Thus far this year, 10 songs have made it to #1 on the Hot 100. In gaming the system, BTS are fucking that whole thing up. Still, the Hot 100 is the best historic marker we have for what’s big at any specific time.

For most of the ’90s, for instance, record labels refused to sell singles, driving people to buy CD albums instead, while Billboard refused to count any songs on the charts that weren’t officially released as singles. (At times, Billboard has allegedly been complicit in those tactics witness the sordid saga of how Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” blocked Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” from the #1 spot in 1978.) There have also been vast stretches where the Billboard charts haven’t been a useful metric in figuring out what’s actually popular. Billboard has kept changing its tabulation methods in part because labels keep trying to use shady tactics to push their songs to #1. If you look at the charts, then, you’re going to get a completely distorted idea of how popular BTS actually are.Ī post shared by Billboard Charts labels have always tried to juke the chart stats. If that means buying two different versions of the same song for 69 cents a pop, plenty of them are happy to do it. (There are also physical editions of the single, but those won’t count on the charts until they ship.) BTS fans are extremely plugged into the whole pop-chart thing, and they’re invested in helping the group get to #1 as many times as possible. That’s 69 cents, too, and its sales count towards the chart fortunes of BTS. BTS sold downloads of “Butter” for 69 cents. So “Butter,” like the big BTS hits that preceded it, sits at #1 right now mostly because BTS have effectively mobilized their tireless fan army. At radio, the biggest song in America right now is “Leave The Door Open,” the retro-soul soul ballad from Bruno Mars and Anderson. “Butter” did get a lot of streams, but it didn’t get as much as any of the three most popular songs from Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album. “Butter” made it to #1 almost entirely based on sales of discounted digital singles. Billboard figures out its charts through some arcane combination of streaming, sales, and radio play. Here’s the thing, though: “Butter” is not the most popular song in America right now. (“Gangnam Style,” which peaked at #2 in the period just before Billboard used YouTube streams to figure out the charts, got robbed.) In the process, it became the first Korean-language single ever to top the Hot 100. A couple of months after that, BTS released the breezy midtempo ballad “Life Goes On,” and that debuted at #1, too. When BTS showed up on the remix, the song went straight to #1. That song, which has a complicated history of its own, was hanging out in the lower rungs of the top 10 for a while. In October, members of the group jumped on “Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat),” a TikTok-driven hit from the young New Zealand producer Jawsh 685 and the fading American dance-pop singer Jason Derulo. Since last September, BTS have notched up three more #1 hits. It got actual pop-radio airplay, something that had previously evaded BTS. The song occupied that slot for three weeks. “Dynamite” came out in August of 2020, and it promptly debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the first K-pop single ever to scale those heights. BTS and their handlers delivered a piece of product designed to attract as many consumers as possible into their whole thing. “Dynamite,” written and produced by British pop-industry professionals, is a perfectly OK example of sunshine-drenched, Bruno Marsian quasi-disco. Then they went ahead and pulled a crossover move anyway. Instead, they brought everyone else into their world. They didn’t need to pull crossover moves. In America, BTS could sell out stadiums and land top-10 singles while only sprinkling occasional English into their records. They were (and are) huge everywhere, and their rise mirrored the trajectories of Spanish-language urbano stars like Bad Bunny and J Balvin. BTS weren’t simply huge in Korea or even Asia. At the time, BTS represented a radical decentering of the global pop system: A leviathan-level success story in which the principal figures come from outside the anglophone pop system to capture the hearts of millions of people around the world. Up until the moment that they announced “Dynamite,” the members of BTS had said that they didn’t plan to record in English. About nine months ago, the phenomenally successful South Korean boy band BTS released “ Dynamite,” their first-ever English-language single.

Bts billboard