The Demographic Divide and “Concretized” Charts
This international isolation has changed the internal user bases of domestic services, thereby creating a radical crisis for South Korea’s music charts. Data from the 2025 Music Industry White Paper and the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI) show that younger listeners, primarily in their teens and 20s, are using more of the overseas platforms, like YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. On the other hand, legacy domestic platforms like Melon depend increasingly on users aged 50 and older.
This generational imbalance heavily tilts local chart data towards locally preferred genres instead of global trends. As per industry preference surveys cited by the Seoul Economic Daily, ballads have a 39.5% preference amongst all age groups, peaking massively among older demographics. Interestingly, 47.8% of the individuals in their 40s listen to the genre alongside 57.1% and 43.6% of people in their 50s and 60s, respectively. Meanwhile, traditional trot music marks a preference percentage of 28.5% amongst the users in their 60s.
Due to such trends, the domestic charts suffer from a “concretization” effect, where legacy mega-hits released years ago remain at the top owing to the repetitive listening by older listeners. This pattern reportedly creates a slow, “lagging chart” environment that is unable to capture the momentum of the new, globally relevant releases.