"Introducing 360 Indie Artists"... Melon, 2022 Year-End Summary

[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] Kakao Entertainment's music platform Melon revealed its achievements for this year on the 13th.

Melon carried out five major projects?‘Track Zero’, ‘Melon Spotlight’, ‘All the World's TOP100’, ‘Hot Playlist’, and ‘Data Lab’?to revitalize K-POP and strengthen the domestic music industry ecosystem.

First, through the 'Track Zero' project launched in April, Melon took the lead in promoting indie music. Along with six expert committee members, a carefully curated playlist of hidden gems has been released every Thursday on Melon's app main screen. Artists featured in the playlist appear on the music broadcast of the same name, ‘Track Zero’, on Melon Station, where they introduce their music directly to fans. In July, a live performance program ‘Track Zero Alive’ was held with a concert in Hongdae.

So far, 360 indie artists have been introduced through the Track Zero playlist. During the three days the songs are featured on Melon's main screen, streaming of these tracks increased by an average of 5 to 7 times compared to before. Melon Station’s ‘Track Zero’ introduced music through 37 broadcasts this year and invited about 18 artists as guests.

‘Melon Spotlight’, opened in March, is a project highlighting new albums both online and offline. It helps promote artists’ new albums through the main screen of the Melon app and large LED screens at Samsung Station. Up to now, a total of 44 artists, including famous domestic artists such as BTS, IVE, NewJeans, BLACKPINK, as well as international artists like John Legend and Charlie Puth, have been spotlighted through ‘Melon Spotlight’.

The brand campaign ‘All the World's TOP100’, themed around the Melon Chart ‘TOP100’, gained significant attention with its main video featuring singers IU and Yoo Hee-yeol surpassing 20 million views. Along with the campaign, various themed charts such as ‘Reverse Climbing TOP100’, ‘Work Songs TOP100’, and ‘Karaoke TOP100’ were introduced, becoming core services within the Melon Chart.

Melon’s ‘Hot Playlist’ is a project that discovers background music suitable for different spaces. Through a nationwide recommendation event, about 80 offline ‘BGM hotspots’ were selected and introduced to the MZ generation enjoying visits to these spaces via Melon’s unique recommendation marks, Melon DJ, and KakaoMap services. Additionally, through Melon’s ‘DJ Hot Playlist’ account, 314 BGM playlists actually played by store owners in their venues were provided.

Moreover, since last December, Melon has been sharing data created collaboratively by artists and fans through the ‘Data Lab’ project via Melon Magazine, Melon’s official SNS, and the K-POP Square in Samseong-dong. So far, a total of 33 teams, including BTS, NCT DREAM, and IU, have participated. For BTS, in celebration of the June release of their anthology album ‘Proof’, data such as ‘the only artist on Melon to surpass 10 billion cumulative streams’ and ‘35 songs with over 100 million Melon streams’ (as of June) were disclosed, achieving 5.6 million exposures and 1.5 million views on SNS.

Lee Jae-wook, head of Melon division at Kakao Entertainment, stated, “Melon focused on the co-growth of the entire domestic music industry this year through large-scale projects that allowed various music and artists to be newly spotlighted. In the new year, we will continue projects like ‘Track Zero’ and ‘Melon Spotlight’ while launching new projects that enable diverse artists and music to be loved, leading efforts to enhance user satisfaction and strengthen K-POP competitiveness.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.