TR.BIZ: 7.8.2025

Your early-mid-week check-in ✨

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition, a midweek look into top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off from Kyle at The Trend Report™. Today, we’re discussing a fake K-pop band dominating the charts, the rise in useless products, and dog parks for friends.

🤩 Hollyweird Insider: Do the Saja Boys matter?

Have you been listening to the Saja Boys? If you have, congratulations: you’re probably twelve or the owner of a twelve year old: the Saja Boys are a fictional K-pop act who are the villains in the Netflix animated movie K-pop Demon Hunters, a movie featuring their hit song. The group scored the top spot on Spotify, becoming the first male K-pop act to do that, which is wild considering BTS didn’t do that first. HUNTR/X — the fictional K-pop girl group who fight the Saja Boys — also have a trending song called “Golden,” which is going to be submitted for awards season as the song is number two on Spotify (along with the rest of the film’s soundtrack). Why is this interesting? In these AI , decreasingly human times, it’s fascinating that a kid’s animated feature featuring duelling fake bands is dominating the charts, which feels very much like a Black Mirror thing if the music itself weren’t a product of Republic Records (which is behind artists like Ariana Grande, Drake, Taylor Swift, Twice, and much more). The calls are coming from inside the house here, that this is a winning music industry formula that has worked again and again and again but with slick new packaging. This could be to the 2020s what Frozen was to the 2010s.