We started this series with Professor Kim Jung-seop’s study of 1,182 K-pop groups and one deceptively simple question: how many of them actually manage to build a sustainable career?
Professor Kim primarily used album sales as a measure of commercial success. We decided to make his spreadsheet suffer a little more.
They did not.
In this article, we have one major measurement left: streaming. Then we are going to put everything together — album sales, charts, touring, and streams — and see what all of this actually tells us about the different levels of K-pop success. Because that was the point the whole time. Not a ranking. A taxonomy.
Local Stars, Regional Stars, Global Acts — and Then BTS
In the first part of this series I said something that the internet heard as shade and that I meant as a map.
There are local stars: acts who are big in Korea. That is not a consolation prize. Korea is a brutal, high-literacy, high-volume music market. Being big there is a career.
There are regional stars: acts who are enormous in certain countries — Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, parts of Latin America — without necessarily owning every Western chart or every stadium routing. That is also a career. Sometimes a very expensive one.
Then there are global artists: the ones who show up consistently across the different metrics we set, in some of the biggest markets we tested. Not a lucky week. Not one song that escaped containment. Repeated demand, in more than one kind of measurement.
Even that last category has levels.
BLACKPINK, Stray Kids, and TWICE are all global in the sense that matters commercially. They can sell out stadiums. They survive when you change the test from albums to singles to tickets to streams. Some of them are more dominant in one metric than another — which is the interesting part, not the insult. A compact girl-group catalog that streams like a utility and a boy-group catalog that prints physical albums are not the same business. They can both be international.
Then there is BTS.
BTS does not just dominate the metrics. BTS reset what the metrics were allowed to look like. First group in Spotify history to 50 billion streams. A Western-market breakthrough that other Korean acts are still living inside. A solo ecosystem that behaves less like a side project and more like a small federation. Matching that is not a reasonable homework assignment you hand to the next debut. It is what happens when one act becomes the ceiling other people get measured against, usually unfairly.
Professor Kim’s population is the punchline that keeps the rest of this from becoming stan math. Out of 1,182 groups, the number who clear any serious international threshold is tiny. That is not proof that “K-pop failed to go global.” That is proof that going global was never a participation trophy. A few acts opened doors. A slightly larger few walked through them at different depths. Most of the 1,182 never even saw the hallway.
So: has K-pop gone global, given a historical population of 1,182? Yes. It has. Just not as a blob. As a stack of different altitudes.
Clarification on Album Sales
Prof. Kim’s study showed eight acts have crossed 10 million albums. Chartmaster shows a different number. Once the full paper is translated, we will determine the method he used to tally the sales. Until then, treat both figures as directional, not scripture.
Circle Chart Has Two Different Album Measurements
Circle Chart actually maintains both an Album Chart and a Retail Album Chart, and they measure different stages of the physical-album business.
The enormous cumulative figures commonly quoted for K-pop groups are generally derived from the main Album Chart. That chart is based on album distribution or shipments into the retail system.
The Retail Album Chart is different. It measures sales of physical albums through retail stores to consumers. Circle describes it as the accumulated sales of offline albums — including CDs, LPs, tapes, KiT and platform albums — at retail stores. In other words, the copies that get shipped to an actual customer.
An album entering the distribution system and an album actually being purchased at retail are two different events. If we rebuilt the entire ranking using Retail Album Chart data, which I am sure many of you would want me to do, the numbers — and potentially some of the rankings — could look very different.
Unfortunately, there is a problem.
The Retail Album Chart was introduced much later, in 2019, and while Circle publishes retail data across different periods, we do not have the same convenient decades-long cumulative artist totals that people routinely compile from the main Album Chart. Circle’s own notices show the Retail Album Chart operating in 2019, and its current chart continues to describe the methodology as retail-store sales.
Could I reconstruct it? Probably.
Am I doing that today? Absolutely not.
That deserves its own analysis, because I would need to compile the data consistently rather than throw numbers together simply because I would like to finish this piece before retirement. So put a pin in that one.
