AS a longtime fan of K-pop, I have a confession to make: I have very little idea of how these music charts work. During comebacks (the term they use when a group or artist has a new album), I just buy physical albums, the soft copies on iTunes and stream via Spotify and YouTube. If there is some extra, I contribute toward buying streaming passes for my favorites’ streaming teams.
The Gaon Chart is the official government-sponsored music chart. It releases weekly every Thursday, and ranks international and domestic music. Gaon is divided into an Album Chart, which ranks physical album sales from data provided by record labels; and a Singles Chart, which ranks digital and mobile track sales culled from data provided from download services (more on this later).
The Billboard Korea K-Pop Hot 100 is a chart which ranks digital sales from web sites and mobile providers. It is released in English every Saturday.
Then there is Instiz’s iChart.
I spent the last week studying music charts and digital streaming so I could do more for my favorite groups in the future, and what I found was a complicated maze—for me at least.
There are seven major music streaming charts in Korea right now: Melon, Genie, Naver, Mnet, Soribada, Flo and Bugs.
The most familiar name to me is Melon. These charts each have Real Time and Daily charts while Instiz’s iChart combines the data from these major music charts. The rankings are based on points given by iChart.
The No. 1 song gets 10 points for real time and daily charts, the No. 2 song gets seven points, and so on and so forth. These points are reflected in the rankings to determine whether a song has achieved All Kill (AK), Certified All Kill (CAK) or Perfect All Kill (PAK).
All Kill means a song is No. 1 on the Melon, Bugs, Cyworld, Soribada, Mnet, Naver Music, Monkey3, Olleh and Daum charts at the same time.
Perfect All Kill means the song has reached an All Kill status then ranked first on the Instiz weekly chart. When a song is No. 1 in real time and daily across all six charts, its considered a Certified All Kill.
If any of the information I provided is wrong, please feel free to correct me via my e-mail address. I would love to learn more about this.
It’s honestly very difficult to get information about this because many of the web sites are in Korean and translating the texts are quite tricky. So how do you support your favorite groups aside from physical sales?
I found this how-to (www.infiniteupdates.net) because, as I’ve said, I am no expert.