PLAVE's Music Core win adds up to 8,299 points, and 4,805 of them come from sound and albums

PLAVE, the virtual boy group formed by the agency Vlast, won MBC's music show Show! Music Core on October 24, 2026 with 8,299 points for its song “Star Trace”. A2O LITE finished second with 6,676 points and NCT WISH third with 5,813, according to Topstar News. Soompi, which reported the result on October 25, called it the group's first music-show trophy for that song.

The four lines of the scorecard

Topstar News published the breakdown of the result on the day of the broadcast. PLAVE received 4,805 points for sound and album, 994 for video and broadcast, 1,500 for pre-voting (a viewer committee and a global vote) and 1,000 for the live vote, cast by app and by text message. The four lines add up to 8,299.

Sound and album is the part of the score that follows what listeners stream and what fans buy, and it supplies more than half of the total. The two voting lines are open to the audience at large. Topstar News does not say which sales tally feeds the album part of the score, nor how the 4,805 points split between streams and discs.

The show adds up everything and announces one name.

The other two finalists were each well short. A2O LITE's “NEON” and NCT WISH's “I SPY” were the candidates named by Soompi for first place on a bill that also had IVE, BABYMONSTER and NMIXX on stage.

1.32 million copies in a week

The album behind the song is Hyperdrive, PLAVE's fifth mini-album, with five tracks. According to Hanteo Chart, a domestic album-sales tracker, it sold about 1.32 million copies in its first week, a figure that Sports Kyunghyang published in English on October 20. That is the highest first-week total of any PLAVE album. The previous record, set by the fourth mini-album Caligo Pt.2 about six months earlier, was above 1.25 million. On the streaming side, the title track and the four other songs held the top five places on Melon, Genie and Bugs at midnight on October 13, after a release at 6 p.m. on October 12. SBS reported that the agency Vlast announced the sweep, and Sports Kyunghyang called it a chart lineup.

The group has been a million-seller before. Wikipedia records that Caligo Pt.1, released on February 3, 2025, sold over one million copies in its first week, which made PLAVE the first virtual idol group to reach that mark with a single release.

A group that writes its own songs

SBS describes PLAVE as a self-produced group in which all five members take part directly in writing lyrics, composing, producing and choreography. The group debuted on March 12, 2023, and its name combines “Play” and the French word for dream, according to the same article.

The five tracks of Hyperdrive range from EDM-based dance pop to bossa nova, rock, pop and R&B pop, SBS reports, and “Star Trace” is the group's first song in the EDM style, as Gukje News puts it. The song speaks of cosmic love and trust, and of the bond with fans.

That bond has a corporate side. Wikipedia records that in April 2024 the agency's chief executive announced equity investments from HYBE and YG Plus to support expansion abroad. In November 2024 PLAVE became the first virtual idol group to perform at the Mnet Asian Music Awards, and its single “Dash” entered the Billboard Global 200 at No. 195, the first entry by a virtual act since K/DA's “More” in 2020.

Those are the facts the agency and its backers can point to, drawn from an encyclopedia entry that itself cites the Korean and international press. What the screen hides is the labour: the movements, voices and writing that sit behind five animated figures. SBS's profile gives no source for the self-production claim, and nothing in the coverage shows how the work is divided among the five.

The same show, two years earlier

The Music Core scorecard is easy to compare with the one from August 31, 2024. On that day PLAVE won the show with the digital single “Pump Up The Volume!”, ahead of Taemin and NMIXX, according to the Korean outlet Etoday. Its score was 7,576: 5,000 points for sound and album, 576 for video and broadcast, 1,000 for pre-voting and 1,000 for the live vote.

Set side by side, the lines moved unevenly. Sound and album fell from 5,000 to 4,805, while video and broadcast rose from 576 to 994 and pre-voting from 1,000 to 1,500. The live vote stayed at 1,000. The 2026 report names two parts of the pre-vote, a viewer committee and a global vote, which the 2024 report does not, and neither article explains how the show sets its caps. The comparison therefore shows what the group scored, and says nothing about how the show changed its rules.

At the 2024 win, the group thanked its audience in plain terms. Etoday quotes the members: “1위를 하게 되었는데 모두 팬 여러분 덕분이다”, which says the win was owed to the fans. They added thanks to each other.

The history goes back further, and it shows how long the group has been collecting trophies on shows built for human acts. Soompi reported on March 6, 2024 that PLAVE had won its first music-show trophy on Show Champion, the first virtual group to do so. Wikipedia adds that the song “Way 4 Luv” also won on Music Core and that the group became the first virtual idol group to win on a Korean music show.

A fandom that also votes

Before the broadcast, PLAVE had already shown how many people will click for it. Gukje News reported that the group took first place in the daily K-pop group vote on StarTrend and tied that to the Music Core result. That article carries a photo credited to the agency, and its reading of the result as proof of a surge in popularity is the outlet's own, not a measurement.

Fan voting is one of the places where this audience shows up, and the group has been visible on others. PLAVE had already topped the September ranking of FLO's Cheer feature, a feature on which fans vote for their favourite act. Sales, streams and votes all measure a kind of attention, but each is bought or given in a different way, and the show adds them together in a single number.

Other numbers around the trophy

The Music Core win did not arrive alone. The headlines that Topstar News links beside its report say that “Star Trace” entered the Billboard Global Excl. US chart at No. 18, that the new album ranked second on Billboard Japan and on Oricon, and that the music video was nearing 16 million views. We did not open those articles, so the figures are the headlines' own.

Each of these is a different counting method. Streams, discs, video views and television votes all feed a different table, and a group can lead one while placing mid-chart on another. The Music Core score is one more table, and it sums four of them.

A critic on why the field is filling up

PLAVE's results sit inside a wider shift. Critic Lim Hee-yun, writing in Korea Daily, counted one in four idols that debuted this year as virtual, and named PLAVE's success as one of the reasons. He noted that the group sold over 1 million copies of a single album in 2025, held a concert at Gocheok Sky Dome and sold out Incheon Munhak Stadium this year.

According to the industry, he wrote, several virtual singer production companies received billions of won in venture capital investment this year. He described virtual singers as offering high cost-effectiveness and low risk, which is a producer's calculation, and his reading of the market. He also quoted an unnamed executive of a mid-sized record label, who said that the number of male trainees has plummeted over the past few years, because young people now lean towards jobs such as YouTuber and influencer.

He also left room for the other side. “In an era of living with robots, humans will yearn for humans forever,” he wrote, arguing that the feeling of seeing a real person succeed gives human singers an advantage over manufactured AI products.

Taipei, Macau, Los Angeles

PLAVE is on its first world tour, Keep It Manic. After Singapore on October 17, Sports Kyunghyang's schedule lists Taipei on October 23 and 24, Macau on October 31 and November 1, and Los Angeles on November 14.