ATEEZ 'BAD' Wins Inkigayo Without Showing Up, 3 Months In
The ATEEZ 'BAD' Inkigayo win on Sunday, September 13 is the odd kind of music-show trophy: the group was not in the building, the song came out on June 26, and its official promotions (활동) had already wrapped, as Tenasia put it.
Korean outlets ran the story Monday morning KST under nearly the same headline. Hankyung went with "발매 석 달째인데…또 음방 1위" (three months after release, and another music-show No. 1), and the "또" (again) is the part worth reading past. This is at least the third trophy 'BAD' has taken with no ATEEZ on stage.
Three Trophies, Zero Stage Appearances
Here's the run, pulled from the Korean coverage rather than the English recaps. 'BAD' is the title track of the fourteenth mini album "GOLDEN HOUR : Part.5," released June 26. On July 10 it took KBS "Music Bank" over SEVENTEEN unit V8 (Vernon and The8)'s "singasong," with ATEEZ absent from the broadcast, per Star News. On August 22 it won MBC "Show! Music Core," again without an appearance, according to Tenasia. And on September 13 it won SBS "Inkigayo" with a total of 5,800 points over Rescene's "Love Attack" and BIGBANG's "BiiiG," per Nocut News, which noted the group wasn't there for that one either.
Three broadcasters, three wins, and the group at none of them.
Absent wins happen in K-pop, usually when a group is touring abroad during the first two weeks of a release and the song is strong enough to carry the chart on its own. The timing is what's unusual here. A June 26 song winning in mid-September means it out-scored whatever was actively promoting that week, on a show it wasn't performing on.
How a Song Wins Inkigayo Without a Performance
If you've only ever watched Inkigayo through fancam clips, the scoring is the thing to understand, and the Korean-language details are more useful than the English summaries.
The fan vote is smaller than most fandoms assume. The pre-vote runs Monday 12:00 to Friday 23:59 KST each week, and the vote operator's own help page says the result "is reflected within 5%" (5% 내 반영) of the score under SBS policy, per LiNC's Inkigayo pre-vote guide. Wikipedia's Inkigayo entry puts digital (streaming and downloads) at half the formula under the system in place since October 2024. I couldn't get SBS's own criteria page to load today (September 14, KST), so treat those percentages as the commonly cited breakdown rather than something I confirmed from the broadcaster itself.
In practice, a song still being streamed heavily in Korea three months out can beat a fresh release that has a stage and a fandom voting all week. That's what happened. The 5,800 in Nocut's report is the total score, not a vote count.
The Melon Climb Is the Real Story
Every Korean write-up leads with the same chart detail, and it deserves the emphasis. 'BAD' entered Melon's TOP100 at No. 81 on release, then climbed, and sat at No. 7 as of September 13; Hankyung and Ilgan Sports both have it. Nocut reported No. 8 on Melon's daily chart as of September 12, which is a different chart on a different day, not a contradiction.
An 81-to-7 climb over eleven weeks is a 역주행 (yeokjuhaeng), the Korean term for a song that runs the chart backwards, rising well after release instead of debuting high and fading. The usual knock on boy groups with ATEEZ-size album sales is that domestic streaming never matches the physical numbers. The album side was covered already: "GOLDEN HOUR : Part.5" debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 dated July 11 with 228,000 equivalent album units, 223,000 of them pure sales, per Complex's report on the chart (via Yahoo), and Hankyung puts first-week domestic sales (초동) at 1.88 million, a career high. A song that also sticks in Korea's streaming top 10 is the piece that had been missing.
Why This One Stuck
Nocut's write-up points to the "다 죽자" ("let's all die") section late in the song, a restrained bit of choreography with San at center, as the reason the track kept climbing on streaming. I'd add a plainer reason. The chorus is very easy to sing badly at full volume, which is what a long-tail streaming hit needs.
I'll admit 'BAD' didn't strike me as the obvious long-runner of the summer when it dropped. Wrong about the shelf life, clearly.
What's Next, and Where Overseas Fans Fit In
ATEEZ's next Korean stage isn't a music show. They're on the Sunday, September 20 bill at the ATA Festival (Asia Top Artist Festival) at Nanji Hangang Park in Seoul, alongside Jannabi, Lee Mujin, Choi Yena and Kickflip, per Hankyung's lineup report. Regular one-day passes were listed at ₩121,000 and two-day passes at ₩187,000 when the final lineup was announced in July; the English-language listing for overseas buyers is on NOL Global, which shows the early-bird tier at ₩99,000 and a four-tickets-per-person-per-day cap. Whether any allocation is left this week is something I couldn't confirm, so check the NOL page before booking a flight around it.
If you're not in Seoul, the boring advice stands. The Melon position is decided by Korean streaming accounts, so international Spotify plays aren't what moved it. What you can do is keep the win count honest when the next music-show tally goes around X, since "three wins without a stage" is a much better story than "another trophy."
Score for the summer of 'BAD': 8/10, docked a point for the lack of a proper Korean stage at the end of it. September 20 fixes that. Anyone at Nanji that day, tell me how the "다 죽자" part lands outdoors.
This is a running news series, not a one-off post — new stories go up twice a day, roughly 7am and 7pm Korea time.
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