MAMA prints its scoring formula, and it shows what a K-pop trophy really measures

At 6pm in Seoul today, 40 acts start a three-week race on a phone app. The second round of Fans' Choice voting for the 2026 MAMA Awards opens on Mnet Plus, with the top 20 male and top 20 female acts from the first round still standing, and it closes at 11:59pm on 18 November. Two nights later, on 20 and 21 November, the trophies are handed out at Kyocera Dome Osaka in Japan.

The Fans' Choice prizes are the only MAMA awards decided purely by fans. Every other trophy comes out of a formula, and MAMA, which is run by the Korean media giant CJ ENM through its music channel Mnet, prints that formula alongside the nominations. Most award shows ask you to trust a room of voters you never see. MAMA hands you the weights.

So read them. Do the arithmetic and a clear picture comes out: MAMA's grand prizes, the four "daesang", measure how much a fandom buys and how hard it organises, more than how far a song travels or what a panel of peers thinks of it. That is not a scandal. It is a design choice, and it is the most useful thing a global reader can know about K-pop's biggest night, especially in a season when the Grammys are about to judge the same music on the opposite principle.

The formula, line by line

Eligible music was released between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026. Here is how the main prizes are built this year.

Artist of the Year: 40% jury, 30% physical album sales, 15% streaming and downloads in Korea, 15% streaming and downloads worldwide.

Album of the Year: 60% physical album sales, 40% jury. Only albums that sold at least a million copies can enter. This year 18 cleared the bar, among them BTS's ARIRANG, BLACKPINK's DEADLINE and ATEEZ's GOLDEN HOUR: Part.5.

Song of the Year and the genre prizes: a jury share plus digital performance split equally between Korea and the rest of the world. For the genre awards (dance, vocal, rap and the rest) the jury now carries half the score.

Best Song Top 10: new this year, and 100% digital, half Korean and half overseas. The ten songs it picks become the shortlist for Song of the Year.

Fans' Choice: 90% votes on Mnet Plus, 10% votes on X. The overall Fans' Choice of the Year adds a live vote on Mnet Plus during the ceremony.

Put the Artist of the Year line under a magnifying glass. Physical album sales are worth 30 points. Every stream and download outside Korea, in every country on earth, is worth 15. A CD, in MAMA's maths, counts twice as much as the whole world pressing play.

That is already a shift. Last year the same prize gave Korea's own streaming 20% and the world's only 10%. MAMA has not said why it evened them out, and its announcement does not name the jurors or explain how a raw sales figure or stream count becomes points on the scorecard. The weights are public. The machinery that turns numbers into a winner is not.

Why the album counts double

To see why a K-pop award leans on the CD, follow the money. A K-pop album is less a record than a box: a photobook, a random photocard of one member, sometimes several cover versions of the same release. Fans buy multiples to complete sets or to chase a card. A first-week sales figure is how a fandom shows strength, and it feeds every chart and music show that counts physical units.

That market is big, and it is changing shape. K-pop album sales on Circle Chart came to about 93.5 million copies in 2025, down from roughly 120 million in 2023. Over the same period the box went abroad: Korean customs counted US$301.7 million in album exports in 2025, the first time the figure passed $300 million, with Japan at $80.6 million, China at $69.7 million and the United States at $64 million. Korea buys fewer CDs. The rest of the world buys more of them, as merchandise.

Last year's winners show the formula doing what it was built to do. Stray Kids took Album of the Year for KARMA, which sold more than three million copies. G-DRAGON took Artist of the Year in the year of his album Übermensch. ENHYPEN won Fans' Choice of the Year, the trophy that is all votes. The one daesang that went to a song built on worldwide streams was Song of the Year, for ROSÉ and Bruno Mars's "APT.", a single that won on global streams rather than boxes of CDs.

There is a quiet consequence in that million-copy rule. An album that is loved, streamed and critically adored but sells 400,000 CDs cannot be Album of the Year at MAMA. It does not lose. It is never in the room.

A vote is only as good as the counter

Fans' Choice is the purest test of organisation. Fanbases run voting drives, share guides and split the work across time zones, because winning depends on how many accounts show up, day after day, for three weeks. Nine-tenths of that vote is cast inside Mnet Plus, CJ ENM's own app, which is also where the ceremony streams worldwide. The award brings the audience home to the broadcaster.

That puts a lot of weight on one company counting its own votes, and Mnet has history here. In July 2019 viewers of its audition show Produce X 101 noticed the final vote tallies did not add up. Prosecutors went on to find that the live finales of all four seasons of the Produce 101 series had been rigged, and two of the shows' producers were jailed. Korea's Supreme Court upheld their sentences in March 2021. The court named 12 trainees who had been voted out by manipulation. Mnet said it respected the decision and apologised.

MAMA is a different show from Produce, and nobody has shown anything wrong with its counts. But that history is why MAMA's published weights matter, and why the parts it keeps private (the jury, the conversion from raw data to points) deserve more light. Outside platforms have also come and gone at short notice. In November 2022, mid-season, Mnet dropped Twitter votes from its fan awards, saying it could no longer collect the voting data after the company's restructuring. This year X is back, at 10%.

Two juries, one genre

Now hold MAMA's formula next to the Grammys. On 7 February 2027, the Recording Academy hands out its first Best Asian Pop Music Performance, open to K-pop, J-pop and C-pop recordings that make "meaningful use of one or more Asian languages". There is no sales line in a Grammy, no streaming line and no fan vote. Academy members, mostly working musicians, producers and engineers, vote on what they hear.

The two systems have already pulled K-pop's biggest names in different directions. BTS and Stray Kids are sitting out the Grammys this season, and BLACKPINK's DEADLINE is sung in English, which keeps it out of the new category. All three are in contention at MAMA, where BTS, BLACKPINK and Stray Kids sit among the Artist of the Year names, because MAMA measures exactly what they are best at: an audience that buys, streams and votes in formation.

Neither approach is the honest one and the other the fake. A Grammy is a guess by insiders about quality. A MAMA daesang is closer to a receipt: an audited (if not fully transparent) record of what a fandom did in twelve months. Read a MAMA win as "this act's fans had the biggest year", and it makes perfect sense. Read it as "this was the best music in K-pop", and you will be confused every December.

The detail worth watching is where the receipt is printed. The sales line counts CDs that are increasingly bought in Tokyo, Shanghai and Los Angeles. The streaming line has just tilted towards the world. The ceremony is in Osaka, the year after Hong Kong, and two years after MAMA's first night in the United States. Each change moves K-pop's own trophy a step away from Korea and towards the global fan. The Grammys are betting there is an audience for K-pop beyond the fandom. MAMA's formula is a bet that the fandom is the audience. Its arithmetic, so far, keeps proving it right.