Netizens suspicious of MelOn manipulating MV views for IU’s “Twenty Three”

Female soloist IU recently made a comeback with her latest album, Cheshire, and has been topping the digital charts with her title track “Twenty Three.” However, her success has also brought some suspicions from some netizens.

On October 31st, a netizen noted the suspicious activities on Korean music site MelOn, a company known to be own by LOEN Entertainment and in turn, manages IU among other singers under the sub-label LOEN Tree.

Via online portal site Pann, the netizen writes the title’s post as “Raised suspicions that MelOn is manipulating IU..(?).”

Find out what Netizens had to say about this article below!

In the post, the original poster notes the strange large amount of views for IU’s “Twenty Three” music video hosted on MelOn, especially when compared to other popular idols including BIGBANG, EXO, and Girls’ Generation‘s Taeyeon and the power of their fandom.

Below is a translation of the netizens post by Koreaboo.

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“The views to IU’s music video.
Released less than two weeks ago.
Has over 1,500,000 views.”

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“This is the latest hit from f(x) and it already has over 400,000 views
They weren’t released on dates too far apart and well IU is a lot more popular than IU so this is understandable so I looked into other idols that have huge fandoms.

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“Taeyeon’s ‘I’, on the other hand, was released awhile ago and has been maintaining on the charts in #3 and #4 
She has an amazing 780,000 views for a newbie (solo)… It came out two weeks before IU..”

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“The most recent music videos for BIGBANG and EXO
This was what convinced me. They are just as popular if not more popular than IU and they have the most number of fans on Melon yet their views are less than IU who has only been out for 2 weeks?”

” Am I underestimating IU or is Melon favoring IU but fudging the numbers? I am curious as to what people think. Please don’t get angry with me I think I have a legitimate inquiry hereㅠ.ㅠ”


NETIZEN REACTIONS
Koreaboo has collected reactions from Netizens who commented on the original article from our Korean source. The below comments are the most popular comments at the time of this article being published.


[+249, -50]  What’s going on, well MelOn is owned by LOEN so this kind of operation isn’t really hard

[+238, -57] As expected from MelOn’s daughter

[+215, -42] ?? I thought BIGBANG had the biggest public recognition among idols but IU fans are saying only fans watch BIGBANG, and for EXO, isn’t the numbers of their fans basically that of the public?

[+66, -94] It could also be that it is higher… For the fans of Taeyeon and EXO, they listen to them first and with IU, everyone listens to her.. At least it’s that way with the people around me. And also, what is IU missing that MelOn needs to manipulate for her. Stop it with the conspiracy theories.

Source: Pann