As the year goes on, I'll try to add more valuable features.Even before I started my work on the top 20 this year, I got the bad news that one of my major chart source – MBC’s Show! Music Core, is not going to have a ranking system anymore.
Fortunately, I have enough sources right now and I’ll adjust the percentage of each source accordingly.Before I tell you the top 20 songs of this week, let’s re-visit how this chart is composed:
Each week, I extract the top (40, 30, or 25 songs depends on the chart) songs and albums of various charts from major TV station gayo programs, weekly album sales, and internet website rankings. I assign a percentage to each of my source based on their relative importance. The song that receives the highest score will be the #1 song of that week.
Starting from the middle of last year, I further divided my sources into “seeded charts” and “non-seeded charts”. A seeded chart is a chart with more importance, and its songs are more updated and/or fairly ranked. The songs of a seeded chart will automatically become part of our chart scores. These are my seeded charts with their weight:
Chart Korea (20%) – An excellent indicator as they calculated airplays from TV, radio, and cable.
M.Net M!Countdown (20%) – Since SBS, KBS, and MBC are dropping their ranking programs, this becomes the only gayo show with a top 50 chart now. It is more important now than before. I just hope that they are having a show every week.
In the 2nd half of last year, they missed way too many weeks with special shows.SBS Inki Gayo (15%) – Even though they stop doing the rankings during the show, they still have a weekly top 50 chart. Not the best charts out there, as they are biased toward teeny boppers and male artists. A good thing about this chart is that their songs are very updated. In fact, the songs are too new sometimes. This year, I decide to backdate this chart one week to be more accurate.
The rest of my sources are what I called non-seeded charts. Non-seeded means that the songs ranked on these charts will depend on the songs from the “seeded charts”. A song must appear on a seeded chart in order to qualify for a ranking on the non-seeded chart. In other words, even if a song who is ranked #1 on a non-seeded chart but it does not appear on any of the seeded chart, this song will not be considered in our ranking scores. The reason I do that is because some of the internet charts rank songs all over the places. Only the first 25 songs (related to seeded charts) will be taken out from each non-seeded charts. Here is the list of our non-seeded charts:
Hanteo weekly sales (20%) – Album sales are an important indicator in each chart rankings. I cutoff each week’s sale on Sunday. The one thing I modify – I include OST sales into the top 25 albums as long as they are sung in Korean language. Also, I backdate the sales chart of 2 weeks ago because it usually takes a singer 1 week for their comeback special and another week to enter the chart. So, for the 1st week of January, the weekly sales of December 3rd week is used. Check out Soysauce's post each week for the updated weekly sales.
MBC (5%) – Even though Show! Music Core no longer offers a chart ranking, they do have another gayo ranking chart on their main site. I’ll use this one from now on.
SBS (5%) – This one is different from the Inky Gayo top 50. Just like MBC, SBS has a chart on their main site. This chart offers more variety of songs.
MaxMP3, Melon, Jukeon (5% each) – 3 of the more accurate internet charts out there.
As you know some of these charts will not update their rankings at times. If that happens, I’ll half their weight for a static week, and then I’ll include my backup sources for that week. Currently, I use the charts of MTV Korea and/or Pops In Seoul (Arirang TV) as my backups.
The scoring rules work as follow:
1. I look at the top 50 (or 25) songs (or its relevant album) of each chart. If a song (or its album) is #1, it will receive a maximum of 200 points (for a 20% weight) for that week. The #2 songs will receive 196 points, and so on, and the #50 songs will receive 4 points. If a song is #1 on a 10% important chart, it will receive 100 points for that week. The #2 songs will receive 96 points, and so on, and the #25 songs will receive 4 points.
2. If 2 or more songs are tied with the same total score, the tiebreaker for the higher ranking will be for the song coming from an album with higher sales (Hanteo).
3. If a singer has more than 1 song in different charts, their album sales score will be pro-rated according to the total charted scores of the number of songs that singer have on the chart.
4. The 20 songs with the highest score on that week will be our top 20 songs of the week.
I may add more sources if I find any other reliable charts out there. The weight of each source may also change in the future depends on the credibility of each source.
Remember to tune in soompi radio for the top 20 countdown show 8pm EST every Saturday. Also check out a new feature “kpop ranks” on the main page of soompi website. I’ll post the top 20 songs out there each week.
a lot to read through this time... but worth it- w00t- goooo epik high!! Jumpin to the top, yooo. 
No, Kim Hyung Joong is a solo artist. He had a #1 song 3 years ago "그랬나봐" from his debut album, and in 2004 he also hit #2 with "그녀가 웃잖아". Before his solo activity, he used to sing on the project group TOY with the hit song "One good person". He's another very underrated artist.
