BLACKPINK Snubbed At The 2020 APAN Music Awards, And Fans Are Furious

Here’s why they deserved the award.

On November 26, the 2020 APAN Music Awards announced its winners for the Top 10 artists award, and fans are furious that BLACKPINK didn’t make the cut.

| YG Entertainment

The 2020 APAN Music Awards was originally scheduled to take place on November 28 at the Kyunghee University Grand Peace Palace, but it was postponed due to a rise in COVID-19 cases.

Winners were chosen based on physical album sales and digital rankings, popularity votes, and scores from judges. The award show regards them as “the greatest singers who made K-pop shine in 2020”.

In Korean alphabetic order, the Top 10 artists award went to Kang Daniel, The Boyz, MONSTA X, BTS, SEVENTEEN, IZ*ONE, Im Young Woong, GOT7, NCT 127, and TWICE.

| JYP Entertainment

Noticeably missing from the list is popular girl group BLACKPINK who made their highly anticipated comeback this year with their first full-length album, The Album.

| YG Entertainment

Aside from being the only K-Pop girl group to have over 1 million pre-orders from a single album, BLACKPINK also sold more than 590,000 albums in its first day of release—the highest within its time period.

| YG Entertainment

Digitally, BLACKPINK’s “Lovesick Girls” is still ranking in the Top 5 songs on MelOn Charts nearly two months after its release.

Ranking of “Lovesick Girls” on MelOn Charts as of November 28, 2020.

It continues to dominate other Korean digital charts.

Moreover, BLACKPINK was named the “biggest pop group in the world” by Bloomberg after they reached #1 on the renowned media and analysis company’s musician ranking.

Alongside the boy group BTS, BLACKPINK has achieved a level of global popularity unprecedented in the history of music.

— Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

| YG Entertainment

Their popularity can also be seen in the sheer number of views their music videos garner on YouTube, all of them raking in hundreds of millions of views. “DDU-DU DDU-DU” alone has over 1.4 billion views.

Considering the millions of albums they have sold, their high digital ranking until this day, and their widely acknowledged popularity, BLINKs were quick to question the 2020 APAN Music Awards‘ decision to exclude them from the list of Top 10 artists.

They claim the girls were robbed of the award, calling it a “rigged award show”.

Source: MelOn Charts and Naver

BLACKPINK