#admin suji

Off the bat, I think we may have seen our highest ever ranked song this time around - Goblin (Favorite Boys) got a 4.9 from 63 responses, receiving only 5 non-five rankings.

The rest of the discography sees the same gradual trend downward we've seen in the past, but very gradual this time, with only 8 songs receiving a total ranking lower than a 4.

The bracket itself didn't have many upsets, which makes sense considering how many responses we received to the initial survey. Another example of how sample size matters! The most interesting upset was Higher beating UNDER COVER in the semi-finals, but only because of how close all the top ten were. If we looks at just the top 10, it looks like there's a huge drop off in ratings between UNDER COVER and Take Me Higher, which makes the upset seem way more extreme than it was. Looking at the scale of this chart shows that UNDER COVER was only rated 0.16 points higher than Higher.

The other interesting thing this bracket was our first ever absolute sweep. In round 1, Talk you down (ranked 31) received no votes against UNDER COVER (ranked 2). We kept refreshing the polls, especially towards the end of the week, just to see if Talk you down would receive any votes at all, and it turns out everyone just likes UNDER COVER better (rip talk you down).

Let's start by looking at the results to the survey:

We have a really nice gradual curve right up until the very end where we see a sharp drop off for All Yours. We see a couple of those plateaus we've seen in other rankings, but way fewer ties this time since we got a wonderful 38 responses.

Clearly, not the case with the polls for the bracket themselves. Almost every round had a tiebreaker, and we even had a tie for the tiebreaker for the semi final! Really, this indicates to me that DKB's discography is just really consistent.

There's a very interesting story between rounds two and three and the ties there. Round two had two tied polls - Work Hard and Coco Colada with 7 votes each, and Flirting X and Tell Me Tell Me with 8 votes each. The tiebreakers had Work Hard and Flirting X move on to round three, where they would face each other. Flirting X ended up upsetting Work Hard 10 votes to 6. Since we received a really consistent number of responses to each poll - with an average and median of 16 - we can clearly see the favorites in each match up. BBs like Work Hard more than Coco Colada (barely), but Flirting X considerably more than Work Hard.

You can see a similar trend in our unprecedented three way finale - More Than 100 Reasons and Turning Point both received 10 votes in the initial poll, then 8 each in the tiebreaker. But, once they were up against Sober, Turning Point only got 4 votes and More Than 100 Reasons got 5, compared to Sober's 12 votes.

Here's an interesting look at the round 2 results - we can see those two tied polls, but more interesting are the songs that received the most votes. Sober with 12 and Rollercoaster with 11. Rollercoaster was the number 1 ranked song, and Sober was ranked 8. In round 3, Sober knocked out Rollercoaster 13 votes to 4, making it clear that those who preferred Rollercoaster over Bubble also preferred Sober over Rollercoaster.

We can see the distribution of ratings for Sober and Rollercoaster below, and you can see that those who responded to the survey did tend to prefer Rollercoaster over Sober, but overall they were very similarly rated. Maybe the upset of Sober taking the whole bracket is not as large of an upset as it seems from looking at just the final rankings.

Really, Sober had quite the run in the bracket. It beat out each other song by an average of 9 votes - the most being 16 more votes than Flirting X in the semi final. I'm not sure we've had a single song consistently receive at least 50% more votes in each poll in any bracket. (Maybe a future comprehensive stats post coming?)

We got 5 responses to our initial SHINee survey, which led to some interesting initial numbers

You can see those plateaus at every round number and each half, since there was less data to average out to smaller decimal places. We ended up with 28 songs getting a perfect 5 - almost enough to populate the entire bracket on their own! As it was, we had to get pretty creative with how to seed the bracket.

We ended up calculating a fake weighted average based on the number of responses each song got, which allowed us to ensure we were more likely to include songs that more people knew. This was especially important with a large discography like SHINee has, where some of the older b-sides might be one or two peoples absolute favorites, but the majority of people voting in the polls are less likely to know it.

Similarly to the (G)I-DLE bracket, the number of tied placings in the survey made for plenty of upsets during the bracket. Most notably, our winner Sherlock (Clue + Note) was ranked number 29 but won each match up, including the finals. It was close, Sherlock (Clue + Note) averaged only 61.2% of votes each round, but it still was crowned the best SHINee song.

I think even if there is some disagreement about whether it is the best SHINee song, I think we can all agree it is definitely the most iconic. It's been 12 years since it was released, and there are still groups performing covers, paying homage in other ways, and I regularly see it included in lists of most iconic kpop songs.

While we had the most responses yet to our final poll, the initial survey responses were a totally reasonable sample size. Nothing extraordinary like the Stray Kids bracket, but also considerably more than the (G)I-DLE bracket.

The total survey responses gave us a really nice curve of responses, we don't really see a huge drop off anywhere until the end where the ratings dipped down for most of the Intro and Outro tracks.

We had a few sets of songs that received the exact same rating this time around, the most notable being BOUNCY (K-HOT CHILLI PEPPERS) and INCEPTION both receiving a 4.27 being tied for 8th place. The top ten results really surprised me - I hadn't heard The Black Cat Nero, Take Me Home, or Turbulence before this bracket. Although, to be fair, I'm still pretty new to Ateez.

I also expected more title tracks to appear in the top ten - Crazy Form ended up ranked 16 and Guerrilla ranked 11. Guerrilla actually received more 5 ratings than Turbulence (13 vs 11), but received two 1 rankings, bringing the overall average down.

Overall, this bracket was probably the most fun to watch unfold! The biggest upset was in the first round when MATZ (26) took down WONDERLAND (7), and then followed up by taking down Turbulence (10) in the next round. But, the real story of this bracket is the final match up - BOUNCY vs HALAZIA. At about 24 hours left in the poll it was pretty much tied with about 60 votes, which was about the average number of responses we had been getting. In the last 24 hours of the polls, literally overnight, we got over 400 votes swaying it in the favor of HALAZIA. It was an absolutely wild ride and so much fun to watch unfold in real time (even though we mourned BOUNCY the whole time).