Every Korean act has one month when more people looked it up on English Wikipedia than in any other. We know that month for 774 acts. Sorted by calendar month, they are not spread evenly: 94 peaked in January and only 38 in September.
| Korean acts whose best-read month we know | 774 |
| Acts dropped for too few months — not counted as zero | 0 |
| Of those, peaks of 50,000 reads or more | 100 |
| Months in the window | 4,080 days |
| Calendar months more than two SD from expectation | 5 of 12 |
February has 28 days. A short month collects fewer reads, so it is less likely to hold an act's best month for reasons that have nothing to do with music. Our window also starts in July, so July and August appear one more time than the other months. Both effects are corrected below, and the day counts are printed so you can check the arithmetic. Without the correction February would read as 59% of expectation; with it, 64%.
| Month | Acts | Days in window | Expected | Of expected | SD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 94 | 341 | 64.7 | 145% | 3.64 |
| February | 38 | 311 | 59 | 64% | -2.73 |
| March | 80 | 341 | 64.7 | 124% | 1.9 |
| April | 89 | 330 | 62.6 | 142% | 3.34 |
| May | 59 | 341 | 64.7 | 91% | -0.71 |
| June | 63 | 330 | 62.6 | 101% | 0.05 |
| July | 87 | 372 | 70.6 | 123% | 1.96 |
| August | 76 | 372 | 70.6 | 108% | 0.65 |
| September | 38 | 330 | 62.6 | 61% | -3.11 |
| October | 51 | 341 | 64.7 | 79% | -1.7 |
| November | 43 | 330 | 62.6 | 69% | -2.48 |
| December | 56 | 341 | 64.7 | 87% | -1.08 |
5 of the twelve months sit more than two standard deviations from expectation — January (high), April (high), September (low), February (low) and November (low). That is the finding. The middle of the table is unremarkable, and we say so rather than dressing it up.
Restricted to the 100 acts whose best month drew at least 50,000 reads, so that a small article having a noisy month cannot drive the pattern. Among those hundred, not one peaked in February — against an expectation of 7.6.
| Month | Acts | Expected | SD |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 11 | 8.4 | 0.91 |
| February | 0 | 7.6 | -2.76 |
| March | 11 | 8.4 | 0.91 |
| April | 13 | 8.1 | 1.73 |
| May | 11 | 8.4 | 0.91 |
| June | 11 | 8.1 | 1.02 |
| July | 11 | 9.1 | 0.62 |
| August | 6 | 9.1 | -1.03 |
| September | 4 | 8.1 | -1.44 |
| October | 8 | 8.4 | -0.12 |
| November | 6 | 8.1 | -0.73 |
| December | 8 | 8.4 | -0.12 |
The pattern is weaker here than in the full set. Whatever produces it works mostly on acts that are read in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands — and that is worth saying plainly, because the opposite would have been the more quotable result.
This is not about when comebacks happen. We measured the month an act was read most, and we do not hold release dates.
This is looking something up, not listening to it.
Acts whose best month we could not determine are counted separately, never filled in as zero.
A calendar month with more days in the window collects more reads, so it is more likely to hold an act’s peak. The expectation below corrects for that.
In particular: we do not hold release dates. If you want to read this as “release in January”, that is a different claim about data we did not collect.
The same 774 acts lose half of that peak within two months of reaching it, and the median act takes two years after debut to get there. Korean titles halve on the same two-month timescale. Birthdays run on a different calendar again — July is the thinnest month for K-pop birthdays, which is not the month that shows up here.
For 774 Korean acts we know the single month each was read most on English Wikipedia. By calendar month they are not even — January runs 45% above expectation, September 39% below. Among the 100 biggest peaks, none landed in February.
7 September 2026
Wikimedia Pageviews REST API (English Wikipedia, all-access, agent=user, monthly), acts from Wikidata SPARQL. Re-counted from kcw-group-afterlife.json — no new collection. Window 2015-07 ~ 2026-08; the current month is excluded because it is unfinished. Re-counted 13 September 2026, 18:25 KST.