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A spike in late week sales for "Who Am I" the new album by K-pop boy band B1A4 following its Jan. 13 release date, caused some observers to wonder if its number one ranking on the Korean pop chart Hanteo had been the result of manipulation.
On Friday, a representative for the weekly chart shot down the allegations, in a statement to the news publication OSEN.
"There is no problem in the total. The sudden increase in album sales is not at all different from other idol groups," the Hanteo rep said.
"It's not a special case. Many idols, including TVXQ who recently released an album, are seeing this type of sales change."
One area of contention was the fact that 14,000 copies of "Who Am I" were sold between 6:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Jan. 19, nearly a week after the album's release.
The chart representative explained that this sudden bump in album sales had to do with the way international reporting works.
"The group purchase data at 6 p.m. on the Jan. 19 as well as the 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. sales were totaled through an offline, overseas store," the Hanteo rep said.
"The sales increased even more because of a fan signing, and there was nothing weird about any of it. There are some cases where albums that become a hot issue suddenly increase in sales like that. If it's online sales, it might be grounds for suspicion, but if it's offline, there is no problem. In this case, the rumors blew up in a weird way and so it grew into suspicion."
A spokesperson for B1A4's label WM Entertainment also shot down the allegations of cheating the K-pop charts in an interview with the publication Sports Seoul.
"The controversy is not true at all. It's nonsense," the spokesperson said.
"The employees of Hanteo chart that calculate chart position even told us that there is no problem in the B1A4 album sales."
Like the Hanteo rep, the WM spokesperson chalked the whole thing up to a delay in the reporting of international figures.
"Some stores don't send the Hanteo Chart staff their real-time sales," the spokesperson said.
"There are a lot of cases where they send it in bulk at the end of the day. That's why the album sales increased by a lot at the end of the day. We're worried that if we respond without any data, the controversy will get worse. To make the B1A4 fans and the other fans understand, we need data to show that it's not manipulated. But we do not yet know accurately to what extent the albums were sold. We can only get it after calculating the balance, but that will take time."
Source : kpopstarz[dot]com
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