Mnet’s weekly music program, ‘M! Countdown’, will be making changes to its ranking system.
Jung Yoo Jin PD announced on August 28th, “We are reorganizing how the rankings are made to better fit the changing music trend. We will choose the winner of the week based on the newly proportioned ranking system from the next episode to provide unbiased report of K-pop stars and their songs.”
The new rankings will raise the importance and percentage of music sales, downloads, and plays, and decrease the importance and percentage of fan votes. While global votes and real-time text message votes account for 5% each, categories that reflect the reactions of age groups between 15 and 39 will take up to 20% of the voting result.
Most importantly, record sales and artists’ participation each dominate 50 and 20 percent of the poll.
Starting this week, ‘M! Countdown’ will start using the new ranking system. The new system will allow fans to view the top 10 artists of the week in alphabetical order, without revealing their rankings. Rather than three finalists, only two finalists will go head to head on the show.