For the nerds!
Intro and Honorable Mentions | 20-11 | 10-1 | Individual Ballots | Stats and Wrap-up
Miscellaneous stats
276 votes and 126 different songs voted for; 45 songs that received more than one vote and 81 unique votes.
Two more people voted for 2023’s list than last year, so obviously the overall numbers are up, but 2022 actually had more songs receive more than one vote (48) and way fewer unique votes (53). This matches the honorable mention cutoff staying pretty much exactly the same as last year, in the 36-38 point range, despite the extra ballots. Basically, more ballots did not necessarily mean a linear increase in the amount of overlapping votes. (The top 20 cutoff rose from 37 to 44, which did correlate more closely to the increase in number of votes).
12,608+ words of writing. (This is a rough count of all the blurbs plus intros and outros.)
Months of release for top 20 plus HMs: Jan 4 – Feb 3 – Mar 4 – Apr 2 – May 3 – Jun 2 – Jul 4 – Aug 1 – Sept 2 – Oct 0 – Nov 0 – Dec 0. (The January through April distribution is almost identical to last year, with a slightly more even spread throughout the rest of the spring and summer. The Q4 void speaks for itself.)
The maximum score that a song could receive was 280 points, if every single person had ranked it their number one. OMG’s total (173 pts) was 61% of the maximum score. This isn’t that far off last year, when Antifragile got 58% of the maximum.
All but one person had their number one make the list this year! Two of them were Fighting, five of them were a NewJeans song, and three of those were OMG. (Besides that, OMG also got three number twos and two number threes.) The only #1 that didn’t make it was So!YoON!’s “Bad”—sorry, Anjy 😭 (I’m sure you knew it was a long shot, though).
The next few songs after the 36-point honorable mention cutoff were:
- TripleS Krystal Eyes – Cherry Talk (33)
- NCT Dream – ITSJ (32)
- Seventeen – Super (27) [yeah, over my dead body]
- Yena – Hate Rodrigo feat. Yuqi (26)
- So!YoON! – Bad (26)
- Le Sserafim – Unforgiven feat. Nile Rogers (26)
If you love spreadsheets and would like to look through the actual data for this year’s vote, here’s a link to download my spreadsheet or look through a Google Docs conversion.
Artist Top 20
This chart shows the overall points that the top twenty artists received in the vote. Points for multiple singles are added together if applicable: for example, I grouped all the TripleS subunits together because damn, someone’s gotta try to compete with NewJeans.
NewJeans
TripleS
Aespa
(G)I-DLE
XG
Le Sserafim
Seventeen/BSS
IVE
Onew
NCT
Billlie
Fromis_9
Key
CSR
Kai
TNX
NMIXX
Zerobaseone
The Deep
H1-Key
483
205
162
149
136
123
111
102
93
88
78
77
77
69
58
54
53
46
44
42
There were 2930 points available in total this year, and NewJeans received 483 of them, or 16.4%. TripleS got 205, or 7.0%. Together, those two groups got 23.4% of the vote. If you add Aespa’s 162 total points and (G)I-DLE’s 149, the top 4 artists account for 34.1% of the total points distributed in the vote.
(Last year, NewJeans received 324 out of 2505 points, or 12.9%.)
Random observations
- Lyricist Kim Eana has two appearances in the top 10: she is the sole credited lyricist for both IVE’s “I Am” and Onew’s “O (Circle)”.
- Zero votes for Cupid, the most notable snub IMO (I mean, I get it).
- The only TripleS single that didn’t receive any votes was EVOLution’s Invincible.
- Super Shy received four #2 votes.
- Queencard received four #4 votes.
- We really want to like Kep1er! They keep showing up strong in the b-side vote, but just haven’t been able to muster as much support among the actual title track rankings (besides Wa Da Da just sneaking in at #20 last year).
- Two votes for Jungkook’s 3D, and neither of them mention Jack Harlow by name—as we should (one person just said “Jungkook – 3D,” and the other said “Jungkook – 3D feat. that man”).
- Number of songs that made the final list where girl groups power walk forward in a line during the final chorus: Two (Sweet Juice, I Am).
Categories and ballot averages
The average ballot had 5.8 unique votes and overlapped with the final list by 10.8 songs. (Last year was 4.4 and 10.1, respectively—again, there was a notable rise in unique votes this year.)
| Average songs per ballot | Percentage of average ballot | Final list count (incl. HMs./top 20 only) | Percentage of final list (incl. HMs/top 20 only) | |
| Girl groups | 12.3 | 62% | 17 / 14 | 65% / 70% |
| Boy groups | 3.2 | 16% | 4 / 3 | 15% |
| Female soloists | 0.7 | 4% | 0 | 0 |
| Male soloists | 1.7 | 9% | 4 / 2 | 15%/ 8 % |
| Non-idols or not gen-classifiable | 1.8 | 9% | 1 | 4% |
| 2nd gen | 1.1 | 5% | 3 / 1 | 12% / 5% |
| 3rd gen | 3.1 | 16% | 3 | 12% / 15% |
| 4th gen | 13.8 | 70% | 19 / 15 | 73% / 75% |
Female soloist votes were way down this year: there was an average of less than one per ballot, compared to 4 per ballot in 2022. Same for the final results, with no female soloists making the top 20 or even honorable mentions this year, compared to Taeyeon, Summer Cake, Yena, and Eun Bi all clearing the top 15 in 2022.
