Ateez, Stray Kids, BTS's Jimin, Tomorrow X Together's Yeonjun and ILLIT each won an award at the iHeartRadio Music Awards 2025 on Tuesday.

The annual awards ceremony has four separate sections for K-pop: K-pop Artist of the Year, K-pop Song of the Year, K-pop Album of the Year and Best New Artist (K-pop). This year, the awards ceremony added one new section for K-pop, the Favorite K-pop Dance Challenge, which was chosen by fan votes.


The winner of the artist category was Ateez, a boy band under KQ Entertainment that has been seeing a strong global fan base with its powerful and masculine music style.

Stray Kids, a boy band from JYP Entertainment, also with a strong global fandom, won K-pop Album of the Year with its ninth EP "ATE" (2024) released last July.

The rest of the three awards went to artists from the HYBE umbrella. BTS's Jimin won the K-pop song award with "Who" (2024), his solo track released last July as the lead track of his album "Muse" (2024). Girl group ILLIT, which debuted in March last year, was chosen as the best K-pop rookie and Yeonjun of Tomorrow X Together was voted as the favorite artist in dance challenge videos.

The iHeartRadio Music Awards show has been hosted by American radio station iHeartRadio since 2014. This year's winners included Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and more.

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]