BTS returned from a near four-year hiatus last month with Arirang, their seventh studio album, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 dated April 4, 2026, moving 641,000 equivalent album units. Of that total, 532,000 came from pure album sales. Both figures are the largest posted by any group since One Direction’s Midnight Memories in December 2013, when that album opened with 546,000 copies sold in its first week.
Between 2022 and 2025, all seven members — RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook — completed mandatory military service in South Korea, a legal obligation for male citizens. The group’s last full album before Arirang was Proof, released in 2022.
What Arirang numbers actually show
The Billboard 200 began measuring albums by equivalent album units — a combined metric of sales, streaming, and track downloads — in December 2014. Arirang‘s 641,000 units is the highest opening week by any group under that methodology.
Of the album’s 532,000 pure sales, 516,000 were physical: 208,000 vinyl copies spread across 17 variants, and the rest across nine CD editions. The vinyl figure is the largest by any group in the modern era, defined as the period since Luminate began electronically tracking sales in 1991.
Arirang‘s lead single “SWIM” debuted simultaneously at number one on the Hot 100, giving BTS concurrent number one positions on both the albums and singles charts in the same week.
Those are group records, but the overall records belong elsewhere. Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl opened in October 2025 with 4.002 million equivalent album units — the largest opening week in Billboard 200 history. She also holds the top five vinyl sales weeks in the modern era. Arirang ranks sixth on that same list.
One Direction’s benchmark
One Direction’s Midnight Memories is the relevant comparison point because it set the group sales standard that BTS has now surpassed. Released in November 2013, the album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 546,000 copies sold in its first week, making One Direction only the third pop group to sell more than 500,000 copies in a single week since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking in 1991 — the others being ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys. It was also the first group in Billboard 200 history to debut its first three albums at the chart’s top position.
By the end of 2013, Midnight Memories had sold four million copies globally, finishing as the year’s best-selling album worldwide despite being released in late November.
BTS’s first-week pure sales of 532,000 fall 14,000 copies short of that Midnight Memories benchmark, but their overall equivalent album unit total of 641,000, which also folds in streaming, surpasses it under the current methodology.
The two groups arrived at commercial dominance through different routes. One Direction formed on the UK TV competition The X Factor in 2010 and built its audience primarily through early social media, reaching US chart peaks within two years of forming. BTS debuted in South Korea in 2013 under what was then a small label, Big Hit Entertainment, and spent several years building a domestic and then regional following before Love Yourself: Tear became the first K-pop album to reach number one on the Billboard 200 in 2018. From that point, BTS accumulated six Billboard 200 number ones and six Hot 100 number ones before the military hiatus interrupted their run.
One Direction’s commercial peak came and the group went on indefinite hiatus in 2016, three years after Midnight Memories. Arirang could similarly represents BTS’s equivalent peak or an earlier point in a resumed trajectory, but that is a question the next album cycle will answer.
General chart context
Recent changes to Billboard’s methodology complicate any straightforward reading of Arirang’s performance. In 2022, the number of counted digital downloads per user was reduced from four to one. In 2023, direct-to-consumer digital single sales were excluded from chart calculations. This year, YouTube data was removed from Billboard calculations entirely following a dispute between the two companies, which is a change that analysts noted would disproportionately affect K-pop acts, whose fan engagement skews heavily toward video streaming.
Arirang hit its numbers despite those headwinds, driven primarily by physical sales rather than the streaming and YouTube metrics that had historically amplified K-pop chart performance.
The BTS world tour launches April 9 in Goyang, South Korea (just a few weeks after the Arirang release), and arrives in the United States on April 25 in Tampa, Florida. US and Canadian dates run through September 6 in Inglewood, California.
