cousin.world is a regular newsletter on global music.

Each week, I’ll update one of the following playlists with 10 ascendant tracks from world markets and provide analysis to explain how they’re breaking:

• run ⇡ — club tracks from euro & UK dancefloors

• cherry soda ⚭ — breaking k-pop, j-pop and city pop

• the grid ✚ — sounds of urbano, reggaeton, funk

• magnitude △ — afrobeat, dancehall and amapiano rising

This week, cherry soda ⚭ highlights releases from k-pop duo AKMU, Filipino group Lola Amour, newly crowned k-pop royalty NewJeans, the biggest single in Japan for the last 21 weeks from YOASOBI and the upcoming blockbuster collaboration between Anitta and TOMORROW X TOGETHER.

This playlist is mostly dedicated to pop exports from the Asia-Pacific region. Next week, the grid ✚ highlights tracks from the booming Latin American and Southern European markets where genres like funk and reggaeton dominate.

I’m making this resource to hopefully demystify how songs are getting big internationally and inspire any artists, labels or teams looking overseas for their next collaboration or new connection. Feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested.

If you have any thoughts on today’s mailer, please shoot me a reply 💌

cherry soda ⚭

1. ‘Love Lee’ — AKMU (South Korea)

South Korea’s most popular music streaming service is Melon and ‘Love Lee’ by duo AKMU is currently #1 on the Top 100 chart. The chart is based on a pretty unique calculation: 50% based on downloads and streams in the last 24 hours, the other 50% on the same usage in the last hour.

A quirk of South Korean consumption is that listening via the charts themselves is more commonplace than via individual playlists, so achieving high placement in these charts gives your track a continuous trajectory. Songs that get to the top of these charts usually stay for a while as so much consumption is being driven by this chart-as-discovery-destination model.

AKMU — AKA Akdong Musician — are a product of a South Korean reality TV competition called K-Pop Star 2, where would-be k-pop stars compete to impress representatives from three leading management companies: YG Entertainment, SM Town and JYP. After winning their season, the duo chose to sign with YG — best know for developing BLACKPINK and BIGBANG — in 2014. Almost a decade later and ‘Love Lee’ is currently the highest new entry at #8 on the Billboard South Korea Songs chart and the second most Shazam-d song in the country behind Jungkook & Latto’s blockbuster collaboration ‘Seven’.

2. ‘Back For More’ ft. Anitta — TXT (South Korea/Brazil)

I will start off by saying this track is not out yet, it’s out officially on Friday and was unveiled last night live at the VMAs. That hasn’t stopped fans from going into meltdown over this collaboration between Brazil’s biggest pop export of late Anitta and the k-pop boy band TOMORROW X TOGETHER, or TXT.

Like the aforementioned collaboration between BTS’ Jungkook and Atlanta rapper Latto, this feels like the apex of current trends in far-reaching international collabs designed to cover as many audiences, markets and playlist genres as possible.

Anitta, who last night took home the Best Latin award for her song ‘Funk Rave’, features on the version of ‘Back For More’ they (BIGHIT/Republic) are releasing on Friday, while according to this NME article written to announce the launch of the teaser(!) a TXT-only version will be available on September 18th alongside “house and afrobeats remixes”.

Like many other people, I’ll be adding this track to the playlist when it’s released on Friday.

3. 「アイドル」(Idol) — YOASOBI (Japan)

Five months ago, YOASOBI released their single「アイドル」(Idol) via Sony Music Japan. The track served as the opening theme to a very popular anime adaptation of the manga Oshi no Ko and peaked at #1 in the Oricon Singles Chart (Japan’s industry standard singles chart), also holding the record for longest-running #1 on the Billboard Japan Hot 100. The video for the single currently stands at 307 million views.

YOASOBI are a duo comprised of producer Ayase and singer-songwriter Ikura. They are a concept group who release songs based on short stories sourced from a creative writing website called Monogatary.com — a concept Sony themselves developed and invited the two artists to lead.

