Turkey is making its own girl groups the K-pop way
A new Turkish girl group's video is number 1 on YouTube in Turkey this week. It is one of several groups made the way K-pop makes them, and the first one has a video on 146 million views.
It appears that Turkey is now making its own pop groups the way South Korea does. Groups come out of talent shows on YouTube, and each member stands for a colour or an element. The songs are in Turkish. The biggest group has a video on 146 million views. That's what I find interesting.
The video at the top this week
This is AURA, a four-member group put together this spring. Their new video went up on the evening of 22 October. On the morning of 24 October it was number 1 on YouTube's trending list in Turkey (kworb's list stamped 24 October, 02:10 New York time), one place above the trailer for season 3 of The Rings of Power.
It had 827,956 views when I read it. The video launches their album ELEMENTAL, and it comes from the company that made the group, so it is promotion by its nature.
The numbers
These are the biggest official music videos I found from the two groups. I read every view count on YouTube on 24 October.
| Video | Went up | Views |
|---|---|---|
| Manifest with Ajda Pekkan, Hileli | 7 May 2026 | 146,621,859 |
| Manifest, Amatör | 4 Dec 2025 | 71,310,301 |
| Manifest, KTS | 15 May 2025 | 58,626,827 |
| Manifest, TRALALA | 8 Oct 2026 | 37,302,250 |
| AURA, YUH! | 14 May 2026 | 9,709,202 |
| AURA, TUZAK | 9 Jul 2026 | 8,767,308 |
| AURA, 2036 Halftime Show | 22 Oct 2026 | 827,956 |
TRALALA has had its 37 million views since 8 October. Dates are YouTube's upload dates, in US Pacific time.
How it started
The first group is Manifest. According to Turkish Wikipedia, it came out of Big5 Türkiye, a talent show that the media company Hypers ran on YouTube. The six members were picked at the end of a six-month camp, and their first single came out on 7 February 2025. Each member has a colour. One of them, Hilal Yelekçi, had been a K-pop style solo singer and a K-pop dance teacher before the show. Wikipedia says their song "Amatör" went to the top of Turkey's most-played chart in December 2025.
Hürriyet wrote about it on 31 May under the headline "Fourth-generation girl groups following in Manifest's footsteps". The paper counts three earlier waves of Turkish girl groups: Cici Kızlar in the 1970s, Çıtır Kızlar in the 1990s and Hepsi in the 2000s. It says Manifest sold out concerts at the Ülker Sports and Event Hall in Istanbul, with fans dressed as the members. Then it lists the groups that followed:
Karm6, three women and three men, came out of a second YouTube talent show, Metronom Akademi. Mantra, five women, came out of the same show, and each member stands for a different mantra. AURA did not come from a show. A new company, Seventh Door Entertainment, put it together as its first project (Onedio). Each of its four members is an element, and Hürriyet gives each a colour too: water and blue, fire and red, earth and green, air and pink. Hürriyet also names a boy band show, Idol House Türkiye, and says Hypers is planning one too. Hürriyet says you only have to scroll social media for a while to come across another new group.
In an interview with Hürriyet in July, one of the AURA members, Suzy Roumenov, said they had been living together for about two weeks. AURA has also posted a dance practice video, a format K-pop groups use, which has 265,156 views.
Fans say it is starting to go the other way
Two things point outwards.
In August, Turkish and Korean fans put AURA's TUZAK video side by side with "Sweat", a video by the Korean girl group KISS OF LIFE. They said the Korean video had copied the Turkish one (Hürriyet, 14 August). TUZAK went up on 9 July and Sweat on 4 August, and Sweat has 35,704,461 views. That is a claim fans made. I have not compared the two videos myself, and I have not seen anything from KISS OF LIFE's side.
Manifest have been looking abroad for longer. Hürriyet said in May that they had their eyes on the international stage. In December 2025 they put out Amateur, an English version of Amatör, which has 10,794,729 views. In October they put out TRALALA, which Wikipedia calls their first song in English, and says they launched in London.
Why I find it interesting
My read is that Turkey has copied how K-pop makes a group, and kept its own language and its own stars. The talent show, the camp, the colours and elements, and AURA's dance practice video and shared house are all K-pop's way of making a group. But the songs are in Turkish, and Manifest ties itself to Turkish pop's own past. A singer from Hepsi sat on the Big5 panel. Manifest's biggest video is a duet with Ajda Pekkan, who has been a star in Turkey for more than 50 years (Wikipedia).
It looks like the method is something you can take and use, and it has worked in Turkey within a year of Manifest's first single. And now the copy has its own fans who think it is being copied back, and its biggest group is singing in English in London. Whether the Turkish groups get anywhere outside Turkey, nothing I read says.
What I could not check
I could not see whether any of these views, or AURA's place on the trending list, are paid for, or how many of the views come from Turkey. I did not read Spotify or radio charts for any of the groups, so the December chart claim is Wikipedia's and I did not open the chart. I am reporting what fans said about KISS OF LIFE, not my own comparison. And I could not find out why AURA's video is called a "2036 halftime show". Its description only names the album and the song "2036", and says some of the effects were made with AI.