Everything You Need To Know About Gaon Charts New Ranking System For 2018
Gaon Charts will be introducing the new “Gaon Certification System” for songs and albums released after 2018.
The Korea Music Content Industry Association (KMCIA) will be posting certifications for songs and albums released after January 1, 2018 that exceed a set number of accumulated sales on the Gaon Chart.
“Many countries such as America, England and Japan have implemented an album sales certification system but Korea has not. There have been many inquiries and requests by Gaon Chart. We have judged the system necessary in Korea where music consumption is active and therefore have decided to implement a certification system based on the data of the Gaon Chart.” ㅡ Secretary General of KMCIA
The certification system will be applied to all domestic and international albums released in Korea (albums licensed in Korea) and all streaming/downloadable songs.
The system will not be applied for internationally licensed albums and albums that are not for sale as well as free promotional songs.
Albums with an accumulated sales of 250,000 will be certified as “Platinum” and those 1,000,000 “Million”.
Songs with accumulated downloads of 2,500,000 will be certified as “Platinum” and those with 10,000,000 “Diamond”.
Songs with accumulated streaming counts of 100,000,000 will be certified as “Platinum” and those with 1,000,000,000 “Billion”.
Meanwhile, some netizens have been predicting how the system will play out.
- “Twice is gonna be the only girl group to ever get an album certification lol”
- “There’s only a few groups that can reach 250k (BTS, EXO, W1, 17, GOT7 and Twice) and only BTS has been able to cross the 1 million threshold.”
- “Figure out digital and album sajaegi first before you move to a new system.”
Some have also pointed out some flaws in the new system.
- “Record sales certifications should be based on industry sales as a whole and purchasing power of that country, not the outliers. The fact that the outliers will always achieve something doesn’t mean that the record itself is too low.”
- “’Million’? ‘Billion’? Man at least pick something that sounds fancy and consistent with ‘Platinum’.
- “10 million downloads? In this day and age? Ridiculous.”
- “I wish their system is more consistent and comparable to countries like the U.S (RIAA) and Japan (RIAJ) since some of the thresholds are really hard to achieve (even for the most popular groups).”
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