BTS Sales and Streaming Achievements

This list is mostly comprised of BTS’s recent sales and streaming accomplishments in South Korea from 2018 on. There is a separate page for all of their Billboard chart achievements. There are several reasons why this page starts at 2018. The first is that my main news resource is Soompi, and they didn’t start extensively summarizing charts like Gaon until 2018. The second is because Gaon Chart itself revised some of its criteria in 2018, specifically the requirements for platinum certifications. And – perhaps most importantly – there are so many BTS related posts on Soompi that the website malfunctions and won’t let me check any BTS news past 2017.

This is not a complete list – it is as comprehensive as possible, but not complete. Outside of platinum certifications and all-kills, this page mostly covers when BTS ranked #1 on any of Gaon’s weekly or monthly charts, and if they ranked on any year end charts. BTS is frequently on Gaon Chart, but I decided to limit this page to their #1s because otherwise it would be way too long. I also haven’t listed every single number one ranking for the Social Chart because there are a lot of them.

Gaon Certifications

Starting in 2018, Gaon introduced the following qualifications for something to go platinum in South Korea:
Album Platinum = sell 250,000 copies
Song Platinum (streams) = 100 million streams
Song Platinum (downloads) = 2.5 million downloads

Platinum AlbumsPlatinum StreamsDownload Platinums
Love Yourself: Tear (2018)
Love Yourself: Answer (2018)
Map of the Soul: Persona (2019)
BTS World OST (2019)
Map of the Soul: 7 (2020)		“Fake Love” (2018)
“IDOL” (2018)
“Boy With Luv” (2019)		“Fake Love” (2018)
“IDOL” (2018)

NOTES:

BTS’s Streaming Accomplishments in Previous Years

Click on the year in the table to go the designated page.

20182019

BTS’s Streaming Accomplishments in 2020

“ON” / Map of the Soul: 7

  • BTS started off 2020 reigning over Gaon’s social chart. They were #1 for 22 weeks from late 2019 through May 23, when they were passed by BLACKPINK.
  • When Map of the Soul: 7 was released, “ON” broke Melon’s record for the song with the highest amount of unique listeners in its first hour – the listener count was 123,489. This record has since been broken by Suga with his collaboration with IU.
  • Map of the Soul: 7 broke Hanteo’s first day sales record (and their own record) with over 2.6 million sales of their album.
  • Map of the Soul: 7 broke Gaon’s first week sales record, which is especially impressive considering it was released on the last day of that week. Naturally, it topped Gaon’s album sales chart for the week of February 16 – 22.
  • Map of the Soul: 7 also broke Hanteo’s first week sales record, with the highest first week sales in the chart’s history.
  • BTS earned a Quadruple Crown on the Gaon weekly charts for the week of February 22 – 29.
    • Map of the Soul: 7 continued its first place on the album sales chart.
    • “ON” topped the overall digital chart and the digital download chart.
    • BTS also placed #1 on the social chart (part of the aforementioned 22 week streak at #1).

“Dynamite”

“Life Goes On” / BE / “Dynamite” (cont’d.)

  • BTS earned a Quintuple Crown on Gaon Chart the week of November 15 to 21, sweeping the five biggest charts.
    • BE topped the physical album chart.
    • “Life Goes On” topped the digital download chart.
    • “Dynamite” continued its reign over the streaming chart and the overall digital chart. 
    • BTS reclaimed the social chart for the first time since May, breaking BLACKPINK’s 25 week streak.
  • According to Hanteo, BE sold 2,274,882 copies in its first week of sales.  While it is not as high as some of their other recent first week sales, it’s still pretty impressive considering that BE is almost double the price of a regular K-pop album and was released in only one version.

Other Items of Note

  • Melon, one of South Korea’s largest streaming services, released a chart of the top 100 songs from the last decade (from 2010-2019). BTS had three songs on the chart: “Spring Day” at #4, “DNA” at #28, and “Blood Sweat & Tears” at #89.

SOURCES: Gaon Chart, Genie Music, Hanteo Chart, iChart, Melon, Soompi*
*For platinum certifications: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)
*For achievements in the year 2020: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21)
Cover Image is of BTS while they were filming the music for “Dynamite” and was originally posted on BTS’s Twitter account. You can see the original tweet here.

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