K-Ballad
K-ballad is the Korean style of slow, emotional pop ballad, built around a powerful vocal and usually about love and loss.
Songs are slow and sentimental, usually led by piano or acoustic guitar with strings, and everything rests on the singer's voice and the melody. The style draws on Western soul, R&B and sentimental ballads adapted to Korean taste; it became popular in the 1980s and took its settled form in the 1990s. Compared with idol K-pop it has no dance element and little rap.
Artists it is known for: Lee Moon-sae, Shin Seung-hun, Sung Si-kyung.
- Family
- K-Pop
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- South Korea; popular from the 1980s
- Also called
- korean ballad
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 2%
About 1,400 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have k-ballad among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
K-Ballad artists
IU
TAEYEON
LEEHI
D.O.
JANNABI
BOL4
Crush
AKMU
The Black Skirts
Epik HighThe k-ballad artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.