I had very much been hoping to finish off the year as I have before (in 2023, at least) with a look at the second half of the year’s Netflix viewing figures. This dataset won’t drop until January 2026, though, so instead we will revisit the US Billboard Hot 100 charts (as we have done here, for example). In more detail, we will look at the number of weeks individual K-Pop songs and see if there are any interesting generalisations to draw about higher level categories, like the relative chart success of boy bands and girl groups. We visualise this using fun, interactive circle packing visualisations using higcharter, the rather wonderful R wrapper for Highcharts.
As well as the Python API and the user friendly, ever-updating scrape of the entire chart available here, the page on Wikipedia devoted to K-Pop songs on the Billboard charts has recently come to my attention. The data from that source can even be acquired using the handy GUI of spreadsheet programs, so it is very accessible indeed. We used that method to obtain the data we use here. It covers all K-Pop songs to chart in the Billboard Hot 100 from their first appearance there in 2009 to the date of data collection (the second of December 2025), the K-Pop artist who performed them, and the number of weeks they spent on the chart.
Circle packing is an almost instinctively appealing kind of visualisation which is nevertheless open to a few different kinds of criticism. Chief among these is that it often uses area, which humans are not so good at interpreting, to represent some continuous variable. Further, the arrangement of circles does not always lend itself to easy interpretation, for example when categories are not spatially contiguous. These shortcomings are addressed to some extent by the interactive functionality of Highcharter. The tooltip which appears when you hover over a circle displays a precise quantity for ‘weeks on chart’, which is the determining factor in for each circle’s size. Moreover, the highlighting of a category when you mouseover an entry in the legend at allows for the easy focusing of attention on category membership, in this case the K-pop artist associated with the song, either as main or featuring artist. All this is demonstrated in a first, basic,non-hierarchical circle packing visualisation, below.
To make categories even more clear, we can create a hierarchical visualisation in which each song is contained within a bubble representing each artist, the size of which is determined by the total weeks on the chart each artist spent. As the plot is a little less busy, this time we will do without the legend.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that BTS are something of an outlier in their success. They have released both a large number of songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart which, in combination, have spent a great deal more time on the charts than the songs released by any other artist. This visualisation also makes it impressionistically clear that while many K-Pop songs do reach the heights of the charts, those which remain there for more than a week or two are considerably more rare.
In line with our recent examination of the relationship between artist gender and language selection in K-Pop lyrics, we can also look at the relationship between artist gender and chart success in the US Billboard Hot 100 over the surveyed period. Those coded ‘N/A’ are either mixed gender groups or those with non-human credited artists.
On aggregate it appears that boybands, including male solo artists, have spent more time in the US Billboard Hot 100 charts than girl groups or female solo artists, but not by an overwhelming amount. In light of our brief discussion of the songs categorised by artist above, it is noteworthy that the proportions would be quite revered were the contribution of BTS and its constituent members removed from consideration.
Finally, we turn to songs classified according to the year in which they charted.
This reveals that 2025 has been the most successful year to date for K-Pop on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, both in terms of number of songs and total number of weeks on the charts. While these metrics have not increased monotonically since the appearance of K-Pop in the Billboard Hot 100 chart, there is a clear trend for more and more K-Pop, measured by both number of songs and number of artists, to spend more and more time at the top end of these charts.
The foregoing serves to demonstrate the sustained engagement from international fans K-Pop is enjoying. It is highly suggestive that this will continue, in the short term at the very least. While a great deal of its chart success is attributable to a single group and its associated artists, a large and growing number of other K-Pop artists have also appeared in the chart. An interesting recent development is the chart success the artists appearing in K_Pop Demon Hunters. Whether future this will result in more attempts to combine and synergise the various constituent media and products of the K-Wave remains to be seen, but is certainly something to watch for in 2026.
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)