K-pop Artists Hit With Spotify’s Streaming Purge, BTS Jimin Loses 200 Million Streams

BLACKPINK and BTS members lose significant streams amid Spotify's purge of artificial and fraudulent streams.

By Anadya Narain Updated July 04, 2025 2:20 PM

K-pop Artists Hit With Spotify’s Streaming Purge, BTS Jimin Loses 200 Million Streams

Over the years, the number of streams a song has on streaming platforms has become an indication of fame and popularity. Out of all the platforms, Spotify is the most popular internationally as it shows the public number of streams on a song, album and artist. Hence, tampering with streams to project them to be more has become a common practice. The platform recently conducted a mass removal of fraudulent or artificial streams, and several K-pop acts like BLACKPINK and BTS were affected by it.

BTS And BLACKPINK Lose Millions Of Streams

In Spotify’s most recent sweep, K-pop artists like BLACKPINK’s Rosé, Jennie and multiple BTS members were reported to have lost millions of streams.

Spotify elaborated on its stream protection and defined the fraudulent streams as ‘An artificial stream is a stream that doesn’t reflect genuine user listening intent, including any instance of attempting to manipulate Spotify by using automated processes (e.g. bots or scripts).’

They further said that as a result, many artists will suffer from having their streams removed because the system detects listens as fraud. Lately, the platform has taken to removing numbers near the beginning of each month, which has continued in July 2025.

BLACKPINK’s Rosé and Jennie reportedly lost around 2 million streams on rosé and “Like Jennie,” respectively. BTS members also became a target. Jin’s ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ allegedly had over 15 million deleted; Jungkook lost millions of streams on tracks like ‘Seven’ and ‘3D,’ while V ‘Winter Ahead’ saw a loss of around 13 million streams.

Also Read: From Release Date To Tracklist, All About BTS’ First Live Album Permission To Dance On Stage!

The most shocking case is, however of BTS Jimin. Jimin lost 15 million streams for his song ‘Who’ in July. The artist has lost over 200 million streams for the song this year.