SM Entertainment Accused Of Taking Away Red Velvet Irene’s Music Show Win

Fans feel as though the company has sabotaged Irene’s sales in favor of another artist.

Red Velvet Irene’s solo debut has been a commercial hit since its release last month, but one accolade “Like a Flower” has missed out on so far is a music show win — and fans say SM Entertainment is to blame.

From the moment Irene’s debut mini album, Like a Flower, was released, it’s been racking up album sales achievements. In its first day alone, the record sold over 250,000 copies, achieving the seventh highest first-day sales for a female K-Pop soloist on the Hanteo chart. With just one day of tracking, Irene also recorded the highest first-week sales for an SM Entertainment female soloist.

Naturally, with such accomplishments in hand, fans had high expectations for Irene to become the first Red Velvet member to achieve a win on a music show. In particular, ReVeluvs worldwide went full force with their efforts on KBS’s Music Bank. After an intense period of voting, fans even managed to break the app All Chart’s record for the highest vote total of all time at 983,504, giving her the number one spot in the pre-vote.

However, despite fans’ tireless efforts, when Music Bank aired on November 6, Irene was not nominated at all. Although she received the maximum score of 2,000 for the pre-vote, her final total was 5,768, putting her in third place on Music Bank’s ‘K-Chart.’

The root of the issue lies in the difference between the Hanteo chart and the chart Music Bank uses for its tally: Circle. In a nutshell, Hanteo counts retail sales, tracking albums purchased by customers both offline and online. Circle Chart, on the other hand, records the number of albums shipped to retailers, before they’re even sold to individual customers.

This meant that more than 120,000 sold albums were missing from Irene’s sales figures. In contrast, the two groups nominated for the win (WayV and TWS) had approximately 8,000 and 31,000 more sales on Circle than on Hanteo respectively. In the end, this meant that Irene was allocated just 914 points awarded for physical album sales on Music Bank.

Had her Circle sales figure matched her Hanteo sales, Irene would have scored around 1,600 points in the physical sales category: enough to push her final points to over 6,400. This would have placed her above the eventual winner, WayV, whose total was 6,354 points, giving her the win.

Irene’s China fanbase (IreneBar), whose members contributed hundreds of thousands of sales for Like a Flower, have also lodged threats against SM Entertainment. “If the company fails to provide a satisfactory response,” they announced on X, “we will request a full refund for all unreleased albums and will completely boycott all albums, activities, and merchandise purchases, except for Irene’s individual activities, in the future.”

Credit by Koreaboo