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- A 'Golden' Number One for 'KPop Demon Hunters'; CORTIS and idntt Debut; This Week's Release Calendar
A 'Golden' Number One for 'KPop Demon Hunters'; CORTIS and idntt Debut; This Week's Release Calendar
This newsletter talks Stray Kids, Pabllo Vittar, KATSEYE, G-Dragon, KCON, ENHYPEN, ATEEZ, INI, TWICE, EJAE, Kendrick Lamar, SZA, and more, but first...
Jeff Benjamin
August 11th, 2025
COVER STORY
A Rare, ‘Golden’ Number One for K-Pop (‘Demon Hunters’)
Two years after BTS members Jimin and Jung Kook both ruled the Billboard Hot 100, K-pop returns to the summit with the animated girl group HUNTR/X from Netflix’s animated flick
Audrey Nuna, EJAE and Rei Ami attend the KPop Demon Hunters Special Screening at Netflix Tudum Theater on June 16, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netflix)
“Golden,” a song sung by fictional animated K-pop girl group HUNTR/X, is the Number One song in America. Billboard reported on Monday, August 11, that the English-Korean track (officially credited as “HUNTR/X: EJAE, Audrey Nuna and REI AMI”) is the biggest song in the country after earning 31.7 million official streams (up 9% from last week), 8.4 million radio airplay audience impressions (up a whopping 71%) and 7,000 downloads sold (up 35%) in the U.S. between August 1-7.
Key to the track’s success is streaming — which is an area most K-pop releases still lack compared to their mainstream contemporaries — proving ongoing streaming success week over week instead of just one hyper-powered week in debut. The Crossover friend Gary Trust writes:
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