There are so many award shows in K-pop and I feel like the judging scores, or the judging criteria in general, are NEVER consistent. Sometimes, it feels like the judge score is just another name for attendance points where simply showing up to the award show gives you an advantage or just playing favoritism. The results are so random that you genuinely can’t understand the logic behind them.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because I was closely following the recent and the new, 2026 SPOTV K-Pop Awards. For the Best Female Group category, the criteria was presented as 20% voting, 20% digital streaming, 20% album sales, and 40% judge scores. The digital and album sales portions are both based on Circle Chart data.
Here’s how things went down:
Voting Round 1:
NMIXX – 57.76%
RESCENE – 19.94%
i-dle – 9.36%
KISS OF LIFE – 8.41%
Voting Round 2:
NMIXX – 670,240 votes
RESCENE – 427,520 votes
KISS OF LIFE – 181,920 votes
Digital Scores:
NMIXX – 528,747,218 points
RESCENE – 137,343,751 points
KISS OF LIFE – 40,383,717 points
Album Sales:
NMIXX – 1,076,109 copies
RESCENE – 106,779 copies
KISS OF LIFE – 134,899 copies
Long story short, Kiss of Life won the Best Female Group award.
As you can see from the numbers above, NMIXX won the voting categories by a significant margin. Their digital score was also incomparably higher (by 13 times), and their album sales were nearly 10 times higher than Kiof’s.
Given that the judges accounted for 40% of the final score, the only way I can make sense of Kiof winning is if we assume NMIXX received essentially ZERO points from the judges whatsoever while Kiof received the maximum possible score.
Granted, NMIXX didn’t attend the award show. So that raises the obvious question here. Is the judge score just another name for participation points for this new award show?
This is precisely what bothers me about these award shows in general. Fans spend actual money and put in a ton of effort voting and supporting their groups, only for a huge portion of the final result to come down to a judging category where the criteria are rarely disclosed clearly enough for fans to understand how those scores are actually determined.
This case is just one recent example, but it’s something I’ve noticed with K-pop award shows for years. Outside of the Korean Music Awards (KMA), it can be so hard to make sense of the results of a lot of these award shows, even when they provide seemingly objective criteria and percentages.
I think that if these awards are supposed to reflect measurable achievements, then the judging process should at least be transparent enough for fans to understand how the final results were reached. What do you guys think about the judges’ criteria for these award shows?
submitted by /u/Carelessies
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