BTS Is Headed Straight to No. 1 With New Album ‘Map of the Soul: 7’
By Geoff Mayfield
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Only 10 months after the release of its last chart-topping album, K-pop kings BTS are primed to reign again with “Map of the Soul: 7” which is on target to be the group’s fourth No. 1 album in the U.S.
With industry analysts predicting first-week consumption of more than 340,000 project units (album sales plus equivalent values from song sales and streams), the new set will own the biggest start of the still-young 2020.
Thus far, the biggest week has belonged to Eminem’s surprise release “Music To Be Murdered By,” which tallied 282,000 on sales of 117,000.
By comparison, Halsey’s “Manic,” which just became the Recording Industry Assn. of America’s first platinum album of the year, had a first-week project total of 245,000 when it arrived Jan. 17, with 183,000 of those coming from album sales. A bulk of ’s RIAA certification comes from pre-release activity on earlier singles, with “Without Me” arriving as far back as September 2018. The other big debut this year is Justin Bieber’s “Changes,” released Feb. 14, with just over 232,000 its first week out .
The new BTS album generated 126,000 project units, 85,000 of those on album sales, in just its first four days, according to BuzzAngle. Once all consumption is registered, including direct-to-consumer orders, industry forecasters think “7” will easily surpass 300,000 project units in week one.
As has been the case for its earlier chart-topping albums, the majority of the opening-week consumption on the new BTS set will come from actual album sales, perhaps ringing as many as 300,000.
BuzzAngle reported first-week project units of 217,000 for BTS’ 2019 outing, “Map of the Soul: Persona.” The bulk of the start for that April release came from 174,000 album sales.
BTS’ new set, released by Big Hit Entertainment via Columbia Records/Sony Music, owes its faster start to a wave of TV exposure, including a performance at Grand Central Station on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” a “Carpool Karaoke” segment on James Corden’s “The Late, Late Show” and a fan-boosted stop on “Today.”
In other BTS news today, the group’s second official music video from their new album, for the song “ON,” became the biggest YouTube Premiere of all time , with 1.54 million concurrent viewers tuned in for the clip’s debut.
