#ARMYsChoiceBTS: Persona Album Reaches #1 on iTunes Following PCAs Fallout
credit: BigHit Entertainment
The results of the November 10th People’s Choice Awards surprised many BTS fans. Though the group was nominated for three awards (Group of 2019, Music Video of 2019, Concert of 2019), BTS lost all three categories to fellow K-Pop group BLACKPINK. Shortly after the results were announced, fans took to social media to express their disappointment.
Fans quickly began to trend #ARMYsChoiceBTS to show their disdain for the award outcomes. By 3AM EST, the hashtag was trending at #2 worldwide as the voting hashtag for BTS (#ThePeopleChooseBTS) was still trending at #1. Many fans commented that the awards must be rigged, citing the known voting gaps on Twitter as well as the official voting rules for the PCAs.
Voting Rules and Twitter Margins
The official voting rules state that voting takes place on the PCA website and via Twitter hashtags, with four categories (none of which BTS were nominated for) also being available for voting for Xfinity customers with X1 boxes. The rules also state that for Twitter voting, votes will only be accepted from public accounts with profile photos that have more than ten followers. The accounts must also be more than 24 hours old at the time of the tweet vote, and all tweet votes must follow the correct format in order to count.
To be sure, it’s possible that a portion of the tweet votes for BTS could have been eliminated from final counts due to rule violations, but the gaps in Twitter votes were so stark, it’s hard to believe it would have made much of a difference. According to Twitter account @InsideVotings, the final unofficial count for The Group award was 25,831,400 votes for BTS and 3,300,420 votes for BLACKPINK. Third place was CNCO with 1,182,250 votes. The gap between BTS and BLACKPINK was roughly 22.5 million votes.
Similarly, BTS had nearly twice as many votes in the Music Video category—“Boy with Luv” came in at 40,380,100 votes while “Kill This Love” had only 20,720,700 votes. For the Concert Tour category, BTS led by 11.8 million votes (Speak Yourself: 19,038,500 votes; BLACKPINK World Tour: 7,195,340 votes).
Some preliminary analysis of the Twitter data supports the activeness and interactivity of ARMY voters, as seen below.
It doesn’t appear that voting results from the PCA website have been made available publicly, so the only data fans can work with is what they see on Twitter. It’s clear BTS fans voted consistently on Twitter, and many noted they’d been voting on the PCA website too. While it’s possible BLACKPINK could have had more votes on the website, the huge gaps in Twitter votes definitely makes the situation suspicious.
Fans are certainly right to question this situation. In addition to the discrepancies in Twitter votes, BTS’s success in the U.S. (and around the world) this year is no secret. They charted seven No. 1 hits on the World Digital Song Sales Chart just in 2019, which Forbes notes is more than “any other K-Pop [group] has throughout their entire careers.” EP Map of the Soul: Persona, released in April, has sold more than four million copies worldwide and became the best-selling album in South Korean history. BTS achieved these astronomical sales even without the help of bundles. Their Speak Yourself tour sold over 600,000 tickets just in the North American, Europe, and South American markets. At Rose Bowl, their show was “the highest-grossing engagement in the venue’s Boxscore history, outpacing previous high marks by Taylor Swift and U2.” (Credit: Yonhap.)
In contrast, BLACKPINK’s North American tour sold over 60,000 seats at smaller venues. Compare that to BTS’s North American stadium shows which sold nearly 300,000 tickets. BLACKPINK’s May 9th tour date in Dallas/Fort Worth was cancelled due to “unavoidable situations,” which YG Entertainment did not elaborate on. Many speculated it could be due to worry over the members’ health; however, the show planned for May 8 was not cancelled. Others have speculated that May 9 was cancelled due to poor ticket sales, as this was a date added on after May 8 sold out, but there has been no official confirmation of what happened.
So, What Happened?
Of course, BTS’s successes do not mean they’re entitled to every award. But the situation surrounding the PCAs is murky at best. If BTS really did have more votes in each category, how did they lose in all three?
Though the People’s Choice Awards are supposed to be chosen via online voting, a clause in the official rules makes it clear that NBCUniversal Media (which owns E! Entertainment TV) reserves the right to make the final decision regarding award recipients.
A screenshot from the official rules on PCA’s website.
Given that clause, it’s clear that the awards can easily be manipulated, should NBCU choose to do so.
Some fans theorize that YG Entertainment paid off the awards show in order to secure the wins for BLACKPINK. Whether that’s true or not, it certainly looks that way. It wouldn’t have been nearly as suspicious if BLACKPINK had won one of the awards, but seeing BLACKPINK take all three, even when in competition with big-name Western artists, reeks of manipulation. Other artists nominated for the Music Video award included Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Shawn Mendes, and Billie Eilish. The Concert Tour award category had Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and P!nk, among others. BTS winning against some of these Western giants would have been surprising enough, but BLACKPINK winning every category they were nominated for just doesn’t add up.