Writing for Japan Times, Tokyo-based writer Patrick St. Michael argues that the group is “shaping a new generation of [J-]pop stars” by offering them a route to international fame through anime syncs. He writes:

“Anime has emerged as a major way for Japanese bands — who long struggled to promote themselves — to reach the overseas fan bases. Aided by the same digital and streaming platforms [YOASOBI] initially emerged on, theme songs like Ado’s work on the latest “One Piece” film, SiM’s song for “Attack On Titan” and Yonezu’s cut for “Chainsaw Man,” among others, have become international viral hits.”

4. ‘Super Shy’ — NewJeans (South Korea)

It would be weird to start any kind of k-pop adjacent newsletter without mentioning NewJeans.

The search for the biggest new group in k-pop started in 2019 with Big Hit Entertainment and Source Music (both now labels under the HYBE Corporation) running a series of auditions in 16 cities on three continents known as Plus Global Audition. A further two rounds were held in December 2021 and January 2022 before the final line-up of NewJeans was confirmed. Their debut single ‘Attention’ was released in July 2022, catapulting them to fame among k-pop’s enormous global audience with the full backing of label mates BTS and their fanbase, the ARMY.

This summer, NewJeans released their latest single ‘Super Shy’ written and produced by 4AD-signed Erika de Casier, known for her contemporary take on 90’s R&B. The single, released two months ago, is still holding high positions in charts throughout the world including, at the time of writing, the #1 spot on South Korea’s Circle Chart (the Billboard Hot 100 equivalent in the market).

In contrast to other international cut-and-paste collaborations designed to game streaming as a format, the sourcing of Erika de Casier for this song feels like a smart A&R move to lend credibility and tastemaker clout to the NewJeans' project and deliver one of their coolest singles. This is explained very well in this GQ profile on de Casier from last month.

5. ‘Raining in Manila’ — Lola Amour (The Philippines)

The Philippines has long been considered among the strongest streaming markets in the Asia-Pacific region, if not the world, thanks to its hyper-engaged, young population and their love affair with Spotify. According to the most recent Music Ally profile on the market from 2021, 93.5% of revenue across the entire music industry comes from streaming, higher than in the Scandinavian markets that pioneered the format. While this is sometimes seen as good news for western artists looking to solidify audiences in the region, it’s better news for Filipino artists themselves who are building long term careers on this fertile ground.

A perfect example of this would be Lola Amour, a 7-piece indie pop band who boast 5.2 million monthly Spotify listeners, 1 million of whom are based in the Quezon City/Metro Manila area — not far off how many people are listening to Central Cee in London every month.

‘Raining in Manila’ is currently the top track on Spotify’s Hot Hits Philippines (5m followers), #2 on Top 50 Philippines and, although sung mostly in Filipino, has already scaled various other global viral charts in markets like Singapore, Hong Kong, the UEA and New Zealand.

+ Five More…

6. ‘Mainstream’ — BE:FIRST (Japan)

Currently #1 on Japan’s LINE Music Top 100 Chart, J-pop boy band BE:FIRST’s new single ‘Mainstream’ came out on Monday. Read more about them on Billboard.

7. ‘Merayu Tuhan’ ft. Dodhy Kangen — Tri Suaka (Indonesia)

This track from Indonesian artists Tri Suaka and Dodhy Kangen clocked 2.8 million views on YouTube in its first week and is currently the #1 trending sound on Tiktok in Indonesia and Singapore.

8. ‘Slow Dancing’ — V (South Korea)

On Friday, BTS member V released his new EP Layover which, per Forbes quoting South Korea’s updated-in-real-time Hanteo Chart, sold “at least” 1.6 million units in one day in South Korea alone and is heading for a historic first week run.

9. ‘I WANT’ — IVE (South Korea)

IVE are a group developed by k-pop management company Starship Entertainment, subsidiary of Kakao Entertainment, one of the major media brands in the market and owner of the KakaoTalk app (the Whatsapp of South Korea). On Sunday, they announced their forthcoming album ‘I’ve Mine’, due for release on October 13th, via Twitter.

10. ‘After I’m Gone’ — En (China)

This track from Chinese artist En currently tops the Popularity Index on QQ Music, one of the three biggest music streaming services in China, all owned by tech giant Tencent. In their financial report from the first quarter of 2023, Tencent reported 94.4 million paying subscribers across their services.

The Playlists