Type of site Record chart Website gaonchart.co.kr Commercial Yes | Available in Korean Alexa rank 168,127 (March 2016) Registration Optional | |
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Owner Korea Music Content Industry Association | ||
The Gaon Music Chart tabulates the relative weekly popularity of songs or albums in South Korea. It is compiled by the Korea Music Content Industry Association and sponsored by South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, with an aim to create a national chart for South Korea similar to the Billboard charts of the United States and the Oricon charts of Japan. It started tracking sales since the beginning of 2010. It was officially launched in February 2010 with a launching ceremony held on 23 February 2010 at the Westin Chosun hotel in Seoul. The launch also included a small awarding ceremony, which awarded girl group Girls' Generation with top artist of January and boy band Super Junior with best album of 2009. Meanwhile, Hit single "We Fell In Love", performed by Jo Kwon of 2AM and Ga-in of Brown Eyed Girls, took the title of best weekly mobile ringtone.
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In February 2011, it published information on both online and offline album sales of 2010, including a detailed breakdown of online chart data and was the first time that off-line album sales was released since 2008 when the Music Industry Association of Korea stopped compiling data.
Music charts
There are two primary charts: Gaon Album Chart and Gaon Digital Chart. The charts lists domestic artists' sales, international artists' sales and a combined overall sales in weekly, monthly and year-end format.
The Gaon Album Chart ranks physical album sales, including mini and single albums. It is compiled from offline data provided by record labels and distributors such as LOEN Entertainment, CJ E&M Music, KT Music, Sony Music Korea, Pony Canyon Korea, Universal Music Korea, and Warner Music Korea.
The Gaon Digital Chart ranks best-selling non-physical, digital music sales, and is an aggregate of downloads, streaming and background music. It excludes radio airplay, and different versions of a song are listed as separate entries. It is compiled from online data provided by web-based music providers such as Olleh Music, genie, Melon, Mnet, Soribada, Naver Music, KakaoMusic and Bugs. There is no digital album chart because each song is a separate digital download.
All charts rank the top 100. Before mid-2014, the digital, streaming, download, and noraebang charts ranked the top 200.
Social charts
The Gaon Social Chart is a weekly chart that ranks the top 100 songs according to their popularity on YouTube, Twitter, Weibo and YinYueTai.
The Gaon Weibo Chart is a weekly chart that ranks the top 10 most popular K-pop groups and the top 30 most popular individual K-pop artists in China using data from Weibo. This chart started the week of June 29, 2014.