BTS member Jungkook’s first solo album, GOLDEN, is off to a flying start.
Released on Friday (November 3), the album broke the K-Pop sales record for the highest first-day sales for a solo K-Pop artist, according to data from South Korea-based Hanteo Chart, whose real-time physical album chart tracks album sales from over 1,100 record stores worldwide.
As reported by K-pop news outlet Soompi on Friday, GOLDEN scored the highest first-day sales of any solo K-pop album in the chart’s history, selling 2,147,389 copies on release day.
The album also broke K-pop’s first-week sales record (for a solo act) in just one day. Jungkook’s BTS bandmate V previously held both of those records, with 1,672,138 sales of his debut album Layover on its first day, and 2,101,974 copies sold during its first week.
Jungkook’s new album includes the megahit SEVEN, which recently broke the record for the fastest song to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify, achieving the milestone in just 108 days. It smashed the previous 112-day record set by Miley Cyrus’ Flowers in August.
Seven also spent 13 consecutive weeks at No.1 on the US Hot 100.
On Sunday (November 5), Jungkook held the top two slots on the Spotify Daily Top Songs Global chart with Seven and Standing Next To You, respectively.
Jungkook now joins a group of artists, including his own group BTS, as well as SEVENTEEN, and Stray Kids, as the fourth artist in Hanteo history to surpass 2 million first-day album sales, according to Soompi.
The artist’s new album project has also widened the gap between his own monthly listeners and that of BTS on Spotify.
With 37,435,951 monthly listeners on Spotify, Jungkook’s presence on the platform has surpassed that of BTS (30,440,247) by 6,995,704.
Jungkook’s solo success comes at a pivotal time for HYBE Corp., with BTS members on hiatus due to mandatory military service in South Korea. The company’s post-BTS strategy focuses on nurturing solo projects from BTS members like Jimin, Jin, Suga, and Jungkook.
Jimin’s solo album FACE, released on March 24, 2023, also achieved a milestone by selling 1.45 million copies worldwide on its first day. He scored a No. 1 on the US Hot 100 with Like Crazy and a No.2 on the US albums chart with FACE, while Jin sold 1 million copies of his solo single The Astronaut.
Strong sales of Jungkook and his BTS bandmates’ solo projects helped drive HYBE’s revenues to 537.85 billion South Korea Won (approx. USD $410 million) in Q3, up 20.7% YoY.
HYBE’s adjusted EBITDA in Q3 also rose 13.1% YoY to 90.77 billion South Korea Won ($69.3m).