ARMYs Response: Persona Tops iTunes Charts
In response to the questionable outcome of the PCAs, ARMYs began to encourage the fandom to purchase MOTS: Persona on iTunes. #BuyPersonaoniTunes began trending worldwide, and at the time of writing, reached #2 on the worldwide trends list with over 581,000 tweets. The hashtag also trended #1 in South Korea. MOTS: Persona quickly began rising on iTunes charts across the world, re-peaking at #1 in Brazil, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sweden, India, Poland, Turkey, Norway, UAE, Argentina, Russia, Vietnam, Slovenia, The Netherlands, and Singapore, as well as steadily climbing in many other countries. While writing this article, Persona jumped to #2 on the U.S. iTunes chart and #8 in the U.K. Despite being released in April, the album continues to soar higher and higher on world charts.
In the end, we cannot know for sure exactly what happened, especially without access to all of the data. To say the least, this does not reflect well on YG—if the company truly did get involved, it’d be nothing new, but it’s unacceptable regardless. Unfortunately, BLACKPINK will have this associated with their name, even though it’s highly unlikely the group would be involved in any manipulation directly.
ARMYs harnessed their negative feelings and channeled that power into an effort that brings BTS the glory, awards or not. This is demonstrative of what a large fandom can do to make its voices heard, and is a much better strategy than raging on Twitter. So if you’re irritated at last night’s outcome, consider lifting BTS up instead of tearing others down, and #BuyPersonaOniTunes.
UPDATE (11/12/2019 at 4:30pm):
Here are a few updates relevant to this article that may be useful to those who wanted to learn more about the situation (or for those looking back on the situation later).
MOTS: Persona remained at #2 on the U.S. iTunes chart and also charted at #2 in a handful of other countries including the U.K. At the time of this update, the album peaked at #1 on the iTunes charts in 48 countries, including South Africa. It also reached the #1 spot on the Worldwide iTunes chart.
Additionally, fans worked diligently to get BTS’s entire discography to chart. All of their Korean albums, three Japanese albums, the BTS World OST, and three mixtapes all re-entered the U.S. charts and appeared on the charts in other countries. In Saudi Arabia, BTS albums occupied the top 20 spots all together.
Several hashtags trended, including #BuyPersonaOniTunes trending at #1 worldwide. K-ARMYs trended #외랑둥이수고는우리가알아 (We know the hard work of I-lovelies) and wrote letters of thanks and love for I-ARMYs on Twitter. K-ARMYs also organized a streaming party for “Boy with Luv” in an effort to repay the work that I-ARMYs had done. #BWLStreamingParty also trended worldwide and many BTS albums entered top spots on Korean charts.
Additionally, some BTS fans previously noted that there was an organized effort among some BLACKPINK fans to vote with invalid email addresses on the PCA website. There are posts on Twitter and Reddit that encourage others to enter invalid emails in order to vote more and at a faster rate. I’ve archived some screenshots of those posts here. The PCA voting rules do not explicitly state that valid email addresses must be used, but this can be inferred from the language of the rules which state only account holders of specific Facebook and email accounts are authorized to use them to vote. However, there would be no way to stop a voter from making multiple valid email addresses and using them to vote.
It’s important to note that there is currently no way to know if BLACKPINK fans who participated in this strategy were successful. Entering an invalid email may have let votes go through on the PCA website, but since the data has not been released, we still don’t know what the numbers looked like for either group. It’s also possible that votes made with invalid email addresses were deleted. We cannot know the effect or lack thereof of voting with invalid email addresses, unless the PCAs release this information. Invalid email addresses could have been used by any fandom involved, though it’s unlikely that the majority of fans from any fandom used this strategy. Cheatsheet notes that this strategy has been used before by fans outside of the K-Pop realm.
Finally, Korean media ran a couple of articles, which I have translated here. At the time of writing, I could find no other articles.
In all, there’s much that isn’t known about this situation. It’s unlikely BTS fans will support any future nominations at the PCAs, given this year’s outcome. Since BTS won four PCA awards last year, including Music Video of 2018, Song of 2018, Group of 2018, and Social Star of 2018, this year’s results are particularly surprising.
A full list of the PCA winners and nominees can be found here.
*Disclaimer: Please do not send any hate towards BLACKPINK or their fans. If any manipulation did take place, the company is to blame. Don’t take it out on their artists. If fans participated in voting with invalid email addresses, please keep in mind that a few fans are not representative of the entire fandom; they made individual choices. Your words have power, so please don’t spread hate or threats.