90s K-pop Songs, One Hit a Day: the Time Machine App

Second week of July. In 1992 the number one song in Korea was Seo Taiji and Boys with "I Know". In 1994 it was Maronie's "Cocktail Love". In 1996 Kim Gun-mo's "Speed" was about to lose the top spot to a rookie duo called Clon by 75 votes. I did not remember any of that until I started digging through the old chart tables, and once I had, I could not stop. That digging became this app: a daily dose of 90s K-pop songs, built around one simple question. This week, back then, what was number one?

It is a small offline app for people who grew up on Korean music in the nineties, and for anyone who came to K-pop later and wants to know what the first generation actually sounded like.

▶ Get it on Google Play (free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.time90song

The 90s K-pop songs that topped the chart this week, ten years side by side

The core of the app is a list of every weekly number one from 1990 to 1999. For most of that decade the chart that mattered was KBS's "Gayo Top 10", which ran until February 1998, and after that the app follows the broadcast charts that took over. On top of the weekly winners I added the songs that never reached number one but defined their year, so the total comes to 310 tracks with a year attached to each.

Open the app and the home screen shows the current calendar week across all ten years at once. Scroll down and you get 1990, 1991, 1992 and so on, each with the song that was on top during this exact week. It is a strange, pleasant way to read a decade. Songs you had filed under "some time in the nineties" suddenly have a season, and you realise "Cocktail Love" was a summer song and "The Day After You Left" was a winter one.

The home screen listing the number one 90s K-pop songs for this week in every year from 1990 to 1999

That is the time machine part of the name, and it is the reason the app opens on the chart rather than on a menu.

Every song comes with the story behind it

The part I spent the most time on is the write-up under each track. I did not want a discography entry. I wanted the thing you would tell a friend while the song plays: that Kim Soo-hee's ballad "Aemo" knocked Seo Taiji off the top and the whole country argued about it, that Lee Hyun-woo's "Dream" missed a fifth straight week at number one by a single vote to a drama theme, and then, six years later, won the very last golden cup in the final episode of the show. That Maronie was not really a band but a project name, and the vocal on their biggest hit was a guest singer.

Every one of the 310 songs has a story like that, written in plain English rather than translated from Korean marketing copy. Underneath it you get the lyricist, the composer, the album, how many weeks it stayed on top and whether it earned a golden cup, which the show awarded for five consecutive wins.

A song detail page with the English story, credits and number of weeks at number one

Watch the original stage, then keep listening

Reading about a song is one thing. Hearing it is the point. Each detail page can play the original broadcast performance inside the app through YouTube's own player, so you are watching the real stage from that year, the outfits and the choreography included. There is no downloading and no background trick; it is the official player, exactly as YouTube serves it.

If the clip makes you want the whole track, there are buttons to jump straight to that song on Melon, YouTube Music or Apple Music. That combination is how I now build playlists for the commute: watch one stage, tap through, add it, next week.

Search, a shelf, a share card, and a nightly nudge

• Search by artist or title across every song from 1990 to 1999. The half-remembered "that one by Shin Seung-hun" problem gets solved in two taps. Tapping a year narrows the list to that year only.
• Favourites put a star on a song and it goes to your own shelf. Mine is mostly 1995 for some reason.
• Share card turns a song into an image with the year and the chart fact on it. It was built for the "do you remember this?" message to old classmates, and that is exactly what it gets used for.
• A nightly notification picks one song for the day, one hit a day, so the app keeps quietly surfacing tracks you would not have searched for.

Searching the 1990 to 1999 catalogue by artist name and narrowing the results by year

Everything except the video and the album art works offline. There is no account and nothing you do is sent anywhere.

Who this is for

• Anyone who was a teenager in Korea in the nineties and still knows the second verse of "Candy"
• K-pop fans who started with the third or fourth generation and want the origin story, with the original stages
• Korean learners who use music as their study material and want songs with context
• Anyone building a retro playlist for a reunion, a wedding table or a long drive

Download (Google Play, free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.time90song

※ Chart positions come from public broadcast records and were cross-checked, but a decade of weekly charts is a lot of rows. If you find a week that looks wrong, tell me and I will fix it.

If a song you loved is missing from the 90s K-Pop Hits list, or the story under one of them leaves out the detail you remember, leave a review. I keep a running list of requests and fold them into updates, and I would like the catalogue to keep growing that way.