Many people seem to be confused about how the Melon Charts work, so I wanted to clear up some of the misunderstandings surrounding them.
When you visit the platform, you’ll see two different charts, Top 100 and Hot 100.
Melon Hot 100 chart is mainly for new releases. It ranks songs released within the last 30 or 100 days based on recent hourly performance. By that I mean the hourly unique listeners & downloads. By nature, it’s much easier to enter than the Top 100 chart and you’ll often see how new songs are doing compared to other new songs on this specific chart. It’s not really something people give much credit for. Simply put, think of it as a chart ONLY for new songs.
Melon Top 100 is the chart that many people look at. It’s the main, more comprehensive chart so I’ll be going into greater detail. It could be a bit confusing, so read carefully.
The chart is updated every hour using a weighted combination of consumption volume. From 8 AM to midnight, Melon calculates consumption by combining 50% of the 24-hour consumption and 50% of the 1-hour consumption. From 1 AM to 7 AM (aka Zombie Hours), it uses 100% of the past 24-hour consumption to prevent fandom-driven streaming pushes during zombie hours from inflating the ranks on the chart.
In other words, since the 2021 reform, Melon’s Top 100 chart has historically been less responsive during these hours to minimize the impact of mass streaming by fandoms, which was seen as non-representative of the GP’s actual listening habits. That’s why you often see songs that chart high during the day suddenly drop multiple ranks or even fall out of the chart entirely during those hours.
Then, this consumption volume (or total usage, whatever you wanna call it) is converted to digital score where streaming accounts for 40% and downloads account for 60%. On Melon, streaming is measured using unique listeners (UL), meaning each account is counted once within the time window rather than raw repeat plays. And downloads are obviously counted once per account. The UL system is precisely what makes Melon more resistant to brute force mass streaming from same users.
The songs then become ranked based on their digital score which ultimately determines their position on the chart. So again, the hourly chart you see during the day on the Top 100 is not truly reflective of how popular a song actually is. The best and most reliable indicator is looking at the Daily Top 100 chart, which only takes into account the 24 hour data.
Because idol songs are mostly fandom-driven, they are able to chart high upon release if the fandom is large enough. A bigger fandom generally translates into more unique listeners (ULs). That’s why you often see BG songs enter high on the Top 100 hourly chart but then drop sharply during low activity hours or even fall out of the chart entirely. This is also why there is often a large gap between a song’s hourly Top 100 rank and its placement on the daily chart.
I’ll give some examples to help you understand. Let’s use BTS as an example. Until AKMU’s comeback, many people saw SWIM sitting at the top of the hourly chart for an extended period. Some wondered why it wasn’t achieving PAKs. That’s because IVE’s Bang Bang retook the #1 spot on the daily chart not too long after SWIM‘s release. It may have felt longer, but SWIM was only at the top of the daily chart for 4 days. The song struggled with its longevity at #1 because much of its chart performance was driven by repeated activity from the same user base, which meant comparatively lower UL count. A large number of listeners outside the fandom checked out BTS’s new music upon release, but the UL count declined fairly sharply with each passing day. That’s why it couldn’t stay consistent at the top.
Another example would be TXT’s recent song, Stick With You. The fandom was able to push the song up to #18 on the hourly Top 100, but the daily ranking at the time finished at #96. This is a prime example of what I said about there being a large gap between the hourly and daily chart.
The reason I used BGs as examples is because the gap is often more pronounced for BGs compared to GGs, who tend to naturally gain more ULs outside of their core fandom. I probably could have explained all this in simpler terms, but I ended up writing too many words because I didn’t want to leave anything out. Hope this helps.
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