Professor Kim Jung-seop’s study of 1,182 K-pop groups that debuted between 1996 and 2025, revealed that the average K-pop group survives only 4.12 years. Just 3.55% of the groups in his study ever sold 300,000 copies of a single album, only 1.61% became million-sellers, and just eight groups—0.68%—crossed 10 million cumulative album sales. It lays the groundwork for a true analysis of what going global truly looks like.
Today, we’re crossing the Atlantic to the home of The Beatles, Queen, Led Zeppelin, and the Spice Girls. We’re going to look at the UK Official Albums Chart and Official Singles Chart to see whether the same post-BTS pattern happened there.
Spoiler: it did.
Then we’re moving from charts to perhaps the most unforgiving measurement of international demand: concert tickets.
Streaming a song requires a phone and approximately four minutes of your life. Attending a concert requires money, transportation, scheduling, possibly airfare, potentially a hotel, and depending on Ticketmaster, a small personal loan.
We will look into:
- How many K-pop groups have actually built international touring careers?
- How many can sell 50,000 tickets? 100,000? 500,000? A million?
- What does it actually mean to be a stadium act?
- And did K-pop groups really not tour internationally before BTS? Did BTS invent planes?
Apparently we need to investigate.
The UK, the Home of Simon Cowell
Before BTS, no Korean act had ever entered the main UK Official Main Albums Chart.
Not BIGBANG. Not Girls’ Generation. Not 2NE1. Not EXO. Not even PSY after “Gangnam Style” became a No. 1 single in Britain. Nada.
Then BTS released Wings and they just flew right inside the top 75 inside Official Albums Chart at No. 62. Yes, I know. Wings flew into the chart. Sometimes the jokes write themselves.
That made BTS the first Korean act in history to enter the UK’s main album chart.
That achievement becomes even more interesting when we remember where BTS came from. In the basement Big Hit, a company about to declare bankruptcy. From the basement straight to the UK! How rude!
That means BTS didn’t just become the first Korean pop act to enter the UK Album chart, they became the first act to do so from outside Korea’s Big 3- SM, YG or JYP.
They did something even more impressive though. They kept the door open.
BLACKPINK entered the main UK Albums Chart in 2019 with Kill This Love at No. 40. The Album subsequently reached No. 2, and Born Pink became the first album by a K-pop girl group to reach No. 1. BLACKPINK have since accumulated four UK Top 40 albums, with three of those releases reaching the Top 3.
NCT 127 entered with Sticker at No. 40 in 2021, while ENHYPEN’s Dimension: Dilemma reached No. 81 that same year.
Stray Kids entered with Oddinary at No. 95 in 2022 and have since placed seven albums on the main chart, more than either BLACKPINK or ATEEZ. But there is an interesting twist in this story.
Like early BTS, ATEEZ did not come from one of Korea’s dominant entertainment companies. KQ Entertainment was not SM, JYP, YG or HYBE. If you’ve been living under a rock, HYBE is now the biggest management label in Korea.
Yet ATEEZ’s first main-chart album, The World EP.2: Outlaw, debuted at No. 10 in 2023. The World EP.Fin: Will then reached No. 2. Golden Hour: Part.1 and Golden Hour: Part.2 both reached No. 4.
Four albums entered the main UK chart. All four went Top 10. Double rude!
That gives us a fascinating comparison between three of K-pop’s biggest international touring acts.
BLACKPINK had four charting albums, all four reached the Top 40, three reached the Top 3, and Born Pink reached No. 1.
ATEEZ also had four charting albums, but every single one reached the Top 10, with a career peak of No. 2.
Stray Kids have more charting albums than either group, with seven, but their highest peak is No. 22.
So if we stopped here, packed up our spreadsheets and went home, we might conclude that ATEEZ has a substantially larger British market than Stray Kids and an album-buying audience approaching BLACKPINK’s.
And this is why we do not pack up the spreadsheet and go home. Chart positions need context.
A No. 2 album in one week can sell more—or fewer—units than a No. 1 album in another week because chart position depends on what everybody else releases that week. The Official Charts Company does not publicly the number of albums soldper week, so we cannot simply compare ATEEZ’s No. 2 directly with BLACKPINK’s No. 1 and calculate the difference.
What we can compare is what happened afterward.
BLACKPINK’s Born Pink debuted at No. 1 and remained in the UK Top 100 for four weeks, moving from No. 1 to No. 37, then No. 66 and No. 81.
ATEEZ’s The World EP.Fin: Will debuted at No. 2, fell to No. 19 the following week and then left the Top 100.
