The Most Successful Songs of All-Time on Melon

You might recall that I recently created a thread where I attempted to determine the most successful artists of all-time on Melon, and given how that went, I will now try to do the same for *individual songs* instead.

Methodology: Using the official Melon web site, I looked up the top 100 songs on the chart for each month, starting from November 2004 (which is when Melon was launched) and going until June 2022. These data points were all compiled into one Excel spreadsheet.

For each month, I then assigned a point value to each of the 100 songs. The #1 song receives 169.50 points, and the points decrease in logarithmic fashion to 22.85 points for the #100 song. The point assignments are based on unique listener figures, and further detail about this distribution technique can be see here.

From there, it was straightforward to simply add up all the points for each song. The top 200 songs are shown in the table below, and I've also included the number of times each song appeared in the Melon monthly chart. Idol group songs are coloured accordingly.

I do see many of the "usual suspects" that I expected to find at the top of the ranking. But do you think that there are any big surprises?

Further Reading on This Topic

The Ranking with Month of First Charting Included

Artists with the Most Appearances

Adjusting for the "Inflation" of Chart Performance Due to Streaming

Quote from ripia

Can you make the idol groups songs a different color?

A good suggestion--I've made the updates. We can easily see that idol group songs comprise a minority of the list.

Quote from Afriyieau1

So how many idol songs are in top 200 and how many are male group tracks and female tracks?

In the top 200, I'm counting 25 boy group songs (12.5%) and 29 girl group songs (14.5%), so 27% are from idol groups.

Quote from ripia

Thanks Im surprised there isn't more bigbang

I just checked my spreadsheet, and though Big Bang only has four songs in the top 200, they have a whopping 75 songs overall in the data set.

Quote from atropos

I guessing songs like tomboy, love dive will eventually make the cut?

If the songs' current charting strength continues, I do expect them to break into the top 200. In fact, IVE's "Eleven" is already on there.

Quote from atropos

I guessing songs like tomboy, love dive will eventually make the cut?

So I just checked my data, and Tomboy is at #306 with 527.80 points, while Love Dive is at #572 with 408.36 points.

The current cut-off for the top 200 is 622.47 points, so they're not too far away.

Quote from cheersj

Cool. BTS having 3 songs in Top 5. Legit mega hits. They are also the only Idol Group in Top 20. 7 in top 100.

IU has like 11 in top 100?

Now is the Savage Love remix considered a proper BTS song? If we do include it, they have 76 songs total that have appeared in the Melon monthly chart at some point.

As for IU, she indeed has 11 in the top 100 if you count her song with High4. And overall, she's charted 102 times (the most out of anybody).

Quote from killthisfenty

As if it’s your last Is much bigger than HYLT

I suppose that depends on our definition of "bigger". In the figure below, I'm showing the chart performance for both songs:

MelonMonthly_BP_AIIYL_HYLT.png

As we can see, they each charted for 16 months. However, HYLT tended to chart higher on average, and had a higher peak, hence its larger point total.

Quote from bbgc

Do different colours for BGs, GGs and Not-Gs, if you can.

By "Not-Gs", I'm assuming you're referring to artists who aren't BGs or GGs? If so, wouldn't colouring them be redundant given that BGs/GGs are already indicated by light blue/pink text?

Quote from bbgc

Next steps would be to check who got most such songs in Top 10, Top 20, Top 50, Top 100 etc.,

That also would be usual suspects - IU, BTS, Bigbang etc.,

A good idea. If we only account for the top 20 positions, I'm curious as to how the rankings would differ. I imagine such a change in methodology would benefit songs with higher peaks versus songs with extended longevity.

Quote from ISaidISaid

One interesting thing to add to this is a year of release column.

Unfortunately I would have no way of getting the year of release for each song without looking them up manually, one by one.

However, I do have the first month that each song charted, which is highly correlated, and arguably even more instructive:

As we can see, songs that were released later tend to perform better, which I'm guessing was the (valid) point that you were trying to make.

Quote from neigl

Aespa

Brave Girls

Blackpink

Best GGs.

Since I know that you're the biggest Brave Girls fan on the forum, here's their complete Melon monthly charting data:

Quote from Etoile23

I'm wondering which one is the oldest song in the list?

In the top 200, it's SG Wannabe's songs "Crime and Punishment" and "Saldaga", both of which first charted in February 2005.

Quote from Lulu_Key

I'm suprised at no sistar

That was actually my initial thought as well. To take a closer look, here are all the Sistar songs that charted:

As you can see, although they had quite a few songs that charted, those songs, unfortunately, didn't have much longevity, lasting only six months at the most.

Quote from BomBomi86

How did my dude got here?

So here's all the data I have for Bloo:

MelonMonthly_Bloo.png

"Downtown Baby" was his only song to chart, but it was quite successful, managing to stay on the Melon chart for 13 months.

According to Wikipedia: "His 2017 single, "Downtown Baby," topped South Korean music charts in June 2020, after singer Lee Hyori performed it on the variety show Hangout With Yoo". I guess this shows the influence that popular TV shows can have on a song's performance.