How K-Pop and TikTok Have Globalized the Grammys

This year’s music industry honors reflect the growth of international music and markets that Sam Howard-Spink has been studying for three decades.

Howard Spink speaking from a podium to a class, next to a monitor with text "Will China Lead Music Business & Industry In the Next Decade? — Sam Howard-Spink teaching a graduate course on international markets.

Most music lovers will tune into the Grammy Awards broadcast on Sunday to see if their favorite artists are honored. Sam Howard-Spink and his music business students will be paying attention, too, but their interest includes tracking industry trends.

“Events like the Grammys highlight how truly international the industry is,” Howard-Spink says. “It also raises our students’ awareness of the importance of global artists, including non-English language artists.”

Rose giving her acceptance speech, holding an MTV VMA award — South Korean singer/songwriter Rosé accepts the Song of the Year Award for "APT" with Bruno Mars onstage during the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards on Sept 7, 2025 in Elmont, New York. Photo by Manny Carabel/Getty Images for MTV

“APT,” the hit single from South Korean singer/songwriter ROSÉ and Bruno Mars, could make history if it wins Record of the Year, while Bad Bunny is the first Spanish-language artist nominated for Album, Record, and Song of the Year.

The global nature of music is important to Howard-Spink, whose research and teaching focus is on the industry’s increasingly international profile. As the new director of the Music Business program in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, he is overseeing the launch of the new degree that offers students a year of study in London.

Howard-Spink has been following the rise of K-pop and other international music trends since before he joined the faculty in 2008. His research focused on global music and markets, and he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on emerging markets, including those in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Pan-Africa, and new models of music distribution and fandom.

EJAE on the Golden Globes red carpet wearing a black evening gown — Tisch School of the Arts alumna EJAE attends the Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton on January 11, 2026. Her single, “Golden,” from the hit movie, "Kpop Demon Hunters," is nominated for several Grammy Awards. Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images.

He also researches music diplomacy, and in 2024 published a case study about the K-pop group BTS and its role in contemporary South Korean soft power. The animated film Kpop Demon Hunters, the latest sensation from this genre, received five nominations for its hit song “Golden” from NYU Tisch alum EJAE.

With the Grammy Awards days away, NYU News asked Howard-Spink about their influence, the “glocalization” of the music industry, and what that means for students entering the field.

The Grammy Awards will be announced February 1. Are you or your colleagues or students involved? What role do the Grammys play in calling attention to trends or shifts or new directions in the industry?

Most of our faculty and many of our alumni who are working in the music and entertainment industry will attend, and there's an NYU alumni event in LA that takes place every year during Grammy week. We have alums who work at the Recording Academy. As for the awards themselves, the Grammys as an institution reflects trends that we are already engaging with in our classes. As an example, I've been teaching about Asian markets, mainly around K-pop, and Afrobeats from West Africa, which have been very influential culturally in pop, hip-hop, and R&B for some time. But it's only recently that the Grammys have given awards to K-pop artists, and in 2024 the Recording Academy created an award for Best African Music Performance.

To see KPop Demon Hunters being recognized with five Grammy nominations and to get an Oscar nomination last week—these are big moments. When Parasite won the Oscar for best film in 2020, the first non-English language film to ever do so, that was a huge, huge moment for Korean popular culture in the world. I think Kpop Demon Hunters is that kind of thing from the musical side.

Tell me more about your research and teaching on globalization and the ways different markets function.

My own teaching and research interests are largely in international, regional, and diasporic music markets, and comparing how they're different from each other, but also the ways that they are connected and influence each other. As an example, the recent US industry focus on monetizing what are called “superfans” is a model that was developed and pioneered first in Japan, then South Korea, and now in China. And of course, TikTok, which has become incredibly important to the music industry in a variety of ways, started as a Chinese social media app. I use a variety of models and theories of globalization to provide context to the changes taking place in international relations and in music and music business. So we examine what is called glocalization—a particular dynamic in globalization studies where the new emerges from recombinations of what exists.

Bad Bunny on stage in front of a live band, performs in a tan suit — Bad Bunny performs during the Debí Tirar Más Fotos world tour at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City on December 11, 2025. Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images.

Will you define glocalization and explain why it’s an important concept?

Localization is where a company makes adaptations to a local specificity, the way McDonald's will change its menu depending on which country its customers are in. Glocalization implies that those local changes can flow back out into the global world. That’s how you can look at K-pop and Reggaeton, for example, as having local responses to pop music and hip-hop and R&B, and over time they come back out and re-influence all of the other kinds of iterations of those genres. That trend has really picked up over the last decade and is accelerating now with the rise of China especially, and the importance of K-pop and Latin music. I've been talking about this in classes for 17 years but the industry is really moving fast in that direction now.

Steinhardt's music business program introduced a Bachelor of Science degree this year that features the students getting to spend their first year at NYU London. What value does that setting provide?

New York, LA, and London are the three most important music business cities in the world, so for Steinhardt's Music Business program to have footprints in all three cities is another way that our program stands out from our peers. This group of undergraduates spends their first year in London, where they have access to different kinds of music businesses, educators, and guest speakers, including a member of the band Pulp, that are special to London and the UK. And out of London, they have opportunities to travel to parts of Europe very quickly to see and hear music and go to concerts and clubs in those places as well.

Sam Howard-Spink speaks at a podium with "New York University" on it — Howard-Spink speaks at a recent Steinhardt alumni event.

In addition to teaching and research, you are a drummer in a Brazilian samba group. How does that experience inform your work with students?

Students like to see their music professors play and perform music outside the classroom, and I've felt for a long time that it adds a kind of holistic component that as faculty we can embody as well as teach. I see the value of collaborative musical endeavors and how that can make me a better professor—and how I can draw on this to encourage collaboration among students, which is just so important pedagogically. It's taught me things about working together with my own faculty or within my department that are helpful. We're actually all creating something together and we want to support and sustain it together. And that's different from being a lead singer, or a solo artist, or even just a professor at a podium—to feel the flow of those experiences and how they reflect and refract each other. I find being in a Brazilian samba drum group complements my role as a music business professor really nicely.