, not a K-pop group, so their connection to South Korea hangs mainly by the single thread that is Yoonchae.

How The Grammy's New Asian Pop Category Makes KATSEYE's VMA Nomination More Complicated

The Recording Academy announced in June that a new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category will be awarded at the 2027 Grammys. The category requires "meaningful use of one or more Asian languages" as an eligibility condition. Under that definition, KATSEYE would not be eligible since their music does not feature Korean or any other Asian language.

After the category was announced, widely-assumed frontrunner BTS declared they were not submitting to the Grammys this year at all. The resulting uproar poured propane onto an existing fire, one that even reportedly led to the Recording Academy CEO reconsidering the category as a whole.

KATSEYE’s nomination is the latest straw on the camel’s back for Western awards shows, which must, at least belatedly, look beyond tokenistic fan placations to actually decide what K-pop means as a category. And then stick to it.