On Kpop Awards Shows

Two days ago I had a very strained exchange via Twitter DM with an Army who was convinced that BTS’s streaming numbers and sales for Map of the Soul: Persona meant that 1) Persona was a high quality album and 2) proved that the group was hugely popular in South Korea and this Army was offended that I would dare imply otherwise.

Yesterday the Melon Music Awards were held and BTS swept all the major categories. Doesn’t that prove this Army’s case?

Here is what I want to say, as a long time fan:

Awards, streaming numbers, sales numbers… these things don’t matter in the long run. Hell, they don’t even matter in the short run.

The only time that knowing who won which award in what year matters is if some sadist decides “Kpop Awards Winners” is the theme of your bar trivia night.

Sales and streaming numbers only matter as far as they can push your favorite group or artist onto the radar of the types of people who book drama OSTs and variety show appearances… as well as hooking a few new listeners.

Awards, sales, and streaming numbers are not objective measures of how liked a group or artist is, the quality of that group or artist’s music, the moral character of fans, or, indeed, of anything else. They are a transitory measurement of popularity filtered through whatever industry politics are happening that day.

Let’s take the Melon Music Awards as an example. Let me give you a more rounded picture of what was happening on the Melon Charts during the past year. I trawled the Melon charts that mapped the top 100 songs on Melon by month and tracked the top 20 songs from November 2018 to October 2019.

There were 106 individual songs in the Top 20 in those months from 69 individual artists/groups (excluding 4 foreigners and combining the Show Me the Money rappers and producers who were mostly a jumble of credits I didn’t bother untangling).

Here are the artists with at least 3 tracks in the Top 20 Melon monthly charts over that time period:

1. Paul Kim, 5 songs

2. Heize, 4 songs

3. Ben, 4 songs

4. Beom June Jang, 3 songs

5. BOL4, 3 songs

6. Kassy, 3 songs

7. Twice, 3 songs

8. Punch, 3 songs

Here are the songs that spent 5 or more months in the Top 20:

1. “2002” by Anne Marie, 6 months

2. “Your Regards” by Song Ha Yea, 5 months

3. “If There Was Practice in Love” by Lim Jae Hyun, 5 months

4. “Every Day, Every Moment” by Paul Kim, 5 months

5. “Me After You” by Paul Kim, 5 months

6. “The Day Was Beautiful” by Kassy, 5 months

The highest ranking idol groups (and idol soloists) are all below these ballad singers: ITZY, WINNER, EXO, Sunmi, Taeyeon, and, yes, BTS all had 2 songs in the Top 20. (Although if you include D.O. and Chen's solo songs then that's 4 for EXO... and with Mino's solo that makes 3 for WINNER.)

ITZY, Twice, Jennie, and BTS all had a song that spent 4 months in the Top 20.

(And Jennie’s “SOLO” spent 3 of those 4 months in the top 5!)

Winner’s Mino, Mamamoo’s Hwasa, Taeyeon, and N.Flying all had songs that spent 3 months in the Top 20.

So, where was Paul Kim when the performances were announced? Where were the ballad artists?

Well, maybe they don’t command the type of media coverage and ratings the idol acts do. Fair enough, but then where was Twice? Winner’s Mino? EXO? Blackpink's Jennie to sing what was one of the most popular songs of the year by any measure?

To dig into this (and to understand why BTS essentially had the BTS Awards yesterday) you have to wade into the muck of Korean music industry politics and be prepared to color in shades of gray.

Melon remains the most popular streaming service but there are competitors but there’s also services like Genie etc..

The Big 3 export Kpop companies--SM Entertainment (EXO), YG Entertainment (Winner’s Mino), and JYP Entertainment (Twice)--don’t like Melon as a company very much. In fact, they went as far as to launch their own rival streaming service called FLO… so why would they lend their talent to promote a rival?

The answer is: they didn’t.

And is Melon going to assign awards based on strict objective criteria, deliberately not looking to see who is going to be in attendance and who has a large fanbase that will generate streams and media coverage?

If you truly believe that, well, I just may be in possession of a bridge crossing the Han River that you might be interested in purchasing but the reality is... no. They gave awards to the artists who were going to attend.

Does that mean the acts who attended and won awards at the Melon Music Awards were bad? No, of course not. But attendance and awards don’t represent an objective measure of quality nor of popularity among the Korean general listening public either.

Because let’s really get into it: Export Kpop is not a perfect Venn Diagram circle with the music Koreans listen to in Korea.

Is there some overlap? Of course. But your average Korean music consumer is not leaving their computer on all night to stream with the sound off to help their favorites in the chart rankings nor are they voting for their favorite ballad singers to win the top prize at a music show. The idol export market is a different world than the one Ben, Paul Kim, Kassy, and artists like that operate in. Neither is better or worse or more or less authentic but if you really want to “prove” things using the Melon streaming charts or award wins, you have to understand what it is these things are measuring and the varied audiences they pull from.

It is fact that fans of export Kpop living abroad can and do stream competitively to get their favorite groups to rank into the Korean charts. I personally know people who have done this for groups like MonstaX and have seen the screenshots from the Baidu bar for BTS (with well over 100k members) giving explicit instructions on how to stream most effectively to get songs to chart.

Is this cheating? It depends on what you think the game is. Does 1 stream represent 1 person who listens to a song all the way through 1 time because of the objective “goodness” of the song? No, of course not. Charting is a game like anything else. Groups with large but niche audiences can get their favorites to chart alongside the mainstream Paul Kims and BOL4s and congratulate themselves on their flex of mass power. But does it mean anything more than that? No.

And how can I be so confident that BTS is in the former category and not the latter? Because I’ve seen the tweets, the screenshots, the discussions of fans who organize things like mass streaming and voting. That’s how. When you have a fandom as large as BTS’s Army--especially in China--then you will see the evidence reflected in the charts.

I got ratioed to hell when I said this on Twitter but you have to understand that in Korea, BTS are just one more idol group. Their birthday signs and advertisements blend into the many, many others that appear around Korea. Idols are like wallpaper to most of the population unless you are part of the idol subculture. That shouldn’t make your enjoyment of your favorites any less valid to you. I started listening to Winner because Mino’s song “Fiance” dominated the charts last winter. That is what the charts can do: help highlight things you might not have otherwise listened to and document what people were listening to in a moment in time.

When it comes to these types of awards, accept them for what they are--a sign of recognition from the industry and/or of hard work from the fanbase--and simply be happy as a fan when your favorites win one without needing to use it as a hammer against other artists and fandoms because there will come a year when your favorites do not win. Will you like them less then?

When GOT7 won their first Daesung at the Asia Artist Awards after years of ranking in behind bigger groups, it was extremely touching. That is what these award shows are good for. Appreciate the moment for what it is and then let it go.

(Originally posted December 1, 2019)