BTS album sales set a new high record: find out

K-pop album sales once again reached an all-time high in the first half of this year, according to a local market tracker.

Kim Jin-woo, head researcher of Circle Chart, which tracks cumulative sales and streams, reported that the total sales of the top 400 physical albums in the country increased to 34.9 million copies in the first half from a year earlier, up 34.6 percent from a year ago. The number of sales in the first half was the highest ever.

Physical album first-half sales increased from 10.48 million in 2018 to 12.93 million in 2019, and then sharply after the COVID-19 pandemic started to 18.36 million in 2020 and 25.96 million last year.

With 4.52 million records sold in the first half of this year, BTS came in first place.

The group was followed by NCT Dream with 3.98 million, Seventeen with 2.72 million, Tomorrow X Together with 2.10 million, Stray Kids with 2.07 million, and Lim Young-Woong with 1.14 million copies. 

BTS topped the list in the number of albums sold in the first half of this year with 4.52 million copies.