BTS has stormed back to the top of the charts with their highly anticipated reunion album ARIRANG, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with a jaw-dropping opening week. The group earned 641,000 equivalent album units in its first week, with 532,000 coming from pure album sales alone, marking BTS’s biggest sales week ever and the largest for any group in over a decade.
The last group to outsell them in a single week was One Direction with Midnight Memories back in 2013, which moved 547,000 copies. To put that in perspective, that was 13 years ago.
Vinyl alone accounted for 208,000 of those sales, the biggest vinyl week for any group in the modern tracking era powered by 17 vinyl variants and nine CD editions packed with collectibles like photocards, stickers, and posters.
The comeback was nothing short of cinematic. BTS celebrated the release with a concert at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul that streamed on Netflix, alongside a feature-length documentary on the platform. The group also hit The Tonight Show for back-to-back performances and dropped lead single “SWIM” with a splashy music video the same day as the album.
After years of solo work during their mandatory military service, ARIRANG captures seven different voices — united again and stronger than ever.
ARIRANG is BTS’s seventh No. 1 album. Their world tour kicks off April 9 in South Korea, with U.S. dates beginning April 25.
