The Beatles And BTS Are The Only Groups To Sell 1 Million Albums In 2020
It was largely business as usual in last week’s Nielsen Music Midyear Report. Streaming is up, traditional album sales are down, vinyl’s heroic resurgence persists, and CDs and digital albums continue their death march into obscurity. Oh, and BTS is still crushing it.
The Korean pop septet’s new album, Map of the Soul: 7, is the bestselling physical album of the year and the only one to sell over 500,000 copies in the United States, more than doubling the sales of runner-up Kenny Chesney. Map of the Soul: 7 is also the ninth-biggest overall album of the year, moving 842,000 equivalent units derived from album sales, track downloads and streams.
Additionally, BTS landed at No. 2 among all pop artists in terms of total consumption, right behind Billie Eilish. In total, the boy band has moved 1.417 million album-equivalent units through the first half of 2020. Only one other group has eclipsed 1 million album units in the U.S., and they’re a group to which BTS often gets compared: The Beatles.
Source: Bryan Rolli/forbes.com
