BTS tops physical album sales chart

K-pop boy band BTS topped Nielsen Music’s Top 10 Physical Albums chart for the first half of this year, chart results showed Friday.

With sales of 312,000 copies in the United States, BTS’s latest album, “Map of the Soul: Persona,” came atop the physical album chart, according to Nielsen Music’s Mid-year Report U.S. 2019.

The report put together sales data recorded from Jan. 4 to June 20 in the U.S. record market.

The septet also came third in the report’s Top 5 Genre Artists chart, which combines sales of albums, as well as digital tracks sales and on-demand audio streams.

Ariana Grande topped the chart, followed by Billie Eilish, with 2.27 million and 2.02 million equivalent album sales, respectively. The figure for BTS was 979,000.

The Nielsen Music report also carried a section on “K-pop’s global domination” in the first six months of 2019.

“After achieving record consumption in 2018, K-pop reached a new critical mass this year, thanks to new releases from supergroup BTS and Blackpink,” it said.

Yonhap