So as you might know, the voting for MAMA's Worldwide Fans' Choice Top 10 just closed, and you can see the results here on MAMA's official web site.
I don't follow award shows all that closely, but I just assumed that the artists with the largest fandoms would have the most votes.
But how do you determine fandom size? For me, I simply look at physical sales as a proxy.
After all, only serious fans would purchase albums right? And only serious fans would bother to vote in a MAMA poll right?
Well it turns out that's not necessarily the case, as apparently, the type of people who purchase albums is different than the type of people who vote!
In the table below, I've listed the voting results, as well as the Gaon physical sales of the latest major Korean release for each artist:
| Rank |
Gen | Size | Artist | Votes Received |
Gaon Sales |
Latest Major Korean Release |
Sales Needed Per 1% | Attending |
| 1 | 3 | 7 | BTS | 16.99% | 2,955,990 | Butter | 173,984 | No |
| 2 | 4 | 8 | Stray Kids |
15.84% | 1,285,799 | Noeasy | 81,174 | Yes |
| 3 | 4 | 7 | Enhypen | 7.54% | 1,181,961 | Dimension: Dilemma | 156,759 | Yes |
| 4 | 3.5 | 7 | NCT Dream |
7.36% | 1,015,549 | Hello Future | 137,982 | Yes |
| 5 | 3.5 | 10/9 | NCT 127 |
6.93% |
1,283,801 | Favorite | 185,253 | Yes |
| 6 | 4 | 12 | Treasure | 6.91% | 350,986 | The First Step: Treasure Effect | 50,794 | No |
| 7 | 4 | 5 | TXT | 6.71% | 744,956 | The Chaos Chapter: Fight or Escape | 111,022 | Yes |
| 8 | 3 | 9 | Twice | 6.26% | 632,506 | Formula of Love: O+T=<3 | 101,039 | No |
| 9 | 3.5 | 1 | Lisa | 6.25% | 762,923 | Lalisa | 122,068 | No |
| 10 | 3.5 | 13 | Seventeen | 6.22% | 2,059,091 | Attacca | 331,044 | No |
| 11 | 3.5 | 1 | Rosé | 6.17% | 618,876 | R | 100,304 | No |
| 12 | 4 | 8 | Ateez | 3.21% | 732,923 | Zero: Fever Part.3 | 228,325 | Yes |
| 13 | 3.5 | 6 | Astro | 1.81% | 309,750 | Switch On | 171,133 | No |
| 14 | 3 | 9 | EXO | 0.74% | 1,334,682 | Don't Fight the Feeling | 1,803,624 | No |
| 15 | 3.5 | 6 | iKon | 0.28% | 55,254 | I Decide | 197,336 | No |
| 16 | 4 | 5 | Itzy | 0.20% | 487,607 | Crazy in Love | 2,438,035 | Yes |
| 17 | 3.5 | 11 | The Boyz |
0.20% | 638,555 | Thrill-ing | 3,192,775 | No |
| 18 | 3 | 5 | Red Velvet |
0.15% | 360,070 | Queendom | 2,400,467 | No |
| 19 | 2.5 | 1 | IU | 0.15% | 393,007 | Lilac | 2,620,047 | No |
| 20 | 4 | 4 | Aespa | 0.09% | 549,133 | Savage | 6,101,478 | Yes |
As we can see, physical sales are not that strongly correlated with voting results, which implies that the people who buy albums and the people who vote are somehow different in nature; they are not the same type of fans.
For example, Seventeen sells almost six times as much as Treasure does, yet Treasure beats SVT in voting.
We also have the case of million-seller EXO, who lose out to Astro, a group with only a quarter of EXO's sales.
And then there's Aespa, who have sales almost at the level of Twice and Rosé, yet do significantly worse when it comes to voting. IU, Red Velvet, and Itzy are almost as bad in this regard, with poor voting results despite strong sales.
In addition, for those interested in statistics, I actually performed a linear regression on the data, and found a R-squared value of only 0.4904, which means only about half of the observed variation in voting can be explained by physical sales.
What am I missing here? What is the "hidden variable" that can explain such a disparity in voting results between artists with similar sales?
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Edit: I've gone ahead added columns for artist generation and group size, which may be helpful. More importantly, for each artist, I've divided sales figures by votes received in order to determine the amount of album sales needed for each 1% of votes received. These numbers are shown in the second-to-last column, and can be seen as an indicator of how "hard-working" a particular fandom is.
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Edit 2: I've added a column to the far right indicating whether or not the artist is attending MAMA this year, based on this AKP article.