A Disclaimer Before Someone Submits This to a University
There is one more clarification I want to make about the way I extended Professor Kim’s research. This is not an academic study.
Professor Kim conducted the academic research. What I am doing is taking his population of 1,182 groups and applying additional commercial indicators to see what patterns emerge.
If somebody tried to submit my methodology as a dissertation, there would be problems. Many problems. I have violated several basic rules of academic research.
- I did not begin by establishing a rigorous rationale for every element of my scope and delimitation.
- Some of my thresholds are analytical tools rather than academically validated classifications.
- The datasets do not always cover identical periods.
And the further we move from Professor Kim’s original study, the more careful we need to be about treating these numbers as illustrative rather than pretending we have discovered the Unified Theory of K-pop.
I have committed statistical violence. I accept responsibility. I have not simply thrown darts at a map either.
From the beginning, I established a basic operational definition of international success. Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, China, and other Asian countries count. Asia is, despite occasional behavior on the internet suggesting otherwise, part of the world.
The argument I have made throughout this series is that “global” has levels.
SEVENTEEN is an excellent example. They are enormous in Asia. They headline stadiums. They have sold more than 40 million physical albums. Their touring profile in the United States is different. Their U.S. dates have generally operated at a different venue and demand level than their strongest Asian markets. That does not mean SEVENTEEN is not global. It means global demand is not evenly distributed.
A group can have extraordinary depth in Asia and more moderate demand in North America. Another can have substantial audiences across several continents but never sell a stadium. Another might have one gigantic market and relatively limited demand everywhere else.
All of those can be international careers. They are not identical international careers.
Japan Was Already an International K-pop Market
I want to emphasize this again because this series is not arguing that K-pop suddenly discovered foreign countries when BTS became successful in America.
BoA and TVXQ were instrumental in opening and establishing the Japanese market for Korean pop artists long before BTS’s Western breakthrough. Japan became an enormously important international market for K-pop because earlier artists did the difficult work of building that market.
If we applied some of these same tests specifically to Japan, the rankings would look different. Some acts with relatively modest American or British chart histories would suddenly become monsters.
That is precisely why geography matters. Even in Japan, some of the names at the very top would remain familiar. BTS would still land as the best-selling Korean artist by revenue in the modern era, while BoA occupies an extraordinary place in Korean music history through her Japanese album sales. The top two best-selling albums by a Korean act in that market belong to BoA.
But Japan is not the market we are testing in this particular exercise. For this portion of the series, I deliberately concentrated on the United States and the United Kingdom because I wanted to examine penetration into two of the world’s major Western music markets and compare what happened before and after BTS’s breakthrough there.
That is the scope.
Not because Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, or the rest of Asia somehow do not count as international. They absolutely do. If anything, their different consumption patterns prove why simply saying an artist is “global” tells us very little.
Where are they global?
How deep is the demand?
How many markets can support them?
And what happens when we change the measurement?
Those are the questions we have actually been asking.
And now we have one measurement left. Let’s talk about streams.
Ten Billion Spotify Streams Sounds Enormous Because It Is
Album sales tell us how effectively an artist can mobilize paying fans.
Touring tells us whether those fans exist in sufficient numbers — and sufficient geographic concentration — to fill physical venues around the world.
Streaming tells us something different: how often people are actually pressing play.
When we apply the same increasingly difficult thresholds we used for album sales and touring, the population of successful K-pop groups becomes tiny again.
Apple Music released its list of the 500 most-streamed songs on the platform last year, but it did not publish their actual stream totals. We know the ranking. We do not know the numbers behind it.
Only BTS made that list, with two entries: “Dynamite” at No. 34 and “Butter” at No. 252.
Spotify is different. Spotify makes individual song stream counts publicly visible, which allows us to build cumulative estimates across an artist’s catalog.
But Spotify is not the entire world. There is Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and others. China is another ecosystem altogether. It would be ridiculous to take Spotify as the ultimate measure of streaming supremacy.
What we are looking at is consistency across different measurements. We looked at album sales, Billboard, the UK Official Charts, and concerts. Now we are looking at Spotify.
