SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – DECEMBER 02: of Stray Kids attend the Asia Artist Awards 2021 at KBS Arena Hall … [+]
Seeing as it’s now July, 2022 is more than halfway through, and it’s time to look back at how the music industry fared in the first half of this year. Luminate (formerly known as Nielsen Music) has shared its annual mid-year report that dives into growth, loss, and the biggest songs and albums, and one table details just how successful one field of music is in the U.S. these days.
According to the report, six of the 10 bestselling CDs in America in the first half of 2022 were released by K-pop acts. This list looks specifically at physical CDs, as opposed to the biggest albums or even the bestselling releases, and it shows that fans of South Korean bands show up in huge numbers to purchase copies of the latest efforts from these groups in huge numbers–ones most Western names can’t match.
Leading the way in a distant first place is BTS, which should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the U.S. music industry or knows how insanely popular the boy band is. The group released their retrospective anthology Proof on June 10, and between then and June 30, when the report cuts off, the title sold a whoipping 328,000 copies. That puts it far and away in first place, and the South Korean vocal troupe was able to nearly double the second-bestselling release in less than one month.
Speaking of second place, Stray Kids’ Oddinary lands at No. 2 with 171,000 CDs sold. When that EP dropped in March, it went right to No. 1, making them the third South Korean musical act to reach the top of the Billboard 200, following int he footsteps of BTS and SuperM.
In third comes Tomorrow X Together, who sold 150,000 copies of their recent EP Minisode 2: Thursday’s Child on CD alone since its release in May.
Closing out the 10-spot list are three more K-pop acts, which land one right after the other. Seventeen’s Face The Sun sits at No. 8 (74,000 CDs), NCT 127’s Sticker appears at No. 9 (66,000), while Enhypen’s Dimension: Answer closes out the tally at No. 10 (57,000). Impressively, NCT 127’s Sticker was actually released in September 2021, and yet it has continued to sell well enough in the States on this one format to place on this ranking.
Three of the aforementioned titles—BTS’s Proof, Stray Kids’ Oddinary, and Tomorrow X Together’s Minisode 2: Thursday’s Child—all also rank on the list of the bestselling albums (looking at all formats), coming in at Nos. 2, 6, and 10, respectively.
In between K-pop success stories are a number of albums by Western acts, such as Harry Styles’ Harry’s House (No. 3, 159,000), Adele’s 30 (No. 5, 115,000), the Encanto soundtrack (No. 6, 80,000), and The Weeknd’s Dawn FM (No. 7, 77,000).
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2022/07/15/bts-stray-kids-and-seventeen-six-of-the-10-bestselling-cds-in-the-us-this-year-are-from-k-pop-acts/