Music of the Philippines: OPM, Kundiman, P-pop and the Songs Filipinos Sing

The music of the Philippines is a meeting of three worlds. Gong ensembles older than colonial rule still play in the south. More than three centuries under Spain left guitars, string bands, serenades and the love ballad. Half a century of American rule, and the American influence that stayed after it, brought jazz, rock and later hip-hop. Filipinos took all of it into their own languages, and today almost any popular song written and sung by Filipinos goes by one name: OPM.

The short answer

• OPM, Original Pilipino Music, is the umbrella name for Filipino popular music of any genre.
• Kundiman is the classic Tagalog love song, which became an art song at the end of the 19th century.
• Kulintang, a row of small gongs, is the oldest living ensemble tradition, played in Mindanao and the Sulu islands.
• P-pop, led by idol groups such as SB19 and BINI, is a fast-growing part of the scene in the 2020s.

Gongs before everything: kulintang and gangsa

Philippine gong music comes in two families. In the Cordillera mountains of northern Luzon, people play flat gongs called gangsa. In the Muslim and animist communities of Mindanao, the Sulu archipelago and Palawan, the gongs are bossed, with a raised knob in the middle. Bossed gongs were once common along the coasts and lowlands too, before most of the country became Christian.

The kulintang is the best-known of these traditions: a row of small knobbed gongs laid flat in a frame, which plays the melody, with larger hanging gongs and drums around it. It belongs to a gong-chime culture shared across Borneo, Sulawesi and the islands of eastern Indonesia and Malaysia, and distantly related to the gamelan of Java and Bali. The Maguindanaon and Maranao peoples are its two great schools, and each plays it in its own way. It is a living tradition, not a museum piece.

Kundiman, harana and rondalla: the Spanish centuries

Kundiman is the traditional Filipino ballad, almost always about love, sung in Tagalog with a smooth, flowing melody and dramatic leaps. It became an art song at the end of the 19th century, and composers such as Francisco Santiago and Nicanor Abelardo gave it its formal shape in the early 20th, setting real poetry to music.

The kundiman was also the song of the harana, the old rural serenade in which a young man and his friends sang under a woman's window to court her. Spain also brought the rondalla, an ensemble of plucked string instruments whose name comes from the Spanish ronda, meaning serenade. Filipino choral arrangers, for their part, have long reworked folk songs, love songs and OPM hits for choirs.

From the Manila sound to OPM

In the 1950s and 1960s, Filipino popular music was mostly sung in local languages and often tied to the movies. Then, in the mid-1970s, a light and catchy pop known as the Manila sound took over the radio of Metro Manila. It peaked during the martial law years, and bands such as Hotdog sang in Tagalog, in English and in the mix of both that Filipinos call Taglish. The Manila sound is remembered as the forerunner of nearly everything that came after.

As it faded, a new name took its place. OPM, a commercial label coined by Danny Javier of the APO Hiking Society, first meant only the ballads and novelty songs of the late 1970s. Over time it became the catch-all name for all popular music composed, performed and recorded by Filipinos, whatever the style. Songwriting festivals fed it: at the first Metropop Song Festival in Manila in 1978, Freddie Aguilar's “Anak” reached the finals. The song, about a child and the parents who raised him, was translated into 51 languages and became the best-selling single by a Filipino artist.

Pinoy rock and Pinoy hip-hop

Rock reached the Philippines with American records and radio, and by the 1990s it had become one of the country's main voices. The Eraserheads, formed in Quezon City in 1989 and often called the Beatles of the Philippines, released their first album in 1993 and set off a second wave of Filipino bands. Rock is not only a Manila story either: Bisrock, Visayan rock sung in Cebuano, grew outside the capital with bands such as 1017 from Davao.

Hip-hop arrived in the early 1980s through American films, television and nightlife. Francis Magalona, known as Francis M, started as a breakdancer and is regarded as one of the most influential figures in Pinoy hip-hop; his songs, among them “Mga Kababayan”, won the Awit Award for best rap recording again and again. Filipino rappers switch freely between Tagalog, English and regional languages such as Cebuano, Ilocano and Chavacano, and that mixing is one of the scene's signatures.

P-pop: the idol era

Pinoy pop has its own long history, from the sentimental live-band pop of the 1990s and 2000s, with groups such as Side A and Introvoys, to the bigger budgets and sharper productions of the 2010s. In the 2020s it took a new shape: idol groups with trained singers, choreography and devoted fan bases, shaped partly by the example of K-pop but singing in Filipino and English.

SB19 is the group most often credited with opening that road. Formed by the Manila branch of a South Korean entertainment company and launched in 2018, the five members nearly disbanded after a quiet first single, until their 2019 dance-pop single “Go Up” went viral. BINI, eight women formed in 2019 through the ABS-CBN training program Star Hunt Academy, became known as the Nation's Girl Group. Beside the idols, the nine-piece folk-pop band Ben&Ben, formed in 2016, has become one of the country's most loved acts, with anthems about love, loss and learning to love yourself.

What the Philippines is playing now

SORI keeps a copy of the YouTube Music home page for the Philippines. On 1 October 2026, its new releases were led by Filipino acts: Ben&Ben's “Nine”, SUNDAY GRIT PH's “Lason Mong Halik”, and a live performance from the 39th Awit Awards, the yearly awards of the Philippine record industry. Its quick picks mixed Filipino rap from Hev Abi and from Gat Putch with Smugglaz with international pop from Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift.

Among the most-played community playlists that day were a chill OPM playlist with 8.2 million views, a Pinoy rock list and several mixes with Tagalog titles. The picture is a country that streams the world's pop and its own music side by side, and sings both. That last part is not a figure of speech. Videoke machines at family parties, fiestas and corner bars are part of everyday life, and the songs people choose there are very often OPM.

Where to start listening

If you are new to Filipino music, follow it in the order it grew. Start with a kulintang performance from Mindanao, then a classic kundiman, sung slowly. Move to the Manila sound of the 1970s and the OPM ballads that followed, then the Eraserheads' albums of the mid-1990s. Finish with today: SB19 and BINI for P-pop, Ben&Ben for the band sound, and a few Tagalog rappers for the way the language bends to a beat. You will hear the same thing all the way through: a love of melody, and a voice that carries it.