The winners of the '2022 Genie Music Awards' were announced on November 8 , and many K-pop artists were recognized for their achievements this year.

Many deserving artists were able to take home the "Daesang" or the grand prize, but a discussion was started in various online communities questioning some of the awards that were given out on this day.

In particular, K-netizens are questioning how NCT Dream was able to take home "Singer of the year (Daesang)." This is because they argue that Lim Young Woong had much better-performing sales and metrics and was the artist most popular this year. In terms of streams on the Genie music platform, Lim Young Woong was #1 with 474 million streams, and NCT Dream was #10 at 49 million streams. The award criteria is based on 60% digital results/streams and 40% judging.

That is why K-netizens and K-pop fans believe that the results may have been rigged. Past award show winners were also brought to light, and netizens pointed out how unexpected SM Entertainment artists have won grand prizes in the past.

Netizens commented, "The awards criteria are definitely rigged," "Lim Young Woong must have been given a negative score by judges for NCT Dream to take the Singer of the year award," "When will SM Entertainment change things," "There is no way NCT Dream could have gotten enough points to win 'Singer of the Year' award," "they definitely subtracted points to Lim Young Woong," "Even for the 2019 Seoul Music Awards, they were promoting that they will give only one Daesang but then on the day of the ceremony, they added one more Daesang award for Taeyeon, lol. Taeyeon's 'Four Seasons' was far behind in album sales compared to BTS who won Daesang that year but still won the 'Album of the year.' Then, the next year they got rid of the category, lol," and "They must get extra 100 points for being from SM Entertainment lol."