The 33rd Seoul Music Awards was held on January 2, celebrating another fantastic year in K-pop. There was a twist this year as the ceremony moved beyond South Korea for the first time and landed in Bangkok, Thailand, at the Rajamangala Stadium.
This year, NCT Dream clinched the win for the Daesang (grand prize), with many K-pop idol groups receiving the Bonsang (main prize).
After the Seoul Music Awards successfully concluded on this day, the list of past Daesang winners garnered attention from many online communities.
Since 2009, numerous legendary artists have been honored with the well-deserved grand prize, but among them, two truly stand out.
The Seoul Music Awards have often been criticized and even nicknamed the “Seoul SM Music Awards” because most of the Daesang (grand prize) winners are usually from SM Entertainment. This pattern continued this year, with NCT DREAM from SM winning the award.
Despite this trend, Psy and BTS have been exceptional winners. Psy won the Daesang in 2012 with his worldwide hit “Gangnam Style,” and BTS consistently won from 2017 to 2020, while sharing the award in 2019 with SM’s Taeyeon. These two acts stand out for their achievements amidst the dominance of SM artists.
After seeing the list of winners, Korean netizens are impressed with Psy and BTS beating out SM artists to take home the Daesang trophy.
They commented, “I’m impressed with Psy and BTS; how did they infiltrate the SM Music Awards?” ” In 2019, they created an additional Daesang award just to give it to Taeyeon, and then they immediately got rid of it the following year. It still seems absurd even now,” “It was impossible to not give them an award because of their overwhelming achievements, lol. But I stopped watching after ‘Sticker’ (NCT 127) won Daesang instead of ‘Butter’ (BTS),” “There was so much buzz over Taeyeon winning Daesang in 2019, lol,” “Those two were the global artists that even SM Music Awards had to acknowledge,” and “Everyone is from SM except for Psy and BTS.”