We were somehow even heavier on the 4th gen votes than last time, with 13.8 per ballot compared to 12.3 in 2022. Third gen votes decreased by about one per ballot in response.
The other fluctuations were fairly small. Average boy group songs per ballot is almost exactly the same as 2022 (3.2 this year vs. 3.0): the consensus was just a little more concentrated this time, allowing more male artists to actually make the top 20.
Highest- and lowest-scoring by number of votes and ballot rankings
| Lowest-scoring song with: | Highest-scoring song with: | |
| 2 votes | Viviz – Maniac (5 pts) | Key – Killer (36 pts) |
| 3 votes | Jeon Somi – Fast Forward (6 pts) | NCT DoJaeJung – Perfume (51 pts) |
| 4 votes | Seventeen – Super (27 pts) | XG – Left Right (59 pts) |
| 5 votes | The Deep – Bappi (44 pts) | IVE – I Am (70 pts) |
| 6 votes | XG – Shooting Star (52 pts) | NewJeans – ETA (99 pts) |
| 7 votes | CSR – Shining Bright (69 pts) | Le Sserafim – Eve, Psyche & The Bluebeard’s Wife (107 pts) |
| No. 1 vote(s) | So!YoON! – Bad (26 pts) | NewJeans – OMG (173 pts) |
| No. 2 vote(s) | EXO – Let Me In, Jungkook – Seven (19 pts) | NewJeans – OMG (173 pts) |
| No. 3 vote(s) | Kep1er – I do! Do you?, Seventeen – F*ck My Life (18 pts) | NewJeans – OMG… lmao (173 pts) |
No songs got 8 or 9 votes. It was either 7 or less, or a massive pileup of 10 or more (i.e. everything in the top 4).
“Fast Forward” getting three votes and only 6 points is so impressive. (There was actually a brief moment, before someone edited their ballot, where Somi had four votes and 7 points.) Other than that, not too many huge differences in the point spectrums from last year. The biggest one is that for 2022, neither Antifragile nor Glitch received a number one vote, and the highest-scoring number one was Attention at #3. That was obviously not the case this year! (And Super Shy at #2 picked up a number one vote as well.)
In general, NewJeans songs tend to overperform relative to their number of votes: in 2022, Hype Boy got 88 points with 5 votes, compared to I Am receiving 70 points with 5 votes this year. Same for GingaMingaYo getting 69 points from 6 votes in 2022, versus ETA with 99 points and 6 votes this year.
I used up all my thoughts on the posts from earlier this week—you might think I’m joking, but nope, they’re all gone, it’s empty up here—so I don’t have much else left to add. The most inconsequential competition of all, i.e. which songs on the list I personally listened to the most obsessively while working on editing, formatting, and administrative tasks, was decisively won by DoJaeJung’s “Perfume” this year, followed by Onew’s “O (Circle)”.
Here are links again to the playlist of the top 20 plus honorable mentions: Youtube version, Spotify version, and Apple Music version.
Bonus b-side playlist here: YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music.
I will definitely not be doing any projects of a similar scale on my blog for a while, but my weekly radio show about pop music will continue to air throughout the spring! Right now it’s on Wednesdays from 1-2 pm eastern, but a new schedule is about to go into effect roughly a week from now, so keep an eye on this blog for me to post a schedule update once I get my new time slot. Pop Excellence airs on whcl.org, and I always post playlists here after each show, for anyone who’s interested.
Most of our writers also hail from The Singles Jukebox, a music reviewing website whose format and ethos heavily inspired this list. Check there next week, and maybe you’ll find something interesting…
With that said, thank you so much to all the writers and voters for the time and effort you put into this list! This is the best K-pop year-end list because everyone cared enough to make it special. Thanks for trusting me with your writing, in particular, and for agreeing to participate in the first place!
I’m sure we’ll be back again next year with another edition of Pop Excellence’s Favorite K-pop Singles of 2024. It’s a crazy amount of work for me, but I like being able to say that I got it done, and what other list-makers are gonna tackle the year in K-pop with this much care? There’s eleven months left ahead of us to fill up the calendar with releases. Who knows what could happen in that time, and what developments we never could have foreseen that will shape the conversation irreversibly by the next time we reconvene? The fun part is not knowing. Until then, thank you so much to everyone who’s followed along with these posts and showed interest in my silly little blog—and fighting 해야지.
Pop Excellence 