KPop's Demon Hunters OST Just Outscreamed the Actual Pop Stars

Every December, Spotify Wrapped arrives like a global personality test we all pretend not to care about. But this year’s plot twist is especially deranged. The world’s second-most-streamed album of 2025 is not from Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga or Kendrick Lamar. It is from an animated Netflix movie about demon-hunting pop idols.

According to Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped, the KPop Demon Hunters original soundtrack has clawed its way to the No. 2 spot worldwide. Let us pause to appreciate the physics of that. A fictional K-pop group featured in a fantasy action cartoon has outperformed some of the most powerful music brands alive. This is either a sign of the industry’s creative vibrancy or a sign that the simulation is glitching again.

The runaway hit on the soundtrack is Golden, which ranked No. 7 globally. It is a razor-shiny slice of choreographed adrenaline that sounds like someone fed a neural network nothing but K-pop bridge sections for a year. Over in viral land, APT. by Blackpink’s Rosé and Bruno Mars nabbed the No. 3 spot, proving that cross-genre collaborations still work as long as the algorithm smiles on them and TikTok turns them into a personality type.

In the US, the OST finished the year at No. 4. Golden also landed at No. 6 among most-streamed US songs, a detail that will no doubt set off several emergency marketing meetings at label headquarters from New York to Los Angeles. Executives may need time to process the fact that an animated film soundtrack is outperforming some of their multi-million dollar release campaigns.

Globally, Bad Bunny reigned supreme again. Debi Tirar Más Fotos became the most-streamed album of 2025, while he topped Spotify’s artist rankings ahead of Taylor Swift. Spotify’s most-streamed song was Die With a Smile by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, suggesting that the world continues its long romance with glamorous melancholy.

Meanwhile Spotify maintains a roughly 31 percent grip on the global streaming market, a position that remains oddly secure despite every government, artist union and startup with a pitch deck claiming they are about to disrupt it. Spoiler: they are not.

But the real story is that KPop Demon Hunters has somehow become the most powerful fictional K-pop group on Earth. This is not entirely surprising. Animation has had a long flirtation with global pop charts, from virtual idols to anime soundtracks that occasionally outrun their physical-world counterparts. Still, it says something about 2025 culture that a film about monster-slaying Korean pop idols now outperforms many actual monster-slaying Korean pop idols.

It also suggests a bigger shift. Soundtracks tied to global streaming hits have become one of the safest vehicles for music discovery. Netflix gets a global promotional engine, Spotify gets unpredictable engagement spikes and fans get to cosplay emotional depth through characters who do not exist.

The biggest winner, though, is the fictional band that cannot go on tour, miss a note or get embroiled in a scandal. The K-pop industry has been trying to engineer that exact scenario for years. Leave it to an animated film to beat them to it.