Chinese music video platform YinYueTai suddenly issued an apology to EXO fans for rigging EXO’s award in 2017.
Recently, the Weibo account of YinYueTai, one of the largest music video platforms in China, released an apology to EXO fans for their mistreatment towards EXO at the V Chart awards ceremony in 2017.
At that time, the organizer set the rules that fans must pay money to vote for their favorite artists. EXO-L (EXO’s fandom) spent up to 200.000 yuan (about 37 million won) to vote for EXO as the “Most Popular Singer”. In the end, fans were all shocked as the award went to the girl group ATF and EXO was not even listed in TOP 5.
In addition, the day EXO attended the V Chart awards was also their 5th debut anniversary, and the group was supposed to perform 4 songs. However, the organizers reduced EXO’s performance to 2 songs due to lack of time. When leader Suho asked the staff to let them perform the full setlist, they rudely told him to get back to his seat.
After the incident, YinYueTai faced backlash from EXO fans, and EXO’s biggest fanbase in China – EXO Bar announced their boycott of all activities related to YinYueTai.
6 years later, YinYueTai suddenly released their explanation for the incident and apologized to EXO and their fans.
In the letter, YinYueTai’s representative Zhang Dou said, “This is our belated apology”, adding “YinYueTai had held the YinYue V Chart for 5 years and suffered big losses every year. Until the 5th V Chart Awards in 2017, our financial state had become so difficult that we could no longer bear more loss. That’s why we introduced a new voting system that allowed each individual to vote as many times as they wanted to encourage competition like a PK strategy.”
They continued, “On the night of the voting, EXO always topped the ‘Most Popular Singer’ category. However, within the last very few minutes, several accounts representing a girl group paid a large sum of up to hundreds of thousands and overturned the chart”, adding “Since YinYueTai’s system was not perfectly completed, the situation went beyond our control”.
“Keeping our principle of not changing the chart data, YinYueTai decided to announce the real-time chart at the awards ceremony and that led to a huge controversy. YinYueTai would like to sincerely apologize for disappointing and frustrating EXO fans as we caused all your efforts to go in vain due to our incomplete voting system”, they shared.
Lastly, YinYueTai said, “We hope to receive a chance to make up for our mistake in the future!”.
