Fans bought the tickets, FLO put up the billboard: PLAVE wins the first month of Cheer

FLO, the music platform of South Korea's Dreamus Company, said on October 15, 2026 that the virtual group PLAVE took first place among about 130 acts in the first month of its fan feature Cheer. The prize is a large digital billboard at Hongik University Station in Seoul, running for about one month from October 12.

A billboard for the September winner

Taemin ranked second and BIGBANG third. Taemin's ad goes on digital media along the main passageways at Express Bus Terminal Station and Gangnam Station, and BIGBANG gets a wrap ad at Gangnam Station. All three run for about a month from the 12th.

Sung Jin-A, head of the traffic unit at Dreamus, described FLO's part as turning the hours of support fans build while listening together into "advertising they can see for themselves in daily life," according to the English translation published by the Seoul Economic Daily.

The ranking rests on what FLO calls cheer listening data for September. The announcements do not say whether acts were ranked by plays, by tickets spent or by a mix of the two.

How a ticket becomes a play

Cheer works in four steps. A fan creates a cheer playlist for an artist, buys cheering tickets and shares a link. Other fans then play that playlist, and the tickets are spent together as the plays accumulate.

The feature officially launched on September 1, 2026. In its first month, FLO says, 250,000 fans took part, collected more than 1 million cheering tickets and pushed cumulative plays past 1 million. The number of participating artists grew from just over 10 right after launch to about 130 within a month.

FLO also reports that new sign-ups rose 19% in September and that the Cheer revisit rate reached 25.7%. Those are the figures a platform wants from a fan feature, and they are FLO's own.

What a ticket costs is not stated in the announcements. Money Today describes the billboards as FLO's way of repaying fans for taking part, so the sequence is fans buying tickets, FLO counting the plays and FLO supplying the advertising space.

FLO's October 8 account says the feature did not stay with one fandom: fans pooled their cheering tickets around each artist's comebacks, concerts and anniversaries to concentrate what the platform calls firepower, and shared dedicated playlists to do it. The same text says support links posted on external channels brought in new users, which is the mechanism behind the sign-up figure.

The fans seem to understand the game. FLO's release quotes a social media comment: "Let's raise the Circle score and get a subway ad, too." Circle Chart is a South Korean music chart, and FLO says Cheer plays are reflected not only in its own chart but also in Circle Chart and Billboard tallies. That claim comes from FLO. Neither chart is quoted confirming it.

Why PLAVE leads

PLAVE was introduced through a live broadcast on YouTube and Twitch on September 15, 2022, and made its official debut on March 12, 2023 with the single album Asterum. The group was formed by the company Vlast and has five members, Yejun, Noah, Bamby, Eunho and Hamin, all shown on screen as virtual characters.

The group's records came quickly. Its second mini album, Asterum: 134-1, sold 569,289 copies in one week in February 2024, according to the group's Wikipedia entry, and its title track made PLAVE the first virtual idol group to win on a Korean music show. In April 2024 Vlast announced equity investments from HYBE and YG Plus to support international expansion.

The group also built its audience on stage and on fan platforms. It announced on December 12, 2023 that it would join Weverse and became the first virtual group on that platform, then held its first fan concert, "Hello, Asterum!", on April 13 and 14, 2024 at the Olympic Hall in Seoul. In November 2024 it performed at the Mnet Asian Music Awards, the first virtual idol group at the ceremony.

Then came February 3, 2025. The mini album Caligo Pt.1 sold over one million copies in its first week, and its lead single "Dash" entered the Billboard Global 200 at number 195, the first entry by a virtual act since K/DA's "More" in 2020.

This year, according to a column in the Korea Daily, PLAVE sold out Incheon Munhak Stadium and started a world tour that includes an auditorium performance in Pasadena, California, in November. FLO's own account of the pre-open period, published on October 8, 2026, says PLAVE fans gathered over 150,000 supports before the official launch, ahead of that tour. PLAVE's new mini-album had already filled Melon's top five places days earlier, so a first place on a feature built around organised fan listening is consistent with a fandom that moves together.

A platform courting fandoms

Cheer is one piece of a larger effort. Dreamus revamped FLO's artist pages into hubs with official social media channels, concert booking information and the latest news, and added a feature called My Affection Level. In July it launched a global fandom platform, FLO ZIP, with a listening party feature in which fans and artists talk while hearing tracks together in real time.

In September the company also unveiled a Rising Artist chart, updated every day at 6 a.m., which ranks acts by surges in interest, such as how quickly new listeners join, rather than by accumulated popularity. Lee Sae-rom, head of the platform business division, said existing charts showed accumulated popularity while the new one captured the movement of soaring interest.

The common thread is a platform that wants to be where fans gather, and not only where songs are played. A streaming service earns from a listener once, whereas a fandom that organises itself around playlists comes back each month, which is why the monthly recalculation matters to FLO.

Who is counting

Every number in this story starts with one press release from Dreamus.

Sports Kyunghyang, the Seoul Economic Daily and Money Today repeat it with little change, and the English editions of the first two were machine translated from Korean. No outside audit of the 250,000 participants, the 1 million plays or the chart claim appears in the coverage.

One trade outlet, Korea Duty Free News, reads the design plainly. In its words, the service turns a single stream into continued participation by linking tickets, shared playback and an offline advertising reward, and gives users a further reason to stay on the platform.

There is a second reading of the same numbers. A fan who spends on tickets is buying attention for an artist, and the artist who gathers the most of it receives the most visible space in a Seoul commuter hub. The artist's agency does not appear in any of the announcements.

Neither does a price.

One new idol in four

PLAVE is no longer an exception. In a column published by the Korea Daily on October 16, 2026, pop critic Lim Hee-yun counted 13 virtual acts among the 55 idol-type singers that debuted in South Korea between January and October 2026. That is his own investigation, and the column is opinion.

He lists reasons. PLAVE's success is the first. The second is money: according to the industry, several virtual singer production companies received billions of won in venture capital this year. He also quotes a mid-sized label executive, identified only as Mr. D, who said that "the number of male trainees has plummeted over the past few years."

Disclosure divides listeners more than the virtual group format does. Lim points to a song called "Did You Become the Adult You Dreamed Of?" by Momeuru, whose album introduction states that its vocals were generated with Suno AI. By his account it reached fourth place on Melon's daily chart on October 14, yet its average Melon rating is 3.1 out of 5, because some listeners give one star saying it is disgusting that it is AI while others give five stars after finding comfort in it. His column also reports that the Korea Music Copyright Association announced last August a plan to allow copyright trust registration for songs partly using AI, then suspended it after backlash from inside the music industry.

Lim does not write the human idol off. "Humans will yearn for humans forever," he argues, and he thinks the emotional pull of a person will keep a comparative advantage over an engineered product, at least for now.

The column also describes Sleeq, an AI singer who debuted in July and whose worldview casts her as a future entity created by AI. Fans are set as summoners who bring her into the human world, and her production company says it uses AI to analyse posts uploaded by fans to decide her activity directions. A virtual act can therefore read its audience as closely as its audience reads it.

The Cheer ranking is a small test of his point. Fans of a group that never steps off a screen pooled tickets to put it on a station wall.

What runs next

Cheer's launch event continues through December. FLO will recalculate the rankings each month, and the top three acts will get subway ads in the following month. October's winners are therefore due their billboards in November, the same month PLAVE reaches Pasadena.

Sources

• “Fan streaming turns into subway ads” FLO ‘Cheer’ first-month TOP 3: PLAVE, Taemin, BIGBANG, Sports Kyunghyang, Son Bong-Seok, October 15, 2026