The survey and its coverage highlights the shortcomings of the Korean blogosphere, namely the lack of a decent bridge blogger – a Korean who’s prepared to read the original sources and translate them for the English speaking audience. None of the reports available had anything to add to the two secondary sources mentioned above, which themselves are derived from the Seoul Shinmun. Putting the two secondary sources together, we get the following results:
- Wonder Girls (above right) (both Nobody and So Hot were voted into the top 5 most popular songs of the year) (22.2%)
- Big Bang (Right. Day by Day made it into the top 5 songs) (21.2%)
- Jang Yoon Jeong (9.9%)
- Girl’s Generation (소녀시대, below; SM Entertainment’s answer to JYP’s Wonder Girls) (7.8%)
- Lee Hyo-ri (U-Go-Girl was one of the top 5 songs) (6.5%)
- Tae Jin-ah (6.5%)
- Rain
- ?
- TVXQ
- ?
At either 8 or 10 appears Park Hyun-bin, another of the younger generation of trot singers. Maybe SG Wannabe, whose La La La was in the top 5, completed the list. But if you want to know this, or indeed the other missing details, you’ll have to track down the original Korean sources.

- I swear I didn’t know of the song’s popularity when I included it in my list of 2008 K-pop choices [↩]