Frank Kogan

Beginning this week, Gaon has changed its weighting methodology to give more prominence to purchased downloads. The order of the aggregate chart is now almost identical to the downloads chart, and Crayon Pop doesn't seem to benefit from the fact that they're #2 on streaming and #1 on BGM, mobile, and karaoke (the social chart is a new thing and is currently not factored into the aggregate chart). This change came in response to the recent news that the Big 3 companies are planning to investigate digital manipulation of the charts, where companies allegedly employ multiple user accounts and IP addresses to stream certain songs 24 hours a day. While there's good evidence that this type of manipulation is happening, and it's good that the charts are taking steps to counter it, simply lowering the weight of streaming doesn't seem to be the right way to deal with it. Streaming is still the primary method people in Korea use to listen to music and is a better indicator of a song's popularity over time than downloads, which tend to be highest on the day of release before falling quickly. At this point, I'd say the individual Gaon charts are still very useful (and it's good that they've now fixed whatever error was making the numbers so inflated on the downloads chart the past few weeks), but the digital aggregate chart has sort of become redundant now that it's more or less the same as the downloads chart but with different numbers. Plus it's not really fair to compare points from before and after they changed their methodology. Are they going to recalculate the points of the songs from the first part of the year when they do the yearly chart? For now, I'd say the Billboard chart is a better indicator of a song's overall popularity in a given week.