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| yna@yna.co.kr 2022-07-17 13:42:30
SEOUL, July 17 (Yonhap) -- In the first half of this year, K-pop album sales marked the best record, continuing the “K-pop Hallyu heyday.”
Even though performances that had been stopped due to COVID-19 pandemic have resumed, it did not affect the album, creating a “positive outlook” that expects a boom in the K-pop market in the second half of the year.
◇ Record sales soared again... led by BTS and Seventeen
According to Senior Research Kim Jin-woo of Circle Chart (formerly Gaon Chart) on Sunday, physical album sales in the first half of 2022 reached 34,947,247 copies based on the top 400 (1st to 400th places combined), approaching to 35 million copies.
This is an increase of 34.6% compared to the same period of the previous year, and also marks the highest record for the first half of the year.
In the first half of the year, album sales increased from 14.8 million copies in 2018 to 12.93 million copies in 2019, followed by 18.36 million copies in 2020 and 25.96 million copies last year.
Looking at the album sales by singer in the first half of this year, BTS took the first place with 4,523,749 copies.
This was followed by NCT Dream with 3,982,696 copies, Seventeen with 2,722,858 copies, TXT with 2,104,740 copies, Stray Kids with 2,072,689 copies, and Lim Young-woong with 1,142,727 copies.
In the single album sales category, BTS' anthology album “Proof” took the top spot with nearly 3 million copies, 2,957,410 copies to be more precise.
In addition to this new album, it was found that BTS continued to sell 17 different songs including “BE” and “Butter.”
The second best-selling album was Seventeen's 4th full-length album “Face the Sun,” with 2,733,52 copies.
"There were a total of 8 groups that sold over 1 million albums in the first half of the year," Senior Research Fellow Kim Jin-woo said. “Compared to the same period of the previous year, there were 5 teams including NCT Dream, BTS, Seventeen, EXO, and Baekhyun before, so three teams increased.”
◇ Sales details show overseas fans became “big buyers”
The huge overseas fandom plays a big role in the booming K-pop album industry.
This month, Circle Chart had made a “retail album chart,” where it separates domestic and overseas sales volume, allowing one to estimate the proportion of overseas fans.
For example, Seventeen (based on the Circle Chart Retail Album Chart) showed their potential by selling more than 1.4 million copies of their 4th regular album “Face the Sun” on May 27, the release date, and has been found that 73.1%, or 1,031,980 copies, of that day's sales were sold overseas.
NCT Dream's 2nd full-length album "Glitch Mode" was also said to have sold 74,522 copies, 95.4% of the sales overseas on March 28, the first day of its release.
Thanks to such overseas popularity, BTS and Stray Kids took first place on the Billboard 200, the main album chart of the US Billboard in the first half of 2022, as well as TXT (4th) and TWICE Nayeon (7th).
Another measure of popularity is the number of music video views on YouTube, which is highly dependent on overseas fans.
In particular, it is well known that fans in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, are as hot as fans in the United States, Japan, and China as they express their passion through YouTube or other social media platforms.
In fact, when one looks at the YouTube statistics, 5 of the top 10 countries with the highest number of views for BTS' YouTube videos in the past year are from Southeast Asia including India (2nd), Indonesia (5th), Philippines (7th), Thailand (9th), Vietnam (10th), etc.
Therefore, in the music industry, it is more common to include members from Southeast Asia rather than China and Japan when forming a new group to increase topicality.
◇ K-pop abroad is already “mainstream”... “Positive” outlook for the second half of the year
Experts in the music industry suggest that this unprecedented boom is because K-pop has firmly established itself as a mainstream genre in the global music market.
Particularly, it is often analyzed that the K-pop music industry has benefited as performances were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The biggest reason is the increase in overseas demand for K-pop,” said Choi Kwang-ho, secretary general of the Korea Music Content Association. “BTS has enlarged the K-pop market for more than ten times, and due to this more people have been paying attention to other K-pop groups as well. The K-pop market has also gained more attention due to the COVID-19 pandemic and has grown in general, not limited to specific artists.”
“The total amount of K-pop demand has increased, and the capabilities of the singers have also been upgraded,” he emphasized.
“In the past, K-pop had a strong feeling of a ‘maniac culture’ that some fans liked. However, these days, it is true that it has expanded as a mainstream genre,” an official from a famous idol entertainment agency said. “Now, it is not unusual for K-pop singers to have their song charted on the Billboard chart. So, it’s only natural for album sales to improve as a result.”
“In the past, if we wanted to go overseas, we had to explain everything in detail including what we were going to do, but now, more and more project requests are coming in from overseas,” he continued. “Apart from concerts, there have been a lot of collaboration requests coming in that not all of them could be granted.”
“I think this boom will continue not only for the second half of this year, but for the time being,” he said.
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