Jimin of BTS has set a new streaming record with his solo single “Like Crazy,” achieving one billion filtered streams on Spotify with a fully Korean song for the first time in history.

“Like Crazy” is the title track of Jimin’s first solo mini album, FACE. Released in March 2023, the song is a synth-pop track inspired by the emotional narrative of the 2011 romantic drama film of the same name, detailing a dreamlike escape from the pain of losing a loved one. It topped the Billboard Hot 100, while the album overall peaked at number two on the Billboard 200 and charted for seven weeks.

Each charting position was a milestone of its own due to the song’s language. Written entirely in Korean, when “Like Crazy” topped the Billboard Hot 100 it became the first Korean-language song from a K-pop solo act to do so.

Though FACE also contained "Like Crazy (English Version)," leading with a wholly Korean-language title track is increasingly uncommon in a genre that has spent years reaching for English choruses and hooks to ease crossover. It is largely a successful strategy, and a commercially rational one – but it has prompted a recurring question: as more internationally charting K-pop songs lean toward English, what happens to the "K" in K-pop?

"Like Crazy" makes that question more complicated. Its milestone suggests that a song without a single English lyric can still accumulate a billion streams internationally – which is its own kind of argument for what the genre doesn't have to sacrifice to compete globally.

The size of BTS' global fanbase is a factor here, but the principle stands regardless: the choice to lead with "Like Crazy" and the scale of its reception makes the point more forcefully than a smaller artist could, precisely because the numbers are impossible to dismiss.