And somehow, certain names keep wandering back into the spreadsheet like they pay rent here.
At 5 billion Spotify streams, we have 10 groups: BTS, BLACKPINK, Stray Kids, TWICE, SEVENTEEN, NewJeans, ENHYPEN, TOMORROW X TOGETHER, LE SSERAFIM, and HUNTR/X — EJAE, Rei Ami, and Audrey Nuna, the Korean artists behind the singing voices of HUNTR/X.
Expand the population to include Korean soloists and we reach 17 — and every one of those additional soloists comes from either BTS or BLACKPINK.
Then raise the requirement to 10 billion streams. Everybody start collecting your belongings. We are down to four groups: BTS. BLACKPINK. Stray Kids. TWICE.
Include soloists and exactly one additional Korean artist walks through the door: Jung Kook.
Raise it again to 20 billion. One group. BTS.
By late April, BTS crossed 50 billion Spotify streams across all credits, becoming the first group in Spotify history to reach that milestone.
Not the first K-pop group. Not the most-streamed Korean group. The first group. Period.
These Numbers Will Change
The exact totals move every day, of course, and other groups will eventually cross these lines.
Stray Kids continue accumulating streams rapidly. BLACKPINK remain enormously streamed despite their relatively compact group catalog. TWICE have accumulated enormous consumption across a much larger discography. ENHYPEN, NewJeans, SEVENTEEN, TOMORROW X TOGETHER, aespa, ATEEZ and others continue adding substantial streams.
So these thresholds are snapshots, not permanent classifications.
Someone will cross 5 billion. Someone will cross 10 billion. Someone eventually will cross 20 billion.
That is exactly why the thresholds are useful. They show us how difficult each level is right now. A million-selling album can result from an extraordinarily concentrated fandom mobilizing around one release cycle. Streaming requires a different kind of consumption.
Ten billion streams require enormous listening accumulated repeatedly across songs and over time. Twenty billion generally requires a substantial body of heavily consumed music. Thirty billion makes the population extraordinarily small. Forty billion starts describing something closer to a global listening ecosystem. And 50 billion is so unusual that BTS became the first group in Spotify history to reach it.
One Metric Can Mislead Us. Several Metrics Tell More
This may be the most important part of the streaming analysis. I do not think Spotify alone proves that an artist is global. Neither does Billboard. Neither does selling one million albums. Neither does selling out one stadium.
Any individual measurement can be distorted by the peculiarities of that measurement: fandom purchasing, one viral song, one unusually strong territory, catalog size, release frequency, ticket pricing, or platform popularity.
But we have now changed the test several times. And the same names keep surviving.
BTS. BLACKPINK. Stray Kids. TWICE. SEVENTEEN. ATEEZ. ENHYPEN. TXT.
The exact order changes depending on what we measure. Some are dramatically stronger in one category than another. That is the interesting part.
Genuine international success may not be defined by dominating every measurement. It may be better identified by appearing repeatedly across independent measurements of demand.
Albums tell us one thing. Singles tell us another. Touring tells us something else. Streaming gives us another piece.
When an artist continues appearing near the top after we repeatedly change the test, the argument that we are looking at a genuinely substantial international career becomes considerably stronger.
That is also why the visible top of K-pop can distort our perception of the entire industry. We routinely talk about artists with five, ten, or twenty billion Spotify streams because those are the artists famous enough to dominate international entertainment coverage.
Then Professor Kim walks back into the room carrying 1,182 groups.
Suddenly, 10 billion streams does not look like a normal milestone in K-pop. It belongs to approximately the top third of one percent of his historical population. And 20 billion? One group. Then 50 billion? Still that group.
The distance between simply debuting in the Korean idol industry and becoming one of the most-streamed music acts on Earth is not merely large. It is a different sport.
Streaming Changed What a K-pop Hit Can Become
K-pop’s physical-album business is unusually concentrated among committed fans. Photocards, multiple versions, fansign opportunities, and collectible packaging encourage purchasing behavior that does not necessarily correspond directly with the number of unique people listening to the music.
