Cumulative annual Sales of the top 400 albums from 2013 to 2016

Compared to last year, the album sales of the top 400 (compiled of 1st place to 400th place ranking) have increased by 29% from 8,383,913 album sales in 2015 to 10,808,921 album sales in 2016. Gaon attributes the increase thanks to the huge album sales by BTS, TWICE, and Seventeen.

Percentage of Album Sales by Artist

Upon analyzing the yearly album sales based on the average of the top 100 albums, EXO recorded the highest percentage of album sales as all their albums accounted for 17% of total album sales. They were followed by BTS with 15.4%, and TWICE with 6.1%. If you were to add EXO-CBX and Lay's solo release, EXO would account for 23% of the total album sales (they accounted for 24.5% of the total in 2015).

Overall in 2016, EXO saw a slight decrease in shares, while BTS is climbing up the ladder.

Distributor Shares (Downloads)

According to the distributor shares for downloads in 2016, CJ E&M increased to 28.5% compared to the previous year of just 4.8%.  LOEN Entertainment decreased by 5.3% with a total of 25.1%, and KT Music decreased 7.8% with a total of 21.3%. CJ E&M enjoyed a huge increase thanks to the success of numerous OST tracks for the most popular dramas.

Distributor Shares (Album)

LOEN Entertainment increased the most in 2016 mainly thanks to BTS's albums 'WINGS', and 'Young Forever', SEVENTEEN's 'Seventeen 3rd Mini Album 'Going Seventeen', as well as their 1st album.

KT Music consisted of 'EXO's EX' ACT', 'For Life- Winter Special Album', TWICE's 'TWICEcoaster- LANE 1', while, CJ E&M major source of revenue were VIXX's 'Zelos', 'Hades', and 'Kratos.'

Music Genre Comparison

The graph above illustrates the music genre comparison between 2015 and 2016 for the top 100 songs in each respective year.  With ballads having 6 more songs and the R&B/Soul genre having 4 more songs in the top 100, an increase compared to 2015. The Dance and Hip Hop/Rap genres saw the biggest decrease in songs in the top 100. The Dance genre had 31 songs in 2015 in the top 100 and that number dropped to 23 songs in 2016. In the Hip Hop/Rap genre, there were 27 songs in 2015 in the top 100 and that number dropped to just 16 in 2016.