Top 10 songs of 2021 is not officially announced by Melon yet but Korean netizens have made their speculation. Which hit songs will be included in the ranking?
Melon is the powerhouse of Korea’s paid music streaming platforms with the largest market share. Therefore, netizens always pay great attention to Melon’s year-end charts and are curious about which songs will make it onto the ranking. In the middle of 2021, K-netizens once predicted the Top 10 songs of Melon Yearly Chart 2021. However, most recently, as 2021 is approaching the end and there is more available data, a more specific forecast ranking was posted on a Korean online community.
Let’s learn a bit about the Melon Yearly Chart to understand why K-netizens do not need to wait until the end of the year to come up with this ranking. Accordingly, Melon’s annual summary chart calculates the number of unique listeners (ULs) per day of the songs from the time of release until the end of 2021. It is not necessary that the release date is in 2021. Songs that came out earlier are also counted.
This also means songs that are released earlier will naturally have the advantage of ranking higher. Additionally, the more popular the songs, the more ULs they get. Songs from previous years are still able to enter the Top 10 of 2021 if they are still streamed by many listeners daily.
Let’s take a look at Melon’s Top 10 songs in 2019 and 2020 to better understand how this chart works.
According to K- netizens, here are the songs that are most likely to enter Melon’s Top 10 songs by the end of 2021 based on the accumulated ULs so far, ranked from lowest to highest.
10th place: IU – Hold My Hand or MSG (M.O.M) – Foolish Love
9th place: BTS – Butter
8th place: Lee Mujin – Traffic light
7th place: KyoungSeo – Shiny Star
6th place: IU – LILAC
5th place: aespa – Next Level
4th place: Justin Bieber – Peaches
3rd place: BTS – Dynamite
2nd place: Brave Girls – Rollin’
1st place: IU – Celebrity
Note that it’s not certain that the final ranking will be the same as the above forecast as the number of ULs will continue to increase until the end of 2021.
Looking at this predicted Melon’s Top 10, ‘digital queen’ IU continues to prove her power when she has 3 songs included.
aespa also receives many compliments from netizens as they have the opportunity to become the first 4th generation Kpop group to enter Melon’s year-end Top 10 songs. ‘Next Level’ has accumulated an outstanding number of ULs that is still increasing. 5th place is already impressive but aespa can even rank higher if they continue to maintain the high number of ULs.
However, the biggest surprise for K-netizens is BTS. Accordingly, the group has 2 songs that are expected to be in the Top 10 10 of Melon’s year-end chart, ‘Butter’ and ‘Dynamite’. What’s more interesting is that ‘Dynamite’ – a song released in August 2020 – is still on top of a 2021 ranking. This is because ‘Dynamite’ is still frequently listened to by many people until now, so it has a steady increase in ULs.
Some comments from K-netizens:
- IU is insane!!!
- aespa is amazing. They’re still a rookie group but they already have a huge hit.
- I thought ‘Rollin’ would be No.1, but IU is so amazing!!
- But I still wonder why KyoungSeo is included. I don’t understand why her song could be popular!!
- Who is Kyoung Seo?!!
- BTS is crazy!! Dynamite is a wall
- aespa is only a rookie group, they are amazing!!
- Honestly, I was so confused when KyoungSeo’s song kept climbing to the top!
- Wasn’t ‘Dynamite’ a song that was released last year…??
- OMG ‘Dynamite’ is crazy!! Wasn’t it released in August 2020?!
- aespa is impressive, BTS and IU are already digital monsters.
- Oh there’s Justin Bieber too!!
- I listen to ‘Traffic Light’ a lot, but seriously who is KyungSeo?!!!
- BTS and ‘Dynamite’ are so cool!! Hopefully they get good rankings!!
