Every week in Korea, someone is told that their song is number one, and someone else is told that it is not. Both statements can be true on the same day. A song can top the streaming charts and lose the trophy on television; another can win on a music show and be nowhere near the top of the charts. For a newcomer this looks like a mistake. It is not. Different lists measure different things, and the question 'who is number one?' has no single answer until you say which list you mean.
We, the haeyo teachers, spent a few days reading public sources to explain how the lists differ. We will be plain about the limits of what we found, because this is a subject where confident numbers travel faster than evidence.
Two kinds of number one
The first kind is a chart. A chart counts what people consumed: streams, downloads, albums sold. It has no opinion about who appeared on which programme. The second kind is a music-show win. A music show builds a score from consumption data and then adds things only a television programme can give: how often the song was played on that broadcaster, and what fans voted for in the show's own app. The two lists share an ingredient or two and a lot of difference.
That is why the idol world pays so much attention to the second list. The first can only be moved by consumption. The second can also be moved by appearances and by organised voting, and that is where the arguments come from.
What goes into a show's score
Each of the weekly shows describes its score in its own way. Here is what public sources say, kept to ingredients where a percentage would be a guess.
| Show | Ingredients named in sources | Percentages: as published, with the caveat |
|---|---|---|
| Music Bank (KBS2) | Digital sales and streaming, KBS broadcast count, fan vote, album sales, social media | One community-edited page lists, for a 2022 revision, digital 60, broadcast 20, fan vote 10, album 5, social 5. The same page contradicts itself on whether digital was 65 or 60, so treat the figures as unverified. It also says album data moved from Hanteo to Circle in January 2023. |
| Show! Music Core (MBC) | Digital, albums, video, broadcast count, a viewers' panel, a global pre-vote; a live vote for the top three candidates | The same source confirms only a 60 percent digital share from October 2022 and gives no breakdown of the rest. Unverified. |
| Inkigayo (SBS) | SBS broadcast count, digital platforms, albums, official music-video views, a pre-vote, a live vote for the top candidates | The published table shows only two figures, 50 and 20 percent, from October 2024, without saying which items they belong to. We do not use them. |
| M Countdown (Mnet) | Digital, albums, global social media, a global fan vote, broadcast count, live vote | The page's own figures add up to 120 percent, so they cannot be right. We give no percentages. |
| The Show (SBS Life) | Global streaming data, a fandom engagement score, pre, live and post votes through one app | Weights not published. This is the system from the June 2026 restart. |
| Show Champion (MBC M) | Digital, albums, online voters, a panel of experts, broadcast count | The only breakdown we found is a 2017 report, which is an old system. Current weights unverified. |
Fan voting for a show happens in that broadcaster's partner app, and whether a foreigner can vote, how often and on how many devices differs from notice to notice. We could not confirm any of it.
Look at the pattern, not the digits. In Music Bank's published table, digital sales carry far the biggest share; broadcast count and fan voting are small, but they are the part a company can influence. For a close contest, that small part can decide the week.
An old scoring system, for comparison
A 2017 report on six music shows is useful mostly as a reminder that the rules change. It said Music Bank then weighted digital sales at 65, broadcast count at 20, albums at 5 and fan preference at 10, while Inkigayo used 55 for digital sales, 5 for albums, 5 for a pre-vote and 35 for social media. These are old systems that have been replaced. A fan who quotes them today is quoting history.
Circle, Hanteo, Melon: three different lists
When fans talk about 'the charts', they usually mean one of three lists, and they measure different things.
Circle Chart
A national chart that publishes digital rankings and album rankings. Its digital chart counts streams and downloads from several services, among them Melon, Genie, Bugs, FLO, VIBE, Spotify and Apple Music, and the weights between platforms are not public. It also publishes yearly album totals: its 2025 top-400 list showed 7.4 percent fewer album sales than 2024. The music shows have used Circle data for albums since January 2023, according to a community-edited page.
Hanteo
A sales-tracking service that is best known to fans for album-sales figures and for its own awards. A community-edited page gives its awards a mix of 50 percent Hanteo sales data, 20 percent global vote and 30 percent judges for the main prize, which we could not check against an official page. We found no source in our reading that explains how the Hanteo chart itself is calculated, so we do not describe it.
Melon
A single streaming service with its own real-time chart, and its own year-end awards. One community-edited page lists the 2025 awards as mixing digital data 60 percent, online voting 20 and judges 20 for the main prizes, with a separate category decided entirely by votes. This is about the awards and not the daily chart, and it is a community-edited source.
The practical point: a song that tops one list is not guaranteed to top another. Circle is spread over many platforms; Melon is one platform with its own audience; Hanteo is a sales view. And all three differ from a television show's score, which is a different mix again.
A worked example, with invented numbers
To show how a split can happen, take an imaginary song. All the figures below are made up for illustration, and nothing here describes a real song or a real weekly result.
Song A is a ballad that streams all week and is never promoted on television. Song B belongs to a group that appears on four shows in the week, has an active fan voting community and a new album out. On the charts, Song A leads comfortably, because streams are what it has. On a show, the smaller part of the score that comes from broadcast count and from votes is a large share of the gap between the two, and Song B can finish first. Both lists are 'correct'. They answer different questions.
Year-end awards use the same ideas
The year-end ceremonies use the same ingredients again: data, fan votes and a panel of judges. Some are now held abroad: the organiser announced that the 2025 MAMA ceremony would take place in Hong Kong on 28 and 29 November. Votes often go through a fan app, and overseas fans take part in large numbers, but we found no confirmed official score tables for the big ceremonies, so we do not print any beyond the Melon and Hanteo figures above, which are community-edited and unverified.
Three of the broadcasters' year-end programmes, on KBS, SBS and MBC, are not award ceremonies at all. They are stage shows with no prizes.
When the vote itself is the problem
Sometimes a count is not honest, and the best known case in this world is a television audition. In 2019, viewers of the survival show Produce X 101 noticed that the final vote totals for the top twenty places appeared to be multiples of a particular number. The analysis spread online and led to a criminal investigation. We give only what the courts decided. The programme's lead producer, Ahn Joon-young, was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit about 37 million won, and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence in case 2020do17078. A chief producer, Kim Yong-bum, was sentenced to one year and eight months and left prison in July 2021. At the appeal stage, a list of the trainees who had been harmed in seasons one to four was made public. We could not confirm the date of the Supreme Court ruling, so we do not give one.
That case was about an audition and not a music show, and it is not an accusation against any show's scoring. We include it because it explains why fans care so much about transparency: a number that decides a career deserves to be checkable.
There is a related, smaller story about openness. In 2022, there was a public row after a singer's broadcast score was reported as zero on one show. The press used it to argue that the broadcaster's scoring should be published more clearly. We mention it without the name, because what matters is the point about transparency and not the person.