Streaming broadens the measurement. Someone does not need to know every member’s birthday, own a light stick, or purchase four versions of an album to generate a Spotify stream.
They simply need to listen.
That makes enormous streaming numbers particularly valuable when trying to understand how far beyond a group’s core purchasing fandom its music travels. And this produces some fascinating mismatches.
A group can be one of K-pop’s strongest physical sellers without being one of its strongest streaming acts. Another can produce an enormous globally streamed song without having anything resembling the same album-buying fandom.
FIFTY FIFTY’s “Cupid” became a major international streaming hit and reached the Top 10 in Britain despite the group originating from a tiny Korean agency.
NewJeans produced another unusually streaming-heavy model, generating enormous global consumption very early in their career with a relatively small catalog.
Meanwhile, acts such as SEVENTEEN and Stray Kids demonstrate the extraordinary purchasing power that large organized fandoms can produce, although Stray Kids’ crossing of 10 billion Spotify streams shows that their international business has also developed substantial streaming depth. None of these groups is succeeding in exactly the same way.
Which means “successful or international K-pop group” becomes less useful as a single category the more closely we look at it. We need to know what kind of success the group has built.
Group Success Can Eventually Create an Entire Ecosystem
There is one more complication with streaming, and it becomes especially important when we talk about the industry’s biggest groups. At some point, measuring only the group catalog starts to understate what the group actually created.
BTS is the clearest example. Spotify lists BTS as one artist. Cute.
The actual BTS music ecosystem now includes substantial independent catalogs from RM, Jin, SUGA/Agust D, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook. Each member has built an individual career capable of generating enormous consumption on its own.
Jung Kook’s “Seven” passed three billion Spotify streams in 2026. Jimin’s “Who” crossed 2.5 billion. Other solo releases have accumulated hundreds of millions or billions more.
So yes, Spotify technically has one BTS page. Commercially, however, this thing has started behaving like a small federation.
BLACKPINK shows a similar pattern. The group’s catalog had accumulated nearly 17 billion Spotify streams by April 2026, but Jennie, Rosé, Lisa, and Jisoo also operate increasingly significant solo catalogs outside the BLACKPINK page. Eventually, we need two different measurements.
GROUP CATALOG STREAMS: How much consumption does the group itself generate?
And: ARTIST ECOSYSTEM STREAMS: How much consumption is generated by the group plus the individual music careers created from it?
The first tells us whether a group built one valuable recording business. The second tells us whether that group became a platform capable of creating multiple valuable recording businesses at the same time. That is another level of commercial development.
And this is where management strategy becomes extremely important. A company can spend years building the individual identities, fanbases, and commercial value of every member. Then contract renewal arrives. Everybody suddenly remembers that lawyers exist.
BTS and BLACKPINK produced two very different outcomes.
All seven BTS members remained with Big Hit even after building enormously successful solo careers. That means the company can continue participating in both the group business and the individual businesses.
BLACKPINK remained with YG for group activities, while the members moved their solo careers outside YG. Which creates a slightly painful business lesson for agencies:
You can spend years developing individual IP inside a group and then discover that the IP has legs. And lawyers. And its own company.
For YG, that means BLACKPINK still exists as a group asset, but the solo recording and business activity of Jennie, Rosé, Lisa, and Jisoo increasingly sits outside the company that helped build those individual brands.
That is a very different revenue structure.
Individual members can become additional recording artists, touring businesses, endorsement businesses, fashion businesses, merchandise businesses, and intellectual-property engines.
Instead of one revenue machine, the group can eventually create several. And increasingly, those machines do not necessarily belong to the same owner.
Welcome to adulthood.
The Group Does Not Have to Die for the Soloist to Live
Historically, the end of major group activity often meant the decline of the primary commercial engine. The modern model can work differently. Group and solo careers can coexist.
BTS can release a group album and conduct an enormous stadium tour while seven members maintain independent catalogs and individual commercial identities.
BLACKPINK can reunite for a global stadium tour while Jennie, Rosé, Lisa, and Jisoo continue operating separate solo recording, fashion, and business careers.
