The BTS album “Map of the Soul: 7,” featuring hit tracks “On” and “Boy with Luv,” has been tallied as the bestselling physical album in the United States last year.
Physical album sales of the septet’s fourth full album released in February reached 646,000 in the U.S., according to an annual year-end report compiled by MRC Data in collaboration with Billboard. The report encompasses U.S. music consumption data between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31 last year.
The report also showed that “BE,” another BTS album featuring lead track “Life Goes On,” ranked fifth on the top-selling physical album chart with 252,000.
In top album sales, including both physical and digital album sales, BTS’ “Map of the Soul: 7” ranked No. 2 with 674,000 after American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s “folklore” with 1.27 million.
Separately, the seven-piece band’s all-English pop-disco track “Dynamite” topped the chart for top digital song sales with 1.3 million, more than double The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” with 580,000.
Apart from BTS, boy band NCT 127’s second studio album “NCT #127: Neo Zone: The 2nd Album” ranked sixth in top physical album sales with 249,000 units.
The report carried a two-page section dedicated to K-pop acts headlined “Korean pop acts reach new mainstream heights,” analyzing the performance of acts like BTS, TWICE, NCT and SuperM as well as BLACKPINK.
On BTS, the report commented that the septet “saw its passionate fan base expand even further, with the group scoring its first three Hot 100 No. 1 singles in 2020 in a span of just three months ― marking the fastest accumulation of any act’s first three Hot 100 No. 1s since The Beatles in 1964.”
It also commented that BLACKPINK “made a splash on the charts in 2020, showing that Korean pop’s breakthrough in American wasn’t limited to all-male acts like BTS and SuperM.” (Yonhap)
