[ASKKPOP] WM Entertainment and Hanteo speak on accusations of B1A4's album sales being manipulated
The boys dropped their 2nd album 'Who Am I' on the 13th, and on Hanteo's weekly chart released on the 20th, the boys had claimed #1 for album sales.
The accusations pointed out that rather than selling the most amount of copies on the 1st or 2nd day of album release (13th), which is when pre-orders are released and when fan signings are held to encourage fans to buy, B1A4 experienced sudden spikes starting the last 3 days of the album release week.
From the 14th to the 19th, the boys had sold a total of 67,186 albums, which the accusers say is not a realistic number for them when comparing it to their past album sale records and the album sales of big groups. They say the number of core fans could not have tripled since last comeback as B1A4's previous album sold 22,000 in a week, while their new one sold 67,000 in a week. Although B1A4 fans argued that it is due to the new album having different covers and fans buying multiple covers, the accusers say that their numbers are still not realistic when compared to big groups who have released multiple covers of albums.
In addition, one of the most controversial parts of the the argument was that on the 19th, which was the deadline day for the weekly chart on Hanteo, the album went from 2,000 copies sold by 6:30 PM to 16,000 copies sold by 10 PM.
This means in a matter of 3 hours and 30 minutes, 14,000 copies had suddenly been sold.
WM Entertainment toldSports Seoul, "The controversy is not true at all. It's nonsense, so we don't even feel the need to respond. Hanteo chart, which calculates the album sales, even told us that there is no problem in the B1A4 album sales. Some stores don't send Hanteo Chart their real-time sales. 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."
Hanteo also responded with their comment to OSEN, "There is no problem in the total. The sudden increase in album sales is not at all different from other idol groups... It's not a special case. Many idols, includingTVXQwho recently released an album, are seeing this type of sales change. The group purchase data at 6PM on the 19th as well as the 8PM-10PM sales were summed through an offline, overseas store. The sales increased even more because of the fansigning, and there was nothing weird about all 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."