Stars · music
Plave's English Wikipedia Reading Rose Before the Melon Music Awards News Broke
The 18th Melon Music Awards named its first lineup — Plave, Riize, NCT Wish, Alpha Drive One and Lngshot — on 16 September. Plave's English Wikipedia reading was already 1.52x its baseline three days before the announcement.
The table this is written from: /what-moves-english-reading
The 18th Melon Music Awards announced the first five acts on its 2026 lineup on 16 September: Plave, Riize, NCT Wish, Alpha Drive One and Lngshot, according to Soompi. The show runs 14-15 November at Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul.
Plave is a virtual K-pop group — its five members perform as motion-captured 3D characters rather than appearing as themselves. We checked whether the awards-lineup news moved how often English-language readers looked the group up on Wikipedia.
What we measured
We pulled Plave’s daily English Wikipedia pageviews for the 29 days ending 17 September 2026, and split the window into a 22-day baseline (20 August-11 September, minus one excluded day — see below) and the five days spanning the announcement (13-17 September).
| Average views/day | |
|---|---|
| Baseline (20 Aug-11 Sep, 22 days) | 139 |
| 13-17 Sep (announcement window) | 211 (1.52x) |
Reading was already above baseline on 13 September — 223 views, three days before Soompi’s report ran. It stayed elevated through 17 September, the last day our data covers. We didn’t find a news item naming Plave on 13 September itself, so we’re not attaching the early rise to a specific cause — only noting that it preceded the public announcement rather than followed it.
What we’re not counting
One day in our window, 23 August, spiked to 649 views — nearly five times the 139-view baseline we calculated from the other 22 days. We found no news event that day naming Plave and are excluding it from the baseline above, rather than let one unexplained day move it.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Soompi — News report, 'Melon Music Awards 2026 Announces First Lineup,' 2026-09-16 · https://www.soompi.com/article/1870945wpp/melon-music-awards-2026-announces-first-lineup
- Wikimedia Foundation — Pageviews API — Daily English Wikipedia pageviews, all-access, user agents only, for Plave, 20 August-17 September 2026 · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
What we checked
- 22-day baseline (20 August-11 September 2026, excluding 23 August as an unexplained outlier — see excluded): Plave's English Wikipedia page averaged 139 views a day.
- 13-17 September (the five days spanning and following the 16 September lineup announcement): Plave averaged 211 views a day, 1.52x baseline.
- The rise starts on 13 September — three days before Soompi's report — at 223 views (1.60x baseline). We found no news item naming Plave that day, so we record the early rise as unexplained rather than attribute it to the announcement.
What we left out, and why
- A claim that the 16 September announcement itself caused the reading rise. The rise was already underway on 13 September; we report the coincidence in timing, not a proven cause.
- Any comparison of Plave's reading to the other four acts named in the same lineup (Riize, NCT Wish, Alpha Drive One, Lngshot). We measured Plave only.
- A single-day spike (23 August, 649 views, 4.0x baseline) inside our 30-day window. We found no news item explaining it and are not including it in the baseline or the crossCheck average — it is noted here only as excluded.
The data behind this
Written from the same data
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