Kakao Entertainment Corp., the South Korean entertainment powerhouse, is spearheading the creation of a unified K-pop chart spanning Asia’s three largest music markets, in a move that highlights the industry’s push to quantify its regional dominance and streamline cross-border promotion.
The company announced Monday that its flagship music streaming service Melon has signed separate agreements with China’s Tencent Music Entertainment Group and Japan’s Line Music Corp. to jointly launch the “K-Pop Artist Chart,” slated to debut in the first half of next year. The chart will amalgamate user consumption data from Melon in South Korea, Tencent platforms including QQ Music and Kugou in China, and Line Music in Japan.
The initiative aims to establish a consolidated, transparent benchmark for tracking K-pop’s performance across a region that represents its core fanbase and commercial footprint. Rankings will be calculated using objectively measured user activity and consumption metrics from each platform, according to Kakao.
“For the first time, we will be able to see a single, credible ranking that reflects the true scale of K-pop’s popularity across Northeast Asia,” said Kakao Entertainment CEO Jang Yoon-joong. “This collaboration among leaders in each market is about creating a trusted standard that delivers new value to the entire industry ecosystem.”
The partnership brings together dominant but previously siloed players. Melon, operating for over two decades, is South Korea’s most influential music chart, with its data already integrated into Billboard’s U.S. charts since mid-2023. Tencent Music commands China’s vast digital music landscape through its portfolio of services. Line Music is deeply embedded in Japan’s daily life via its parent messaging app, which boasts approximately 99 million users in the country.
Industry observers note the chart is as much a business tool as a fan-facing service. It is expected to provide artists, management agencies, and record labels with data-driven insights to optimize promotional activities, tour routing, and marketing investments across the region. “A unified metric reduces guesswork for strategic planning,” said a Seoul-based music industry analyst. “It translates amorphous regional popularity into actionable data.”
The move reflects K-pop’s continued evolution from a Korean cultural export into a regionalized commercial infrastructure, where understanding nuanced market preferences is key to sustaining growth. Analysts say it also addresses a longstanding challenge: fragmented data that has made it difficult to gauge an artist’s true pan-Asian reach.
“The global K-pop fandom operates across borders, but the charts have remained national,” said the analyst. “This is an attempt to build a dashboard that matches the reality of how the genre is consumed.”
