Patterns of Engagement with K-Pop Demon Hunters

Preamble

K-Pop Demon Hunters began streaming on Netflix on 20th June, 2025. Its success and pop-cultural ubiquity have already been much discussed. Here, we attempt to add to the discussion of the film and it soundtrack by looking at patterns of engagement with the two fictional bands HUNTR/X and Saja Boys:

in the USA and South Korea as reflected by the presence and position of select songs in prominent music charts
internationally in terms of:
1. number of streams for select songs on Spotify and Youtube at time of publication
2. relative volumes of English-language internet searches for each band

While only suggestive, this raises questions about how engagement with the film, its soundtrack, and the fictional bands varies across countries and platforms.

Chart Performance

As with earlier posts dealing with K-Pop in the charts, we rely on the Circle Charts, specifically the Digital Chart, as the de facto official chart of Korea and the Billboard Hot 100 for the USA. The below visualisation shows the trajectory of the songs in these weekly charts from their appearance there to the most recent week available. Clicking on legend entries will remove them from the visualisation to allow for easier comparisons and hovering over the line identifies the title of the track it represents.

The animated visualisation below is intended the emphasise the difference between the performance of the songs attributed to the fictional bands in each chart.

Key differences to pick out are the slightly later entry of the songs into the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the more precipitous decline of the tracks Takedown and What it Sounds Like in the Circle Digital Chart. Both charts, however, reflect the sustained popularity of songs from the soundtrack that have been released as singles, most especially Golden attributed to HUNTR/X as well as the two tracks, Soda Pop and Your Idol, attributed to Saja Boys.

Views and Listens

Now we move on to the number of streams for the two best performing songs released through official channels under the name of each band on Youtube and Spotify. These figures are just a snapshot as of the 21st of October 2025 give us some indication that not only is there a difference in the level of engagement each band enjoys, but that the extent of this difference varies by platform.

As might be expected for songs, there is a higher level of absolute engagement through Spotify, a platform which focuses on audio content, over Youtube, which focuses on video content. On both platforms, the standout success of Golden among the tracks considered here is clear, albeit even more pronounced on Spotify. Also notable is the difference in the relative popularity of the two bands. On Spotify the Saja Boys tracks outperform the second most popular HUNTR/X track, whereas they do not on Youtube. Furthermore, the ratio by which Golden outperforms other tracks is much greater on the video-focused platform.

Internet Search

Finally, in this section, we consider which band draws the more search traffic. We restrict ourselves to Google searches as this captures the greater part of English-language search traffic and is also highly accessible. A detailed description of Google Trends data can be found in an earlier post on engagement with the K-Wave in the USA here. The most salient point to reiterate, is that this data is all relative. That is, the scores assigned all represent the amount of search traffic for each term in proportion to the time period and term with the highest search traffic over the surveyed period, which is arbitrarily assigned the value of 100. Raw numbers of searches are not known.

This reveals a strikingly higher volume of searches for Saja Boys in comparison to HUNTR/X. The search term Huntrix is not visualised, but appears to attract and even lower volume of searches than the less conventional, official spelling. The boy band attracting a larger amount of search traffic than the girl group runs somewhat contrary to expectations given the apparent greater popularity of songs attributed to HUNTR/X on streaming platforms and as reflected in music charts. The reasons behind this remain a matter of speculation.

Conclusions

Coming around four months after its release, we are, perhaps, little late to the K-Pop Demon Hunters party. This slower response has had the advantage of allowing the data-driven story of engagement with the film to develop. More time still will be necessary to get the fullest possible picture this film’s place in the K-Wave. Undoubtedly, its popularity and influence will be reflected in the upcoming Netflix Viewer Engagement Report for the second half of 2025. It may also be worth revisiting the films’ songs and their stay in time in the Billboard Hot 100 to contextualise their chart success outside of Korea in relation to other international breakout K-Pop.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)