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Published February 3rd 2023
Here are 10 incredible stats and facts based on years worth of data about the world's hottest boy band, updated for 2023 by popular demand.
BTS is the biggest K-pop group in the world. People just can’t get enough, especially online.
We at Brandwatch love data, K-pop, and we definitely love BTS. So we’ve created a list of facts based on our research about the band, their ARMY of fans, and another record-breaking year.
We used the Brandwatch Consumer Research platform to search for social media mentions of BTS from January 1 2013 to December 31 2022. We’ve also incorporated fascinating data points from other online research.
Here are 10 amazing stats and facts about BTS and a bonus at the end.
According to Nielsen Music’s annual report, only two albums racked up at least 500,000 sales in 2020, and they were Taylor Swift’s Folklore and BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7.
Map of the Soul: 7 sold 674k copies.
To date, BTS have won 483 awards out of 692 nominations.
As a brand, BTS is extremely valuable. Data suggests that the band brings over $3.9 billion to the South Korean economy.
The Hyundai Research institute found that about 800,000 visitors visit South Korea because of BTS every year.
If that wasn’t enough, by bringing $3.9 billion each year, the septet could generate an economic value of $39 billion over the next decade!
The BTS fans call themselves the ARMY, which stands for “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth.”
There were 12.98 million unique authors mentioning BTS online between January 1 2020 and December 31 2022. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, an army generally includes between 400,000 and 1,000,000 soldiers. So, if we take unique authors and Britannica’s army figures, 13 armies would be the most conservative estimate.
Over the last 10 years (we looked at social data between January 2013 and December 31 2022) – there were close to 2 billion mentions of BTS. That’s an average of 547,945 mentions daily – aka a lot of social conversation. And 36.96m unique authors initiated conversations about BTS on Twitter.
Well, don’t we all? But this ARMY is primed for social media. Just in the last year, there were close to 370m Tweets with hashtags relating to BTS, a 7.5% increase from 2021. Hashtags are used in a majority of posts, with #bts leading the pack, followed by #bts_butter. To give you some context on the latter. Last year, BTS’ “Butter” topped the Billboard Top 100 chart for 10 weeks, breaking a 23-year record by Aerosmith's 'I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing'. “Butter” has generated over nine million comments on YouTube, placing fourth on the list of 10 most commented videos on YouTube in the world in 2022.
#bts_butter was also the fourth-most popular BTS-related hashtag in the last 10 years.
Brandwatch’s Audiences ranks Twitter accounts according to a selection of criteria that, added together, create their influence score. And with 92 out of 100, makes @BTS_twt one of the most influential accounts on Twitter, and certainly the most influential K-pop band on Twitter. They have more than 48 million followers at the time of writing.
You can read more about influential Twitter accounts and influencer scores right here.
In October 2020, Big Hit Entertainment (BTS’ record company) went public. The move allowed die-hard fans to finally buy a share of their favorite band — kind of.
In our post (K-pop Goes Public), we wrote about how this news generated nearly a million online mentions, and, while it’s a pretty novel prospect to buy into a band in this way, it seemed to have paid off, at least back in 2020. Since the BTS break announcement, the share price of Hybe Co., the agency that manages BTS, has fallen by nearly 25%.
BTS hold more than 25 Guinness World Records titles under their belts. In 2022 BTS bagged several Guinness World Records, breaking their own record for “Dynamite” with “Butter.” Here is a look at just some of the records from 2022.
Bonus #1: Jungkook became the first Asian artist to perform at the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. He also debuted a solo single at the World Cup opening ceremony, and #Dreamers2022 landed the fifth spot in the top five most popular World Cup 2022 hashtags.
Bonus #2: In May 2022, BTS became the first K-pop group who made it to the White House, joining the A-list celebrities like Elvis Presley, James Brown, Johnny Cash, Michael Jackson, and Olivia Rodrigo.
Let us know what you think of our stats and facts [email protected].
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