Seoul Music Awards Issues Statement Regarding Voting Error Following Complaints

Dec 16, 2019

Seoul Music Awards (SMA) has published a statement following issues with voting on December 16.

Fans of BTS reported that their online votes were not being registered for several hours on December 16. That evening, Seoul Music Awards issued a statement to admit that there was an error with voting for some artists between 3:15 a.m. and 9:45 a.m. that day.

The show stated that this was due to the high number of votes during this period, which led to the memory database containing some artists’ information not responding and votes for them not going through. They confirmed that the artists affected included BTS, EXO’s Chen, and AOA. SMA went on to clarify that contrary to what some fans have thought, there was no intentional manipulation of the votes.

Following the publication of the statement, fans have continued to speak out against SMA, saying the show has not offered any solution to the issue in which their votes over several hours have not been counted while other artists’ votes during that period remain reflected in their total score.

Read the full statement below:

Voting for the Seoul Music Awards began on December 9, and the daily, weekly, and monthly votes are being counted. The daily votes are counted every day at midnight, and the counting of the first weekly vote began automatically at 3 a.m. today, after one week had passed.

Since the number of free votes has increased this year, we expected an increase in the number of overall votes. To prepare for this, we are using a separate database (AWS RDS) and a memory database that’s divided (AWS ElastiCache – Redis) to speed up the system processing.

Within a week of voting, there have been one million new accounts created. The memory database is being used to get artists’ information when votes are made.

Due to the high thoroughput when the weekly vote counted occurred today in the early morning, the memory database containing some artists’ information became unresponsive during the vote that was taking place at the time. Therefore it was not possible to vote for some unspecified artists at that time. After doing a complete survey of all the voting records, we confirmed that those artists were BTS, Chen, and AOA, and we have found that the voting record did not show for some artists during that time but when the overall vote count was looked at, the vote had not gone through.

After checking the customer reports regarding this issue, we immediately took action and the voting was back to normal as of 9:45 a.m. today. Because of this, the fans who had wanted to vote for those artists could not vote during that time. Some fans have thought that there was intentional manipulation of the votes, but there was none at all. In addition, there was no decrease in the number of users’ voting tickets.

We are making efforts to ensure that everyone can fairly and transparently see the current state of the votes. Last year the votes were shown only in percentage, but now the rankings are shown with the real number of votes. This can be seen by looking at the attached data. In the case of artists whose voting was carried out as normal, their vote count increased steadily every hour.

On the other hand, you can see that in the case of artists who had issues, the number of votes remained the same throughout the period of the issue, and after it was resolved, the number of votes greatly increased. All of the votes in the SMA are recorded and stored, so we are confident that there is no possibility for manipulation or intervention.

We apologize for causing inconvenience as we were not able to quickly respond to the issue that occurred over the weekend on Monday morning. The Seoul Music Awards is doing our everything possible to ensure that the vote remains fair, and we once again promise that it will be operated transparently through a more thorough monitoring and verification process.

SMA attached an image with data that confirms that BTS and Chen’s voting scores for a Bonsang (main prize) did not change for several hours, and the votes for Chen, BTS, and AOA for the Popularity Award did not change either.