When Spotify users opened the app last week, they were greeted with the music streaming service’s annual personalized wrap-up, summarizing their most-listened-to music and providing a bevy of stats. The service also provided a location where other users have similar tastes, and for fans of Korean pop music, or K-pop, that location was “Davis, USA.”

“Who the hell is Davis from USA,” a tweet that has been seen more than 2 million times asked in response to a Spotify Wrapped graphic showing Davis as their “Sound Town.”

Several replies pointed out that Davis was a “where,” not a “who,” while others quickly Googled the city’s demographics.

Chancellor Gary S. May got in on the fun, responding with a photo of him holding a photo of Jihyo, lead vocalist of the South Korean group Twice, during a commencement ceremony.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, some 6 million Spotify users got Davis as their “Sound Town.” Berkeley, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Cuiabá, Brazil, were among the 1,300 cities chosen for users, Spotify said.

Jokes and serious discussion of the K-pop community in Davis (and UC Davis) spread across social media. UC Davis students posted a TikTok on the university’s official channel celebrating the trend, and when students and staff in the Office of Strategic Communications crowdsourced a K-pop playlist, they got hundreds of song suggestions.

K-pop is a fixture across campus, and there are at least two student dance groups who perform routines popularized by South Korean groups. Last week, the club EKHO posted a video of students performing a dance routine in front of the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, with Alicia Eggert’s “This Present Moment” neon sign shown prominently. A 2018 video of a dance routine performed in front of the ASUCD Coffee House has earned nearly 3 million views for SoNE1 (pronounced “so anyone”).

Nicole Tran, a fourth-year psychology major and director of SoNE1, called UC Davis’ K-pop community “actually pretty large” and said she often hears the music in public spaces on campus where students pick the playlists.

“I also see students with K-pop tour merch of their favorite groups (like Stray Kids, Twice and Blackpink). I also see subtle merch that I am able to detect as a K-pop stan,” she said, using the word for an enthusiastic fan of a genre or subculture.

She said the size of that community isn’t necessarily caused by UC Davis attracting the type of people who listen to K-pop — it’s that the university is diverse and welcoming, which encourages people to be open with the unique things that make up their personalities.

“One thing I like about the school is how welcome the students are with each other and how open-minded we are,” she said. “It makes people more likely to express their interest in K-pop compared to the past, because I know people used to make fun of K-pop.”