Everything You Need to Know About the 2025 MAMA Awards: Hong Kong, 'Hear My Roar,' and the Daesang Race

The 2025 MAMA Awards arrive at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Stadium on November 28, reuniting K-pop's most internationally watched awards event with the city where its global era began.

The 27th edition of the Mnet Artist Music Awards spans two nights — November 28 and 29 — and returns to Hong Kong for the first time since 2018, when the ceremony helped cement the territory's place in K-pop's global geography. This year's edition has the scale to match that history: Kai Tak Stadium, Hong Kong's largest arena with a capacity of up to 50,000, will host both nights of live performance, and the show will stream on HBO Max internationally for the first time. Here is everything to know before the lights go up.

The Return to Hong Kong — and Why It Matters

MAMA held some of its most significant editions in Hong Kong during the 2010s, becoming the first major K-pop event to operate at stadium scale in an international city. The shows in that era helped establish the template for what a K-pop awards night could be outside South Korea: a live broadcast visible across Asia, carried by a combination of idol fandoms and mainstream music audiences who had been drawn to K-pop through the global streaming boom.

Since 2018, MAMA has rotated through Japan, the United States, and South Korea. The 2025 return to Hong Kong is therefore not merely a venue decision — it is a statement about where K-pop's global center of gravity currently sits and an acknowledgment that Hong Kong's role in that history has not been forgotten by the industry.

The choice of Kai Tak Stadium amplifies that statement. The venue, located on the site of Hong Kong's former international airport, is the largest indoor arena in the city and one of the most architecturally significant concert venues in the Asia-Pacific region. Hosting a two-night event there requires a level of production ambition that matches the ceremony's current global profile.

The Theme: "Hear My Roar: uh-heung"

This year's MAMA carries the theme "Hear My Roar: uh-heung" — a fusion of a declaration of power and a Korean expression of pure, uncontrollable excitement and joy. The combination is deliberate: the 2025 K-pop landscape has been defined by both the scale of its global commercial achievements and the emotional intensity of the fan communities driving them.

The "roar" half of the theme speaks to the year's data — record-breaking album sales, unprecedented concert grosses, Billboard chart positions that have required the music industry to reclassify how it thinks about K-pop's market penetration. The "uh-heung" half speaks to something that charts cannot capture: the quality of aliveness that a great K-pop performance generates in a room, and the specific atmosphere that only a live MAMA audience can produce.

The Performers: Two Nights, Two Distinct Lineups

The 2025 MAMA operates on a chapter structure, with each night featuring a distinct performer roster designed to build its own internal arc.

Chapter 1 (November 28) assembles a lineup centered on groups with the strongest domestic and pan-Asian fandoms of the past twelve months. IVE, ENHYPEN, BABYMONSTER, BOYNEXTDOOR, Super Junior, MEOVV, TWS, Hearts2Hearts, ALPHA DRIVE ONE, BUMSUP, (G)I-DLE, MIRROR, NCT WISH, and TREASURE will take the Chapter 1 stage. The range runs from Super Junior — whose decade-and-a-half career makes them the night's institutional anchor — to acts like MEOVV and Hearts2Hearts who have been among 2025's most-watched rising forces.

Chapter 2 (November 29) is where the year's heaviest-weight acts converge. Stray Kids, TXT, aespa, RIIZE, ZeroBaseOne, G-Dragon, JO1, Izna, Cortis, KickFlip, All Day Project, IDID, and KYOKA make up a lineup that represents K-pop's current commercial and critical peak. G-Dragon's presence as a solo performer is Chapter 2's most anticipated moment: his 2025 return has been one of the year's dominant music stories, and a MAMA performance in Hong Kong — a city with enormous personal history for the BigBang era — would carry weight beyond the stage itself.

The Daesang Race: What the Data Says

MAMA's three primary Daesang categories — Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year — are determined by a combination of fan voting, digital chart performance, physical sales, and jury scores. Each year, the race for these prizes functions as a real-time argument about who defined the year.

For Album of the Year, Stray Kids' KARMA has built the strongest quantitative case. Released in August, the album broke multiple Billboard 200 records and sold over three million copies in its first week on Hanteo — making it the best-performing K-pop album of 2025 by most traditional measures.

The Song of the Year race has been shaped in large part by the global reach of Rosé and Bruno Mars's collaboration "APT." — a track that crossed chart boundaries in ways that few K-pop-adjacent releases have managed and sustained its presence across streaming platforms for months following release.

For Artist of the Year, the conversation has centered on G-Dragon's comeback narrative. Returning after years away from active promotion, his 2025 presence has generated a volume of media and fan engagement that transcends the usual metrics. Whether the ceremony's scoring system translates that cultural weight into a Daesang is the question the industry has been asking since the nominees were announced.

How to Watch

Both nights of the 2025 MAMA Awards will air live on Mnet and stream on TVING. The 2025 edition marks the first time MAMA will be available on HBO Max internationally — a distribution deal that reflects the show's evolving relationship with Western streaming infrastructure and the audience it is designed to reach.

Coverage for international viewers begins November 28 at the start of Chapter 1's broadcast window. Fan communities across major social media platforms will coordinate real-time commentary, performance clip sharing, and translation throughout both nights. For K-pop fans outside the region, the MAMA live broadcast has become one of the year's most shared collective viewing experiences — and the 2025 edition, returning to the city that helped build that tradition, is set to be one of the most-watched yet.