Virtual boy band Plave tops Favorite’s first Weekly Chart of 2024

Virtual K-pop band PLAVE was the winner of Favorite’s first Weekly Chart of 2024. [NHN BUGS]

Virtual K-pop band Plave was the winner of Favorite’s first Weekly Chart of 2024.

Favorite is a K-pop fan voting service co-developed by Bugs and the JoongAng Ilbo, an affiliate of the Korea JoongAng Daily.

The weekly chart is calculated with popular fan votes accounting for 80 percent of the final score, alongside 20 percent determined by the percent of each contestant's music streams played through the Bugs music service. That number is divided by five and added to the final score.

Plave took the victory for the week of Dec. 28 to Jan. 3, with a score of 53 percent, which was divided into a total of 8736 votes and 0.5 percent of the streaming data from Bugs.

Plave is a five-member virtual boy band that debuted on March 12, 2023. Plave has been setting records as a virtual K-pop band, selling over 200,000 copies of its first EP, “Asterum: The Shape of Things to Come” (2023).

IVE ranked in second place with a score of 11.5 percent, with 1206 votes and 4.2 percent of streaming, followed by NewJeans, who earned a total score of 10.4 percent, with 1179 votes and 3.3 percent of the streaming score.

As the winner of Favorite’s weekly chart, a celebratory video of Plave will be played at the Parnas Media Tower from Saturday to next Friday. Parmas Media Tower is located near Coex mall in Gangnam District in southern Seoul.

To find out more about PLAVE, visit Celeb Confirmed!

BY CHO YONG-JUN [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]