"2015 MAMA" or "Mnet Asian Music Awards 2015" celebrates the year with a grand music festival held at Hongkong last December 2, although what was supposed to be a congregation of artists who released at least one song this 2015 became a mini concert festival for YG Entertainment.
For one, the YG rookies iKON who also won "Best New Male Artist" performed for more than 10 minutes when other more senior artists like Got7 who released three albums this year barely got a three-minute stage for themselves.
While fans of 2NE1 were pleasantly surprised when the girl group got the longer end of the stick by making an unexpected performance with their old hit songs such as "Fire" and "I am the Best" following leader CL's introduction of her newest track "Hello Bitches," groups like Red Velvet who actually released an album this year had no more end of the stick to share and were instead ushered to be seated somewhere as part of the clapping crew.
Big winner BIGBANG was nominated in almost every category so much that netizens made a joke out of it saying "If only BIGBANG had long hair, MAMA would give them 'Best Female Artist' as well."
They were nominated in "Best Male Dance Performance" which fans of other groups find ridiculous because BTS who had a more formal choreography was not even given a chance to compete with SHINee who won the award for "View" and has been winning the category since "Sherlock" and "Dream Girl."
Along with their biggest competitor EXO who also won four other categories, BIGBANG took home the most awards for a group winning "Worldwide Favorite Artist," "Song of the Year," "Best Music Video," and the grand prize "Artist of the Year."
"2015 MAMA" received more backlash after member Taeyang's "Artist of the Year" speech where he cited how he was disappointed that most of the artists were not there to congratulate them.
Due to the program overrunning its original time, many artists left before the grand award only leaving Monsta X behind because they either had a flight to catch such as Red Velvet and SHINee who were having a concert in Europe as part of the Korean President's entourage the next day and TaeTiSeo who had a showcase in Korea for their Christmas album "Dear Santa."
Some fans expressed their distaste for Taeyang's words appearing to be hypocritical as he was not also there when rookies TWICE won their "Best New Female Artist" award and BIGBANG also did not bother to show up during the red carpet ceremony.
"2015 MAMA" was truly a series of exciting performances by groups from YG Entertainment and some small time allowance for other selected groups, the whole program screaming blatant favoritism towards the agency's artists.
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