Could BTS’s next album be their biggest debut ever?
If the recent success of “Dynamite” has made one thing clear, it’s that there’s no stopping BTS from topping all the music charts. The K-Pop band released their first English single in August this year – one of the very few good things to have happened in 2020 if you ask us – and it has been sweeping away all records since.
For starters, the music video has been watched over 450 million times, making it the fastest video by a Korean outfit to reach this milestone. The song was set for success since the week of its release, in fact. It crossed its first 100 million views within 24 hours of its release, surpassing the record held by their colleagues from another K-Pop band Blackpink.
The song also outshone Taylor Swift in its Spotify debut. The pop-culture queen who was trying her hand at cottagecore with her latest album folklore was reigning the top debuts list on Spotify with “Cardigan” until “Dynamite” came along & dethroned her. While “Cardigan” debut recorded 7.742 million streams, BTS’s English debut rakes in 7.77 million streams on its debut day.
The home of all records
By now, BTS band members are used to setting & breaking records: their fandom called the BTS army also helped the band set a record in March 2019 for the most used hashtag in 24 hours under the #TwitterBestFandom that was then tweeted 60,055,339 times.
Now, the boy band has announced that its next album BE is slated to be released on November 20, following their last album Map of the Soul: 7 on its heels, just 9 months after reigning on the Billboard 200 with it. Between now & then, however, things have exploded for the BTS. With “Dynamite”, their popularity has soared exponentially.
“Dynamite” brought in the first No 1 position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the group. With that in mind, the release of their next album BE is bound to create newer, faster records. From what we hear, it is on its way to becoming a commercial smash. Let’s see what the projections have to say about that.
What do the commercial pundits say?
Their last album set a high bar, add to that their new virality and the loyalty of the BTS AMRY & you have projections that surmise much, much more than the 4 million global preorders Map of the Soul: 7 garnered. The ARMY is keen on doubling that number, with the fan theories targeting 7 million preorders of the album.
Taylor Swift’s folklore kicked its debut at 846,000 units, so it’d be interesting to see if the K-Pop group manages to break yet another record, perhaps, proving that the BTS ARMY is stronger or larger in number than the Swifties.
A first-week U.S. haul of 600,000 units is an attainable goal for BE, and one that might even be on the low side, given BTS’s previous album debuts. In February, Map of the Soul: 7 collected 422,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, including 347,000 pure sales. That was a vast improvement over 2019’s Map of the Soul: Persona, which debuted with 230,000 units, including 196,000 pure sales.
An ARMY can dream
Now let’s consider this: for BTS, with each progressive album, the sales have increased exponentially too. In its first week, Map of the Soul: 7 hauled 1.835 times the haul of Persona – pure sales were 1.77 times – but we’ll try not to get too caught up in the nitty-gritty. If BE performs on the same scale of exponents, then it could very easily seel anywhere around 770,000 albums.
In fact, if all goes well into the high end of the range, there’s no stopping the band from dethroning Swift from the biggest debut sale record either.
