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The Korea Grand Music Awards 2026 winners list for Music Day lands on Sunday 8 November at Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, and three acts walk away with the night’s shape. ATEEZ take Grand Record. RIIZE take Grand Performer. ITZY leave with five trophies, more than anyone else in the room (Soompi).
The ceremony, hosted by Kim Jae Won and IVE’s Liz, closes a two-day event — Artist Day on 7 November, Music Day on 8 November (Soompi; allkpop).
ATEEZ Grand Record KGMA 2026 makes three grand prizes in three years
ATEEZ win three awards on the night: Grand Record, Best Music and Best Stage (Soompi). The Grand Record is the KGMA’s prize for an album and its musical achievement, and it makes ATEEZ the only act to win a grand prize at every KGMA since the awards began in 2024 (Seol Notes). Three ceremonies, three grand prizes. Consistency like that stops looking like a hot streak and starts looking like a position.
Ilgan Sports founded the awards in 2024 and hosts the show, which ENA aired live in Korea (Seol Notes). A young awards brand needs repeat winners it can point to, and ATEEZ keep volunteering.
They do not coast through the ceremony either. ATEEZ close Music Day with a medley of “Drip,” “BAD” and “Adrenaline,” drawn from the past ten months rather than from a greatest-hits shelf (Seol Notes). The year behind them supports the billing: GOLDEN HOUR : Part.5 opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, their third chart-topper, and a follow-up album, GOLDEN HOUR : Part.6, arrives on 13 November, five days after the ceremony (Goldscene; Seol Notes). On stage they thank ATINY, their fans, first: “The road to this moment wasn’t always smooth, but we could stand here because of the fans who loved our stages and our music” (Seol Notes).
RIIZE Grand Performer KGMA 2026 rewards a year spent on stage
If Grand Record is about the album, Grand Performer is about the stage — the prize for the act that gave the year’s best performances — and it goes to RIIZE, who also take Best Music (Seol Notes). “I never imagined we’d receive an award this big,” Sungchan says, crediting BRIIZE, the group’s fans, with making every stage (Seol Notes).
The year behind the trophy is measurable. RIIZE’s first tour, RIIZING LOUD, played 21 cities across Asia and North America to 420,000 fans, ending with three sold-out nights at Seoul’s KSPO Dome in March; along the way the group became the fastest K-pop boy group to play Tokyo Dome after debut, about two years and five months in (Seol Notes). Their June mini album TWO became their fourth million-seller, and the October single “Insomnia” spent seven straight days at No. 1 on Melon’s Global K-Chart (Seol Notes). Accepting Best Music, the group looks forward rather than back: “Please look forward to our second full album next year” (Seol Notes).
ITZY five awards KGMA 2026, and a shared honour for KiiiKiii
ITZY’s five break down into two group awards — Grand Honor’s Choice and Best Music — and three individual ones: Best Solo Performance and the coogoong Most Popular Artist award for Yuna, and Trend of the Year (Female Solo) for Ryujin (Soompi). It is a haul that says two things at once: the group is still collecting, and its members are now winning on their own names.
Grand Honor’s Choice is shared with KiiiKiii, who take three awards in total, adding Best Music and Best Streaming Song for “404 (New Era)” (Goldscene). A rookie-era act sharing a grand prize with ITZY is the kind of line a young group builds a year around.
The rest of the Korea Grand Music Awards 2026 winners list spreads widely. MONSTA X win Best Group; Minho and Yena win Best Solo; Billlie take Best Dance Performance; KISS OF LIFE share Best Stage with ATEEZ; NEXZ win Best Global K-Pop Star and the Hulu Japan Popularity Award; and the Best Music field runs to sixteen acts, from IVE and aespa to WayV, TWS and Hearts2Hearts (Soompi). A day earlier, the weekend’s other grand-prize story had already broken: AND2BLE, six months after debut, won Grand Honors Choice and IS Rising Star on Artist Day, 7 November (allkpop).
Analysis: Music Day’s results draw a clean map of where K-pop’s centre of gravity sits this year — an established act, ATEEZ, converting longevity into a third straight grand prize; a touring act, RIIZE, rewarded for the unglamorous work of 21 cities; and ITZY showing that a group in its veteran phase can still out-collect the field by letting its members win solo too. The shared Grand Honor’s Choice, split between ITZY and KiiiKiii, is the ceremony hedging its own bet: honour the present, and buy a stake in whatever comes next.
Photo: Trainholic, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Sources
- https://www.soompi.com/article/1885017wpp/winners-of-2026-korea-grand-music-awards-music-day
- https://seolnotes.com/k-pop/riize-kgma-2026-grand-performer/
- https://seolnotes.com/k-pop/ateez-kgma-2026-grand-record/
- https://www.allkpop.com/article/2026/11/and2ble-gains-attention-for-winning-both-rising-star-rookie-award-and-grand-prize-at-2026-kgma
- https://www.mygoldscene.com/todays-radar/kgma-music-day-ateez-itzy-kiiikiii-2026
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