SEOUL, April 4 -- In just a few years, K-pop has become an international musical phenomenon. Such is the enthusiasm for this South Korean musical genre that almost all the records in the chart of best-selling albums for 2023 are K-pop albums.

In detail, 19 of the world's 20 best-selling albums last year (physical and digital sales) belong to the K-pop genre. Taylor Swift's fourth re-recorded album, 1989 (Taylor's Version), is the only outlier in the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI), global album sales chart for 2023, taking sixth place.

The top three are Seventeen's FML, Stray Kids' 5-STAR and NCT Dream's ISTJ. Seventeen is one of the most influential K-pop groups in the world. The boy band first came to pr...