Within merely 10 days of its official release, South Korean boy band BTS’ latest album, Love Yourself: Tear, successfully reached the No. 1 rank on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. This achievement makes BTS the first K-pop group to have an album leading the tally, as well as the first dominantly foreign-language album to acquire the No. 1 spot in over 12 years, after Il Divo’s Ancora back in 2006.
The album, released by BigHit Entertainment on the 18th of May, had already sold over 1 million copies worldwide, and 135,000 equivalent album units in the US within that week itself. Out of these, Nielsen Music confirmed that 100,000 units had been purely traditional physical album sales. The ranking in the Billboard 200 chart is based on the popularity of an album within a week, which is deduced by calculating its multi-metric consumptions. This means that the amount of traditional album sales, all the track equivalent albums (TEA), as well as streaming equivalent albums (SEA) are counted as a whole to determine am album’s rank in the Billboard 200.
Love Yourself: Teat had a starting sum of 135,000 units, out of which 100,000 were traditional album sales, 26,000 SEA units, and 9,000 TEA units. This officially broke the previous high record which was also demarcated by BTS back in 2017, with their album Love Yourself: Her. Her, which had sold 31,000 units within its opening frame, with 18,000 traditional album sales, now look like nothing in comparison to BTS’ latest achievements. The Billboard 200 chart for the 2nd of June, where BTS is scheduled to lead the list, will be uploaded on Billboard’s websites on the 30th of May, which is one day behind of schedule, owing to Memorial Day ceremonies throughout the US on the 29th.