BTS declined the 2027 Grammys over a new "Asian Pop" category. Here's the debate — and what one "Asian" label means for Southeast Asia's rising music scenes.

From Indonesia to Thailand, each ASEAN nation builds AI its own way. What does this mean for creators? Three questions on data, dependence, and access.

Why is Southeast Asia building its own AI? A deep dive into SEA-LION—its origins, purpose, and how it tackles the "WIRED" bias baked into global models.

Across Southeast Asia, urban regeneration policy has fundamentally shifted. Rather than focusing solely on physical infrastructure, governments are increasingly adopting a model in which urban heritage, local narrative, and spatial design are converted into commercializable cultural-content IP.

UNESCO designation impact, four practical urban-IP models, global benchmarks, Gen Z literary circuits, and Indonesia's measurement infrastructure.

This report tracks the trajectory of China's largest state-backed cultural-industry fair, the China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair (Wénbóhuì, hereafter ICIF), examines what a contemporary industry fair actually does beyond matchmaking, and situates the IP business it incubates within an Asian context that is distinct from Western models.

In October 2025, the British Council released the first-ever Regional Perception Poll on the ASEAN Creative Economy — a survey of 4,117 respondents across all ten ASEAN member states and Timor-Leste, covering both the general public and active creative economy participants ("Creative Players").

The creative economy is the region's chosen answer — and notably, an agenda ASEAN set rather than received. Indonesia was the main sponsor of the 2019 UN resolution declaring 2021 the International Year of Creative Economy, having convened the first World Conference on Creative Economy in Bali in 2018, and ASEAN culture ministers enshrined their own definition of the "ASEAN Creative Economy" in the 2022 Siem Reap Declaration.

When Thailand's Pheu Thai-led government took office in September 2023, its very first cabinet meeting created the National Soft Power Strategy Committee — a signal of how central the creative economy had become to Thai economic thinking. The reasoning was openly demographic and structural: with the country's fertility rate at roughly 1.0 and conventional industries no longer generating sufficient growth, policymakers framed soft power as the engine for transforming Thailand'

There is a particular kind of cultural diplomacy that does not happen in conference rooms. It happens when you stop walking, sit down on a bench, and find yourself reading about a country you have never visited—while looking out at the sea. That is exactly what the ASEAN-Korea Olle Trail is designed to do.

HORI7ON (호라이즌) is a seven-member Filipino boy group under MLD Entertainment, formed through the ABS-CBN/MLD co-production Dream Maker (2022–23). They debuted in Seoul in July 2023 and performed at the 2026 ROUND ASEAN-Korea Music Festival in Manila in April 2026.

The UK faces a choice between two futures. In the first, the UK becomes a world-leading home for responsible, licensing-based artificial intelligence (AI) development, where commercial model developers using UK content obtain permission, pay fair remuneration to rights holders and can deploy their models without questions of legal liability.