That suggests two different kinds of strength.
ATEEZ demonstrated extraordinary concentrated opening-week album demand. BLACKPINK demonstrated both enormous opening demand and stronger sustained consumption after release.
And Stray Kids present another profile entirely: lower individual album peaks, but more releases consistently finding their way onto the main chart.
So already, the UK is warning us against ranking international success using one measurement.
And the warning becomes even louder when we get to the Singles Chart.
UK Official Singles Chart
The singles side began even earlier with an obvious exception.
PSY’s “Gangnam Style” reached No. 1 in the UK official singles chart in 2012. But Professor Kim’s research excludes soloists, PSY’s career was structurally very different from the idol-group syste, and. “Gangnam Style” is also a novelty song.
BTS became the first group to establish a sustained UK main-chart presence.
“DNA” entered the Official Singles Chart in September 2017 at No. 90. “MIC Drop” followed later that year, and “Fake Love” arrived in 2018. Then “IDOL” debuted at No. 21.
That made BTS the first K-pop group to reach the UK Top 40, according to the Official Charts Company.
BLACKPINK entered shortly before that with “DDU-DU DDU-DU” at No. 78 in June 2018. Their Dua Lipa collaboration “Kiss and Make Up” subsequently reached No. 36, and the group went on to build one of the strongest Korean singles-chart histories in Britain, with nine UK Top 40 entries.
For a while, that was basically the party. PSY as a soloist. BTS. BLACKPINK.
Britain was not exactly waiting at Heathrow with champagne and a fruit basket.
TWICE apparently did not receive the non-invitation and barrelled their way onto the chart anyway. Then came FIFTY FIFTY, NewJeans, Stray Kids, ILLIT, LE SSERAFIM and, most recently, aespa.
FIFTY FIFTY was interesting. After BTS, they are the only Korean act that entered the UK SINGLES CHART that is not from the Korean majors. “Cupid” entered the chart in 2023 and climbed all the way to No. 8, remaining in the Top 100 for 22 weeks. It has never had a follow up entry since.
Nine Groups Out of 1,182 Is Not Exactly a Stampede
Now we arrive at my favorite part. The denominator. Professor Kim studied 1,182 idol groups. The population that reached Britain’s main charts? Nine in the main albums chart and nine in the main singles chart. And ten in total.
Against that historical population, we’re dealing with a fraction of one percent.
Obviously, this isn’t a perfect probability calculation. Some of Professor Kim’s groups existed before Spotify, modern global distribution and international K-pop infrastructure. Newer acts have also had considerably less time to build international careers.
But as a measure of rarity? Good goblin.
And once again, almost the entire population capable of reaching these Western charts appears after BTS’s breakthrough.
We saw it on the Billboard 200, Billboard Hot 100, Now UK. Yes, the number of Korean groups capable of competing in major Western music markets increased substantially after BTS. Going from almost nobody to ten groups represents enormous industry growth. Ten out of 1,182 is also still almost nobody.
Britain Also Reveals Something Billboard Can Hide
There is an important methodological difference between the UK Official Singles Chart and the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. Billboard’s Hot 100 combines streaming, sales and radio airplay.
UK’s Official Singles Chart counts consumer consumption: audio and video streams, downloads and physical purchases. Radio airplay does not contribute points to the main chart. Official Charts says its system captures more than 99% of UK singles consumption.
That makes Britain particularly useful for this analysis. A Korean act does not need BBC Radio 1 or commercial radio stations to put its song into heavy rotation before its fans can push it onto the chart.
At some point we have to consider the terrifying possibility that British people simply aren’t listening to most K-pop songs in sufficient numbers.
There appears to be a deeper issue of reach and market resonance. K-pop has developed an enormous global audience, but the British mass music market has not embraced Korean idol music as deeply as some other territories have or looked at from the Korean industry’s side, most K-pop companies still haven’t found the particular combination of sound, promotion, collaboration, distribution and cultural momentum that consistently converts K-pop fandom into broader British consumption.
The exceptions are revealing. BTS, BLACKPINK and Stray Kids have built repeated chart presence rather than producing one isolated entry.
Other groups have one or two.
And that suggests international success isn’t a switch that flips from NOT GLOBAL to CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE NOW GLOBAL.
A market is built. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes one song at a time. Sometimes apparently by ATINYs buying every album in Britain simultaneously.
BTS Still Operate on a Different UK Scale
And now we arrive at the slightly awkward part if you are a BTS hater, infuriating if you really really hate and absolutely delightful if you love BTS.
