Music of South Korea: K-pop, Trot, Pansori and What Koreans Listen to Now

Abroad, the music of South Korea is known by one word: K-pop. At home it has several layers that live side by side. There is gugak, the traditional music of court, village and storyteller. There is trot, a pop style about a hundred years old that grandparents and, lately, their grandchildren sing. And there are the ballads, rock, hip-hop and indie songs that fill the charts beside the idol groups. This guide walks through each of them, then looks at what Korea is actually playing this season.

The short answer

• Gugak, “national music”, is Korea's traditional music: court music, folk song, poetic song and the music of shamanic and Buddhist rites.
• Pansori is musical storytelling by one singer and one drummer, and a single story can last from three to eight hours.
• Trot is Korea's oldest pop style, with a bouncing, repetitive rhythm and bending vocals, and it returned to prime time through TV contests in 2019 and 2020.
• K-pop grew out of the rap-dance of Seo Taiji and Boys in the early 1990s and the idol system that followed.

Gugak, pansori and Arirang

Gugak is the name for Korea's traditional music: the slow, stately music of the royal court, folk songs from every province, sung poetry, and the music of shamanic and Buddhist ceremonies. Since the division of the peninsula in 1945, North and South have each developed their own branch of it.

Pansori is gugak's most dramatic form. A singer stands on a mat with a fan, and a drummer, the gosu, sits beside them with a barrel drum called the buk, calling out encouragement between beats. Together they tell a long story in song, speech and gesture, and a complete telling can take three hours or more than eight. Of its two schools, the mournful western one came to outweigh the livelier eastern one in the late 1900s, and people began calling pansori the sound of han, the Korean word for a deep, lasting sorrow. On 7 November 2003 UNESCO named pansori one of its Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

Arirang is the song every Korean knows. It is a folk song believed to be more than 600 years old, with about 3,600 variations of some 60 versions, all sharing a refrain close to “arirang, arirang, arariyo”. South Korea added it to the UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2012 and North Korea in 2014, and it is sung on both sides of the border as a symbol of unity.

Trot: the century-old pop that came back

Trot, also nicknamed ppongjjak, took shape during the Japanese occupation (1910 to 1945), drawing on Korean, Japanese, American and European music. Its signature is a steady, repeating rhythm and a vocal style full of bends and quavers. After liberation and the Korean War, singers such as Lee Mi-ja, Nam Jin, Na Hun-a and Joo Hyun-mi made it the sound of a generation.

From the 1990s, as K-pop rose, trot came to be seen as old-fashioned. Young singers such as Jang Yoon-jeong and Hong Jin-young kept it alive in the 2000s, and idols tried it too, but the real turn came on television. The audition show Miss Trot, won in 2019 by Song Ga-in, and Mr. Trot in 2020, whose winner Lim Young-woong came first out of 17,000 applicants, made trot a prime-time event again.

From GI clubs to idols: rock and the birth of K-pop

Rock came to Korea with the American soldiers who stayed after the Korean War. Local musicians learned it by playing in the clubs around the US bases, and in the 1960s their bands, known as group sounds, moved on to Korean stages. The military governments of the 1970s branded rock a corrupting youth culture and restricted it, but when that censorship was lifted, rock became a mainstream genre until the end of the 1980s.

The break that created modern Korean pop came in 1992, when Seo Taiji and Boys mixed hip-hop, techno and rock into a style called rap dance. Teenagers adored them, and the industry began to aim at teenagers. In the late 1990s Lee Soo-man of SM Entertainment built the idol system, training young performers for years and launching them as groups, and H.O.T. and S.E.S. became the first generation of K-pop. In the 2000s TVXQ and BoA broke through in Japan; through the 2010s, social media and the wider Korean Wave carried K-pop around the world. By 2019 South Korea was the sixth-largest music market on earth, led by BTS and Blackpink.

Ballads, hip-hop and indie

The ballad, slow and openly emotional, is a staple of the noraebang, the private karaoke rooms found on almost every street. Hip-hop has been part of Korean music since the late 1980s and early 1990s; in Korea the word hip-hop is understood mostly as rap, and the TV rap contest Show Me the Money made many rappers household names in the 2010s. Bands and singer-songwriters, many of them from the club scene around Hongdae in Seoul, make up the indie world.

What Korea is playing now

SORI copies YouTube Music's weekly top songs chart for South Korea. On 2 October 2026, the number one was “Paradise of Rumors” by AKMU, the sibling duo of Lee Chan-hyuk and Lee Su-hyun, who first won the nation over on the TV audition K-pop Star and debuted in 2014; Koreans call them the Nation's Siblings. Right behind them were two girl groups that only debuted in 2025: Hearts2Hearts from SM Entertainment with “RUDE!” and KiiiKiii from Starship Entertainment with “404 (New Era)”.

The rest of the top ten shows how wide Korean listening is. There are two tracks by BTS, songs by WOODZ, YENA and IVE, and two songs, at numbers nine and ten, by Hanroro, a singer-songwriter born in 2000 who writes and plays her own music. Idol groups, a sibling duo who write their own songs and a young singer-songwriter share the same ten places. Trot is not among them this week.

Where to start listening

To hear the whole of Korean music, start at the beginning and come forward. Each name below opens SORI's search for it, so you can play it on the spot.

• Pansori: the love song from Chunhyangga, sung by Ahn Sook-sun. Listen for the drummer's shouts.
• Arirang: Jeongseon Arirang, sung by Kim Young-im, from the mountain county where the song is believed to have begun.
• Classic trot: Lee Mi-ja's “Camellia Girl”, her best-selling song of 1964.
• Trot reborn: Lim Young-woong's “My Starry Love”, his first number one, in 2021.
• Where K-pop began: Seo Taiji and Boys' “I Know”, from 1992.
• Idols, the first and the newest: H.O.T.'s “Candy” and Hearts2Hearts' “The Chase”.
• A ballad to finish: AKMU's “How can I love the heartbreak, you're the one I love”, the way many Korean nights out end, in a noraebang.