Hybe singers won ALL Grand Prizes in 2019, and all but one in 2020

Until around 2017, the three major Grand Prizes in Korean music were MAMA, Golden Disk and Seoul Music Awards.

Around 2017 or 18, Melon Music Awards began to be treated seriously.

In 2019 BTS did the impossible

It won all 4 Grand Prizes from MAMA, including Worldwide Icon of the Year

It won 4 Grand Prizes from Melon, including Record of the Year

and, it won an unprecedented both Grand Prizes, Digital and Album (it has no Artist of Year award - it was given to aespa on 2022 but is not considered a Grand Prize)

and it chose NOT to show up in Seoul Music Awards, which is so slanted towards SM that it is sometimes called the SM award.

So, on the day of the award,Seoul Music Award created a Grand Prize for digitals, and awarded it to-- Taeyeon, an SM singer of course. From that point SMA is no longer considered to be a serious award.

In 2020, the same scenario occurred - BTS won all of MAMA and all of Melon.

At that point the organizers of Golden Disk did something cheesy.

Normally Golden Disk considers albums which came out from Dec of previous year t ill Nov of the awarding year. The criteria was changed just once, in 2011, to exclude Dec 2010, which is best known for the song "Good Day".

IU winning a Grand Prize would make the awards a big joke.

However, in 2020, with BTS about to win all the awards for the second time in a row, Golden Disk changed its criteria to include Nov 2019 , which would include IU's Love Poem, which led IU receiving the Grand Prize and making her the first act not named BTS to win a Grand Prize since 2018 (no one cared about Seoul Music Awards by that point of time).

With the old rules Lee Jieun would have been ineligible, and BTS would have won all Grand Prizes for 2 straight years!

Quote from Coldhit

Well, no one can defect IU even the greatest had to struggle past her.

That is the whole story of KPop, the dichotomy of global and domestic systems and their incongruity.

basically if she did not exist the whole history of KPop would have been very different

Quote from Jasque-O-Part2

If this won't convince all hybe stans to declare war on IU, I don't know what more you can do

What do you think tokki-swag

What saved Iu during the BTS dominance of the world was the unfounded rumor that Jungkook liked IU, which made the Armies a bit lenient on her. She responded by neither acknowledging nor denying the rumor, and only after the members began to be dragged to the military that her relationship with Lee Jongsuk was revealed.

And she has pre-empted the tokkis by summoning New Jeans members to her show.

Quote from selfmate

wait isn't the KMAs like the most prestigious one if one is talking about Korean music in general compared to just kpop?

No one in the world really cares about KMA, which usually awards acts which no one has ever heard about. It only reluctantly gives awards to Kpop acts, who rarely bother to show up there.

I have said not much about KMA in my entire posting history.

Quote from selfmate

which is why I wanted to confirm that to my knowledge the KMAs are like the top top and applies to all Korean music not just kpop...

is my take correct?

4300 views

I think that tells all we have to know about KMA.