By now, there’s little chance you haven’t heard or seen the name ‘BTS’, the undisputed kings of K-pop. And should the world’s course not have been changed by the current pandemic, BTS rappers RM, J-hopeand Suga, and vocalists Jin, V, Jimin and Jungkook would currently be on their 37-date world tour to support their fourth Korean album, Map of the Soul: 7.
On 18 and 19 April (the dates they were due to play Seoul Olympic Stadium), their label Big Hit Entertainment aired Bang Bang Con, a free two-day live stream of archival footage from previous concerts and tours. More than two million fans (known as Army) watched simultaneously, with the total views toppling 50 million.
This weekend, on 14 June at 10am BST, BTS will perform a 90-minute pay-to-watch online concert — Bang Bang Con: The Live — that’s bound to pull an audience of record-breaking numbers. The social engagement is consistently unsurpassed; earlier this year, Jungkook broke his own record by amassing over two million likes on five different tweets, breaking the previous record set by Barack Obama. He is also the most searched for K-pop Idol on Google and YouTube while in 2019, BTS were the most Googled boy band in the world.
As they’ve grown to become multimillion-selling, stadium-filling superstars, there has never been a singular answer as to how and why a non-English language pop group managed to break into the upper echelons of the western record industry. Multiple factors have been woven together to form an irresistible and, more importantly, unduplicatable recipe that’s seen BTS achieve four US number-one records in under two years and cumulatively sell over 20 million albums.