The group does not necessarily have to disappear for the members to grow. Nobody needs to be sacrificed at the altar of the solo debut. This is a very different model from the one available to many first- and second-generation idol groups.
A successful group can now potentially transition from one group business into one group business plus several solo recording careers plus several touring businesses plus several endorsement portfolios plus several independent IP businesses.
At some point, calling it a “group” starts underselling the infrastructure. It is becoming an ecosystem. And that brings us all the way back to Professor Kim’s most sobering statistic. The average K-pop group historically lasted only 4.12 years.
But the groups at the extreme upper end of the modern industry are no longer merely trying to keep one commercial unit alive for seven years. They are building structures capable of generating revenue long after the conventional idol lifecycle would once have started winding down.
That creates an enormous reward for reaching the top. Unfortunately, the climb has also become more expensive.
Because the same global platforms that expanded K-pop’s potential audience also created an environment where the audience is being attacked from every direction.
Another song. Another comeback. Another debut. Another dance challenge. Another livestream. Another behind-the-scenes video. Another member staring silently into a camera for nine seconds and somehow generating 14 million views.
Attention is now the scarce resource.
And that may explain one of the most dramatic differences between the K-pop industry Lee Hyori entered and the industry a new idol enters today.
There was once enough time to promote the same song for months.
Now, three weeks can feel long. The market became bigger. The opportunities became bigger. The potential revenue became bigger. And everyone’s attention span became sixteen seconds and a swipe.
So Has K-pop Gone Global?
Yes.
Fine. The longer answer.
Going back to Professor Kim’s study, there is certainly proof that BTS opened the market for Korean acts — not just K-pop as a genre brand, but Korean recording artists as a category Western and global platforms were newly willing to treat as default inventory. That is a market event. It is also why “no one has matched BTS” keeps getting used as a dunk when it is closer to a category error.
No act has matched BTS. Maybe that is an unreasonable ask. It is an unreasonable ask. You do not evaluate whether a country’s film industry “went global” by asking whether everyone else is Christopher Nolan. You ask whether more than one film can travel, at more than one scale, in more than one market.
Other groups have gone global. Just at different levels.
BLACKPINK, Stray Kids, and TWICE are stadium-capable, multi-metric international businesses. SEVENTEEN is a physical-sales and Asian-touring superpower whose Western footprint does not copy-paste the Asian one. ATEEZ, ENHYPEN, and TXT keep clearing the “appears again when we change the test” bar. NewJeans and FIFTY FIFTY showed that streaming can mint a different kind of international moment than album-cycle militarism. None of that is BTS. All of that is global in the only sense the word should be allowed to have: demand that is not confined to one country, one chart, or one very online fandom screenshot.
Given a historical population of 1,182 groups, is that enough to say K-pop has gone global?
Yes. It is enough. It is just different levels of global. Local stars. Regional monsters. Multi-market acts who can fill rooms the size of small cities. And one group that stopped being a peer and started being infrastructure.
Which brings us to the final paradox of modern K-pop:
It has never been easier to reach the entire world.
And it may never have been harder to keep the world’s attention once you get there.
P.S.
Some of you have asked me to show the touring statistics in much greater detail, so I will do that. Others have asked me to apply the same analysis to Japan, which I think could be particularly interesting because the hierarchy may look very different once we move away from the U.S. and U.K.
I am also interested in exploring the soloist ecosystem. Which groups successfully turned individual members into commercially viable solo artists? BTS and BLACKPINK are obviously the extreme examples, but we could look at BIGBANG, EXO, SHINee, Girls’ Generation, TWICE, and others and see how successfully group popularity converts into multiple independent careers.
So if there is another metric, market, or category of success you want me to explore, put it in the comments.
Charts? Touring? Longevity? Girl groups versus boy groups? Big agencies versus small agencies? Latin America? Fandom power versus general-public consumption?
I am open to suggestions. Just understand what you are doing.
This entire thing started with one professor and 1,182 groups. Now I am counting stadium seats and interrogating Spotify.
So choose responsibly.
