BTS News: Amid hiatus, ‘Proof’ tops Billboard 200
Premium‘Proof’ was released on June 10, just four days before BTS announced a hiatus.
‘Proof’, BTS' new album, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, giving the South Korean pop group their sixth number one. According to Luminate, the retrospective, which has largely previously released material, debuted with 314,000 equivalent album units in the United States in the week ending June 16. CD album sales accounted for the vast bulk of those units sold.
The Billboard 200 chart, collected by Luminate, ranks the most popular albums of the week in the United States based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units. Album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA), and streaming equivalent albums are all counted as units (SEA).
Each unit represents one album sale, ten individual album tracks sold, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by album songs. The new chart, which is dated June 25, 2022, will be available in its entirety on Billboard's website on June 21.
‘Proof’ was released on June 10, just four days before the band announced a hiatus in order to focus on solo projects.
BTS’s announcement of a hiatus is the latest bad news to hit South Korea’s entertainment sector, causing a 25% plunge in the shares of its managing agency Hybe Co. on Wednesday.
An equal-weighted basket of stocks of Korean drama producers and pop music agencies has slumped 39% this year, outpacing the 18% drop in the benchmark Kospi. The 22 firms in the cohort have lost $12.7 billion in market value in 2022, with Hybe accounting for more than half the decline, according to Bloomberg calculations. That’s after the basket jumped about 60% in 2021. As the BTS-triggered slump suggests, sometimes entertainment companies can be overly reliant on one act.
The seven-piece South Korean group was created in 2010 and debuted on the Billboard charts in the United States in 2013. On the Billboard 200 albums list, BTS has 15 entries.
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(With agency inputs)