Because this is where the distinction between global success and what we’ve been calling BTS-level metasuccess starts becoming clearer.
Stray Kids, BLACKPINK and ATEEZ are unquestionably international groups. Their audiences have bought albums, pushed them inside the charts, purchased concert tickets and occasionally occupied buildings large enough to have their own postal codes.
But the accumulated UK data still puts BTS in another category.
Official Charts credits BTS with 13 UK Top 40 singles, 26 Top 75 singles, five Top 10 singles and 61 total weeks inside the Top 40. Their albums include three UK No. 1s and six Top 10s. They also matched a record of The Beatles. I mean come on.
There is analysis, and then there is the point where the spreadsheet starts bullying you.
And then, because apparently one chart career wasn’t enough, the members started doing it individually. Jung Kook, Jimin, V, Jin, j-hope, RM and SUGA/Agust D have all charted. Greedy little chart goblins.
So BTS have effectively produced eight separate charting music identities. BTS plus seven soloists. Is this the kind of greed they speak of in the Bible?
BLACKPINK have developed something similar on a smaller scale, with all four members building solo chart careers alongside the group.
Among groups themselves, BLACKPINK currently has the strongest accumulated UK singles record behind BTS, with nine Top 40 entries.
Stray Kids’ trajectory is particularly interesting though because their UK chart performance has accelerated alongside the rapid expansion of their European touring business. And none of them has released a promoted solo song.
When we get to touring, something starts happening that has now happened several times in this series. The same names come back. Different tests. Different metric. Same suspects.
And that may ultimately tell us much more about genuine global success than any single No. 1 ever could.
Everyone Is Doing “World” Tours
Touring asks a much more expensive question: will enough of those people leave their houses, spend real money and show up in the same city on the same night?
This is also where the pre-BTS and post-BTS comparison becomes much more complicated, because Korean artists absolutely toured internationally before BTS. The story is not that everybody stayed home until BTS discovered airplanes.
Wonder Girls is one of the most important examples. In 2010, they mounted a genuine 20-date North American headlining tour across the United States and Canada. They sold 35,000 tickets.
That was a legitimate international touring operation, and it happened years before BTS became a major Western touring act.
Other Korean artists followed. JYJ, Jay Park, 2NE1, CNBlue, BigBang, BAP, TVXQ, VIXX, and others. According to the touring data we compiled, approximately 28 K-pop acts toured or held headline concerts in the United States between Wonder Girls’ 2010 tour and BTS’s Love Yourself era in 2018.
So the international touring market existed but it looked very different.
Before BTS, International Touring Was Real but Usually Small
Most of those early tours were built around theaters, halls and relatively modest capacities. Even when K-pop artists booked arenas, the building’s published sports capacity could give a misleading impression of the actual concert configuration.
BIGBANG’s 2015 MADE concerts at the Honda Center are a useful example. The venue can accommodate more than 18,000 people in a traditional concert configuration, but BIGBANG drew roughly 12,000 per night. That was still an impressive audience for a Korean group in America in 2015, but it was not the equivalent of selling every available seat in an 18,000-seat arena.
That practice remains common today. Concert promoters can reduce the sellable capacity of an arena by moving the stage forward, closing upper levels or curtaining sections. A group can therefore legitimately headline an arena without necessarily selling anything close to the venue’s maximum concert capacity.
This is why venue names alone can be deceptive. The meaningful numbers are tickets sold, number of dates, prices of tickets, and number of markets capable of supporting those dates.
And by those measurements, the pre-BTS Western touring ecosystem was still relatively shallow. Korean acts could tour internationally, but sustained large-scale demand across North America and Europe remained rare.
Then BTS happened… again.
Love Yourself Changed the Question
By the Love Yourself era, BTS was no longer testing whether a Korean group could sell a few American theaters or half an arena. They were selling arenas in their full concert capacity… within minutes. I still have PTSD from queing up for their Honda Center concert by the way.
Then they started adding stadiums with Love Yourself: Speak Yourself, across North America, South America, Europe and Asia, including two nights at Wembley Stadium in London which they sold out in 90 minutes. Why are ARMYs always in hurry? Geezuz, slow down. My internet connection sucks.
At that point, it wasn’t about whether KPOP acts can tour in the West. It was about how big groups can go.
And what happened underneath BTS may be even more important to Professor Kim’s research.
Our touring dataset identifies more than 55 K-pop acts touring or holding headline concerts internationally between the BTS breakthrough period and 2026, give or take 5. Remember there was a 2-year shutdown. Approximately 28 acts in the earlier 2010–2018 period toured in smaller venues.
