Noah of the virtual K-pop boy band Plave was voted the No. 1 K-pop ‘Ending Fairy,’ while Twice’s Jihyo was named the K-pop Best Solo Hit Music on Favorite charts for the last week of January.

Favorite is a K-pop fan voting service developed by music streaming service Bugs and the JoongAng Ilbo, an affiliate of the Korea JoongAng Daily. Favorite runs a Weekly Favorite chart, with rankings released every Thursday, among others.

Favorite’s Ending Fairy chart, released last Thursday, saw Plave’s Noah at No. 1 with 67.3 percent, accounting for 9,791 votes with 0 percent of Bugs song streaming data.

Ending fairy is a K-pop term that refers to the member that the camera focuses on for a few seconds at the end of a group’s performance on music shows.

Girl group WJSN’s Seola landed in second place with 16.7 percent, accounting for 175 votes and 15.6 percent of Bugs song streaming data. Pentagon’s HUI, who dropped his first solo EP “Whu is Me: Complex” on Jan. 16, was in third place with 4.9 percent, accounting for 160 votes and 3.8 percent of Bugs song streaming data.

Favorite’s The Year of the Blue Dragon chart for artists born in the dragon year, saw Zhang Hao of ZeroBaseOne in No. 1 with 67.4 percent, accounting for 29,908 votes and 0.9 percent of Bugs song streaming data. Solo singer Lee Mu-jin followed in second place, with 20.3 percent, accounting for 1,043 votes and 18 percent of Bugs song streaming data, and Tomorrow X Together’s Soobin came third, with 3.4 percent.

Zhang Hao, Lee and Soobin were all born in 2000.


The K-pop Best Solo Hit Music chart, which had its votes up for two weeks (Jan. 17 – Jan. 31), saw Twice’s Jihyo in first place, with 52 percent and 138,122 votes. Jihyo released her first solo EP “Zone” in August last year. Blackpink’s Jisoo, who dropped her solo single “Me” in March, landed in second place with 25.7 percent, and singer-songwriter IU was in third place, with 8.8 percent. IU will drop her sixth EP “The Winning” on Feb. 20.

The Weekly Favorite chart, calculated by a combination of fan votes and an artist’s number of streams on Bugs, saw SM Entertainment’s rookie boy band Riize on the top, with 42.7 percent, accounting for 2,496 votes and 4.5 percent of Bugs Streaming data, followed by IVE with 25.1 percent and NewJeans at 8.4. percent.

A celebratory video of RIIZE and IVE is being played at the Parnas Media Tower, located near COEX mall in Gangnam District, southern Seoul until Thursday, while Noah’s celebratory video will last until Feb. 16. Jihyo’s celebratory video will play from Saturday to Feb. 29.


BY CHO YONG-JUN [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]