HEADLINE ACT

Filipino pop is having a festival moment. Weeks after BINI made history as the first Filipino act to perform at Coachella—and drew the kind of online attention that’s usually reserved for much higher-billed acts—SB19 are gearing up to perform at Lollapalooza. Novelty bookings these are not: BINI’s 2026 world tour includes stops in the US, Europe, and Asia, while SB19 reached 1B Spotify streams at the start of the year. 

BINI and SB19 are perhaps the highest-profile examples of a broader shift: across Southeast Asia, local-language artists, homegrown formats, and culturally specific stories are rapidly gaining ground. This isn’t one ‘wave’ replacing another, rather the emergence of multiple local scenes with increasingly engaged audiences. 

While previous SEA exports like NIKI and Rich Brian saw international success singing and rapping in English, these newer acts are finding global audiences while performing in their own languages. There’s still a place for global culture, but SEA consumers are becoming more confident that what’s made close to home belongs on the biggest stages.

OUR TAKE

Interest in local acts is intertwined with the evolution of K-pop. As the genre’s focus has shifted towards global audiences—think English-language releases, multinational line-ups and international training systems—it’s become both a global template and less of a geographically fixed category. But this has also allowed for the idol infrastructure to be adopted and remixed across SEA, as the all-Indonesian girl group NO:NA reveals. Although trained in an idol pipeline, they’re distinctly ‘local’, with gamelan, Balinese cymbals, and music videos set in rice terraces.

Meanwhile, the systems around these emerging local acts are also being built locally, through a mix of government funding, major-label investment, industry bodies, and international competition formats. Thailand’s Creative Economy Agency is in year three of Music Exchange, a program that’s seen 95 artists participate in 64 international festivals. In Vietnam, Sony Music took a 49% stake in YeaH1 Group’s music production unit to build a ‘direct pipeline’ for V-pop to reach international charts. And this November, Bangkok will host the inaugural Eurovision Song Contest Asia .

Of course, consumer interest in local acts predates export programs or investment, but now the scale is almost impossible to ignore. OPM’s share of Spotify’s Philippine daily Top 50 rose from 44% in 2023 to 63% in 2026 (note that we’ve been tracking this since budots crashed brat summer in 2024). Meanwhile in Thailand, daily music charts are a mix of K-pop and T-pop and Thai hip-hop, with Jeff Satur (the second most-streamed Thai act on Spotify globally) touring arenas across Asia and Latin America. Homegrown Malaysian acts like K-Clique are building a dedicated regional fanbase. And while Singapore remains an outlier, with K-pop, Western pop, and Mandopop still dominant, interest in local stories is surfacing in other formats.

Single x 35, a manga set in Singapore, recently went viral with fans praising the depiction of MRT commutes, bidding wars for in-demand apartments (brutal), and career stagnation. It sits alongside other webcomics like Woke Salaryman and Indonesia’s Tahilalats as an example of homegrown IP built on everyday anxieties and humor that—crucially—don’t need to be explained to the audience. Brands are starting to get it, too. Airbnb’s partnership with MILLI turned the Thai rapper into a cultural translator who guides travelers through Bangkok’s creative neighborhoods. Using an artist as an access point into a place and a culture works because MILLI’s credibility with that audience is earned.

For years, the safe bet for brands in SEA was to borrow cultural credibility from global acts. More recently, attention has shifted closer to home, but a partnership with BTS, BLACKPINK, or similar was still a bet on the biggest name in the room. Now, with local talent seeing chart success (at home and abroad), those ‘safe’ choices are starting to look less like the smart ones.

For those of you born before 1997, ‘fax, no printer‘ is Gen Z speak for ‘undeniable facts I agree with’

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 LAST CAPE STANDING

Regular readers know superhero fatigue has been a running joke for the last few years, so when Superman surpassed US$ 400 M globally this week, you’d be forgiven for assuming capes are cool again. Strong reviews and audience praise for the movie’s hopecore message (one moviegoer said: “I haven’t felt depressed even once” since watching it) helped drive up ticket sales, alongside a relatively unknown but ultimately likeable lead actor and a viral press tour. But before we declare that superhero fatigue is over, there’s a more complex story here…

OUR TAKE

On paper, Superman wasn’t an easy sell. Yet another superhero film in a saturated and stagnant genre, combined with the challenge of marketing a quintessentially American character in an anti-American moment. Ahead of the launch, director James Gunn talked up Superman’s universal appeal: “I’m telling a story about a guy who is uniquely good, and that feels needed now because there is a meanness that has emerged due to cultural figures being mean online”.

You can draw a direct line between that comment and the audience’s embrace of Superman’s hopecore message. The film deliberately leans into positive masculinity – and that resonated with the core young male audience who’ve been served nothing but brooding antiheroes for years. The love is spilling into real life too: Krypto the superdog helped drive up searches for dog adoption, with Google searches for “adopt a dog near me” jumping up 513% after the opening weekend (the more specific “rescue dog adoption near me” rose by 163%) .

But rather than signaling a franchise renaissance, Superman’s triumph tells us something about the current state of culture. With studios remaining committed to ‘cultural backsliding‘ (did you see the identikit Harry Potter stills?), the broader entertainment landscape feels stagnant.

That’s reinforced by our collective inability to agree on a ‘song of the summer’ and an onslaught of AI-generated content (the AI band Velvet Sundown racked up 1 M Spotify plays). Signs of pushback are emerging: YouTube’s recent pledge to crackdown on AI-generated video content highlights that platforms recognize audiences can tell the difference between genuine creativity and manufactured culture.

Against that backdrop, Superman’s success shouldn’t be read as a permission slip to keep recycling IP . Instead, it shows what franchise films now need to do to break through cultural noise. Gunn didn’t just make another superhero film; he had to reinvent what the character could mean against 2025’s political and cultural climate.

The lesson for marketers? Leveraging familiar or nostalgic brand equity now requires genuine reinvention. Whether you’re reviving a product line or tapping brand recognition, audiences expect you to answer ‘why now?’. Rather than falling back on familiarity, justify why a story matters today.

For those of you born before 1997, ‘fax, no printer‘ is Gen Z speak for ‘undeniable facts I agree with’

Scroll to the end of the newsletter for the correct answer!