In other words, K-pop produced more than twice as many internationally touring acts in a considerably shorter amount of usable touring time.
And these were no longer exclusively artists sitting near the very top of K-pop. Groups from smaller companies could increasingly build legitimate overseas touring businesses. VERIVERY, for example, could sell thousands of tickets on an American tour. ONEUS could move into tens of thousands.
Neither group needed to become BTS to make international touring economically meaningful. And that may be the more important post-BTS effect.
If we judge BTS’s impact by asking how many other Korean groups can sell the same number of stadium tickets as BTS, the answer is nobody. At least nobody yet. The better question is: how many more K-pop artists can now make money outside Korea Asia because a functioning international touring ecosystem exists for them?
“World Tour” Does Not Describe One Level of Success
This is also why we need to stop treating the words “world tour” as though they describe a specific level of international success. They don’t.
A tour through Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore is legitimately international. But adding North America demonstrates another layer of geographic demand. Adding Europe expands it further. South America provides another test altogether.
Venue size adds a completely separate dimension.
One group might sell 3,000-seat theaters in ten countries on 3 continents. Another might sell 50,000 tickets at a stadium in Japan but struggle to tour anywhere else.
Which group is more global? Welcome to a problem nobody needs because the world does not have enough of it.
There isn’t a particularly useful answer unless we measure breadth and depth separately. Geographic breadth might progress roughly like this:
Domestic → select international markets → pan-Asian → Asia + North America → multi-regional → genuinely global
Commercial depth moves independently:
Clubs/theaters → halls → arenas → domes → stadiums
That produces a much more useful picture of an international career.
Ticket Sales Give Us Another Way to Measure the Hierarchy
Professor Kim’s research showed how rare commercial success becomes as we move from surviving three years, to selling 300,000 albums, to selling one million and eventually ten million.
Touring can be treated similarly.
Instead of merely asking whether an act has conducted a world tour, we can ask how many K-pop tours have crossed increasingly difficult ticket thresholds. The population shrinks very quickly as we raise the ticket threshold:
Twenty-three K-pop acts have sold more than 50,000 tickets on a single tour. Raise the requirement to 100,000 tickets, and so many disappears you’d think Thanos dropped by Kpop: only 12 acts remain.
At 200,000 tickets, there are five acts. At 300,000, four. At 500,000 tickets, the three acts in the North American/European touring figures contained in our dataset. 23 → 12 → 5 → 4 → 3. It’s a statistical massacre.
This is where “K-pop is global” starts needing a lot more context. Plenty of groups can now conduct international tours, which itself represents enormous growth from the earlier generations. But every time we increase the amount of international ticket demand required, the population gets brutally smaller.
That is the touring equivalent of Professor Kim’s album-sales pyramid: international access has expanded dramatically, but large-scale international commercial depth remains extremely rare.
And then there is BTS.
Their current 2026 tour has already crossed two million tickets with fewer than 40 reported performances.
BLACKPINK and Stray Kids approaching two million tickets with more than 60 dates and BTS’s Two million tickets across fewer than 30 dates are both extraordinary achievements.
They are not the same level of demand.
And this is where our idea of metasuccess begins making more sense. The existence of other global K-pop touring acts does not somehow diminish BTS and the success of BTS does not invalidate the level of success of acts like Blackpink and Stray Kids.
The PR Moves
Now we need to ruin everyone’s fun for a moment and talk about concert statistics.
Sold out shows are relative. Touring Data, Boxscore, and Pollstar are considered the most reliable sources when it comes to measuring tour attendance and gross profit. However, they get their numbers from either the promoter or the agency itself. They are reported figures.
Nobody from Billboard is hiding underneath your seat with a clicker counting everybody who walks in and ask every person if they paid full price for their ticket. They might check if the irregularity is massive but they don’t make a call to Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG every Monday morning to perform a forensic audit because somebody’s favorite boy group sold out an arena in Newark.
Next, empty seats don’t necessarily mean unsold tickets and occupied seats don’t necessarily mean sold seats.
Welcome to concert accounting. Everything is terrible. There have been acts who have been known to give away their tickets to fill the venue. It may be an additional expense but it makes good PR because 15,000 screaming people photograph considerably better than 9,000 screaming people and 6,000 empty chairs contemplating their existence.
Empty seats could mean people didn’t make it or scalpers got them but couldn’t dispose of them. It could also be unused tickets for sponsors.
In other words, we will never know the absolute reality of the numbers unless you are in the accounting department of the agency or one of the executives of the agency. You get what everyone gets, reported data.
