Method:
Top 100 weekly digital so 5200 songs per year,5100 in 2010. - 62300 spots.
#1 gets 100 points, #100 gets 1 point.
Add up by each act, for the whole year. Most points indicate which group was consumed most that year.
That could include songs from the past years as well.
* Yes absolute ranking is not as accurate in showing the popularity of a song was digital points will.
Since differences between ranks won't be uniform, Song #2 on Week2 might be 10 times more consumed than Song #3, whereas in Week3, #2 might be consumed 100 times more, yet they both get the same rank points.
But it is a simpler method to aggregate than deal with different periods of Download, Streaming and post-2018 digital points data.
*This is not about individual songs or hits. But consumption of any song of the group in the year - old, new, hit, non hit, as long as it was in the Top 100 of Gaon Digital Weekly.
* Subunits are combined with main units e.g. GG+Oh!GG+TaeTiSeo, SISTAR+SISTAR19.
* Few people carry their groups, so their solos are combined with groups - Busker Busker+Jang Beom June, Big Bang+G-Dragon, 4Minute+Hyuna. But not so with Taeyeon's solo career separate from GG.
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Observations.
After checking the top acts, following are the leaders in each year,
2010 - SNSD,
2011-IU,
2012-Busker Busker,
2013-AKMU,
2014-IU,
2015-BigBang,
2016-EXO,
2017-IU,
2018-BTS,
2019-Paul Kim,
2020-BTS,
2021-IU
While on an average GGs do better than BGs on the digital chart, the top BGs do best the top GGs to take the first every year.
GGs had their best year in 2018 - Twice, Mamamoo, RV, BP all peaked, yet even the leader Twice did only half as good as BTS and 3rd after Wanna One.
Taeyeon as a soloist has better digitals than SNSD comparing 2010-15 SNSD vs. 2016-2021 Taeyeon.
Below graph gives the top 5 of
BGs - dashed lines
GGs - dotted lines
NGs (not groups) - solid lines.
.
