Why did Melon get rid of its real-time chart?
After repeated 2018–2019 chart-manipulation scandals ("sajaegi"), Korea's top music platform scrapped its real-time chart entirely in 2020 — and to date, nobody has ever been criminally punished for it.
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- After repeated 2018–2019 chart-manipulation scandals ("sajaegi"), Korea's top music platform scrapped its real-time chart entirely in 2020 — and to date, nobody has ever been criminally punished for it.
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I need practical help with a Music Streaming (Spotify) issue.
The policy question: Why did Melon get rid of its real-time chart?
Useful context I found: After repeated 2018–2019 chart-manipulation scandals ("sajaegi"), Korea's top music platform scrapped its real-time chart entirely in 2020 — and to date, nobody has ever been criminally punished for it.
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6. Do not invent account access, guarantees, refund rights, or legal conclusions.Why this policy exists
Between 2018 and 2019, a string of relatively unknown independent artists topped Korea's music charts ahead of major idol groups with large, genuine fanbases, fueling suspicion of "sajaegi" (음원 사재기) — paying a broker to loop-stream a track to manipulate rankings. Suspicion deepened when some #1 tracks showed listener-count graphs that tracked suspiciously identical to the #2 track. The technical vulnerability was clear: Melon's old real-time chart recalculated up to 4 times per hour, while the daily chart recalculated only once every 24 hours — the more frequently a chart updates, the easier it is for a burst of coordinated streaming to move it. Melon abolished its real-time chart entirely on July 6, 2020, replacing it with a new "24Hits" chart, then revised again in August 2021 into a "Top100" chart designed as a middle ground between real-time and 24-hour aggregation, alongside a dedicated internal chart-integrity monitoring team. Despite years of recurring allegations, nobody has ever been criminally convicted for sajaegi — proving deliberate manipulation beyond doubt has proven structurally difficult.
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