Playing a Stadium Does Not Make You a Stadium Touring Act
This brings us to one of K-pop’s favorite modern status symbols. The stadium. The term has become so loosely applied that it can sometimes tell us almost nothing.
For this analysis, I would divide stadium performance into three increasingly difficult categories.
Headline stadium act: The artist is the principal ticket-selling attraction and demonstrates the ability to headline at stadium scale in at least one market.
Regional stadium touring act: Several stadium concerts appear within a larger tour, although other dates may remain arenas or smaller venues.
Global stadium act: The artist repeatedly headlines stadium-scale venues across multiple continents rather than depending primarily on one exceptionally strong country or region.
Once we apply those distinctions, the K-pop stadium hierarchy becomes much clearer.
SEVENTEEN unquestionably have stadium-level demand.
Their Right Here World Tour opened with concerts at Goyang Stadium and included major stadium dates across Asia. Their American routing, however, looked different, using venues including Allstate Arena, UBS Arena, Frost Bank Center and Oakland Arena, before concluding the U.S. leg at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles.
TWICE provide another excellent example.
During the Ready to Be era, they became the first K-pop girl group to headline both SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and MetLife Stadium in the New York area. They have also demonstrated enormous dome and stadium demand in Japan.
But Ready to Be itself was not a stadium-dominant world tour. Its routing mixed arenas, domes and stadiums depending on the market. So TWICE are absolutely a stadium-level act.
Stray Kids Crossed Into Genuine Global Stadium Touring
Stray Kids’ dominATE and BLACKPINK’s Born Pink and Deadline tours give us one of the clearest examples of the next category.
Stray Kids’ dominATE tour sold 1.98 million tickets. Those are extraordinary global touring businesses.
BLACKPINK’s Born Pink World Tour sold roughly 1.8 million concert tickets, excluding festival attendance, across more than 60 shows.
All their venues were stadium or stadium-size. Note that some venues call themselves an arena even if they hold stadium-size crowds.
And Then There Is BTS
BTS had already demonstrated global stadium demand before their military hiatus.
The 2019 Love Yourself: Speak Yourself extension included stadiums across North America, South America, Europe and Asia, including two nights at Wembley Stadium.
Their planned Map of the Soul Tour would have expanded that model further in 2020 before COVID-19 erased the entire touring cycle.
By 2026, however, the scale had moved again. BTS crossing two million tickets in fewer than 30 performances puts them into another level of touring density.
Saying BTS = global. Everyone else = not global is ridiculous. BLACKPINK and Stray Kids have clearly demonstrated global touring careers.
“Global” itself has levels. And BTS continues to occupy the extreme end of that spectrum.
Which is annoying if you hate them. We’ve been through this.
The Post-BTS Story Is Bigger Than Stadiums
This brings us back to Professor Kim’s 1,182 groups. Everything is his fault.
If we look only at the very top, we see BTS, BLACKPINK and Stray Kids building enormous stadium businesses and conclude that K-pop globalization means stadiums.
But that misses the more consequential industry change happening much farther down.
Before BTS’s Western breakthrough, international touring existed, but relatively few Korean groups could sustain substantial tours outside Asia. Theater-level touring was noteworthy. Arena concerts were exceptional. Stadium touring across Western markets was virtually nonexistent.
Afterward, BTS just went nuclear and international touring also spread downward through the industry.
Groups nowhere near BTS, BLACKPINK or Stray Kids in global fame can now sell thousands or tens of thousands of tickets internationally. Smaller agencies can build overseas tour legs. Artists without Billboard hits can still monetize American audiences. Groups can develop strong markets in Latin America, Europe or Southeast Asia independently of their Korean chart position.
That may ultimately be the strongest evidence that the market expanded. BTS did not carry 55 other groups onto airplanes and personally put fans into their seats. They demonstrated how large the potential market could become.
The industry then built around that opportunity.
Promoters became more willing to book Korean artists. Venues became more familiar with K-pop demand. Distribution improved. International fandom infrastructure expanded. Agencies became more willing to invest in overseas touring because there was now considerably more evidence that those investments could produce returns.
BTS opened doors. Other groups still have to sell the tickets. And increasingly, they are.
That is far more interesting than searching endlessly for “the next BTS.”
Because Professor Kim’s research may be pointing us toward a much bigger measure of K-pop’s success:
Not whether another one of the 1,182 groups can become BTS.
But substantially more of them can build sustainable international careers because the market BTS helped expand is now large enough to support them.
Up next: We will discuss streaming and wrap up the differences between local stars, regional stars, global stars, and the Meta stars.
